Benjamin Humphrey
Leaving Atlassian to Start Dovetail
In this episode of Brave UX, Benjamin Humphrey shares the highs, lows and in-betweens of leaving Atlassian to start Dovetail. A frank account of what it's taken to make it this far as a designer turned product entrepreneur.
Highlights include:
- Why did you decide to leave Atlassian and go all-in on Dovetail?
- What did your mum think when you left Atlassian to start Dovetail?
- What do you focus most of your time and efforts on?
- What are you not willing to compromise on as Dovetail grows?
- How do you manage self-doubt and other people‘s expectations?
Who is Benjamin Humphrey?
Benjamin is the co-founder and CEO of Dovetail, the elegant, fast-growing and cloud-based research repository, collaboration and analysis platform.
Before founding Dovetail, Benjamin was a Lead Designer at Atlassian, Australia’s most well-known and most successful software-as-a-service company.
Benjamin also invested time at AVOS, a company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world class UX design and product management professionals. My guest today is Benjamin Humphrey. Benjamin is the co-founder and CEO of Dovetail, the elegant, fast growing and cloud-based research repository, collaboration and analysis platform in early 2020. After three years of bootstrapping, that's code for blood, sweat, and Tears. The company raised $4 million in a seed round led by Australia's Blackbird Ventures with US based Felicis Ventures and the co-founder of Culture Amp, Didier Ainger. Also participating. Before founding Dovetail, Benjamin was a lead designer at Atlassian, Australia's most well known and most successful software as a service company. There he was responsible for designing Atlassian's cloud platform, which included components across services such as Jira, Confluence, Hipchat, and Bitbucket.
- Benjamin also invested time at AVOs, a company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen moving from Dunedin and New Zealand to San Mateo, California to be the product designer on social bookmarking platform. Delicious, working closely with Chad and Steve Benjamin planned, executed, and led a complete architecture of the delicious front end experience. But back to Dovetail, it's a great product and from my research for today's conversation, I understand that Benjamin has some big goals for it. So I'm looking forward to learning more about those goals and the person who's responsible for achieving them. Benjamin, welcome to the show.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Ah, thank you Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here. And one of the great things about interviewing interesting people is, well they're interesting and one of the interesting things I realized about you when I was researching for today was that you received your private pilot's license in your last year of high school. [laugh]. How did flying become part of your life?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- There's this thing about pilots, it's like there's a joke, which is how do you know someone's a pilot and they tell you. So it's [laugh]. Try not to bring it up too often. So when I was in school, I always wanted to be a pilot. Originally wanted to join the New Zealand Air Force, actually [affirmative] and this is back in the early two thousands and the Air Force had these fighter jets called Skyhawks, which was interesting. And I kind of liked the idea of flying one of those. So I was into aviation and went to air shows and things like that, [affirmative], and used to go out and sit at Christchurch airport if you're familiar with Christchurch, that you can go to the airport and sit behind the kind of fence and watch the planes taking off and people have binoculars and things like that. So go on Spot planes [affirmative].
- So I wanted to get my license and I thought that that would help me with my application into the Air Force if I already had my pilot's license. So at the age of 14 or 15 I was kind of getting involved with the ERA club at Canterbury Air Club in Christchurch and I in, they had a scholarship every year where they had for kids wanting to get their license and they would give you, I think it was $2,000 towards your license. And back then I think it would cost something between six to $10,000 to get your license. So it's not cheap for a 14, 15 year old. So scholarship obviously helps. So it was a written kind of essay that you had to say why you wanted to get your license and everything. And so I was a 14 year old kid, I wrote this essay and then I submitted it to the A club and they chose me to be the scholarship winner, which was fortunate. And so then for the next time, what
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did you tell them? What did you have in the letter that made it so
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Good? So we were hu ago now, but I think I just sort talked about why I loved aviation and I guess tried to demonstrate some of my knowledge about aviation and some of the studying I had been doing and all sort of stuff and my passion for it. I can't quite remember what the criteria was like what they were actually looking for. But evidently whatever I wrote was good enough and got my license when I was 15 or 16 before I had my full driver's license. [laugh]. Yeah. And then what happened during that time? Well, yeah, I mean I worked hard for it I guess, but I was very fortunate to get that scholarship and had some support from mum. So that was cool. But during that time, the New Zealand Air Force, I got rid of the Skyhawks and I also kind of learned in high school that I was not very good with being told what to do.
- As I got older, I sort of developed a bit of a rebellious streak and didn't really being told what to do by teachers and almost actually dropped outta high school and maths and physics were not my strength either, which is an important part of joining the Air Force as a pilot. So I kind of realized maybe this is not really for me salaries also pretty low. So [laugh], I was like this whole computer thing seems better. So I did that and I let my license lapse. The thing with a license is you have a fe life but you have to stay current. And so I went to university, couldn't afford to stay current, sort of forgot about it. And then a couple of years ago I went back and got recurrent.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What prompted you to go back?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- So this was in 2017 and I was taking a bit of time off from Atlassian, three months to think about what I wanted to do and decide if I wanted to try this start thing or stayed Atlassian and I so I took three months off, went back to New Zealand and decided I'd do some more flying. It was reasonably cathartic, although I had to reset law which cuz it had been 10 years since I'd last flown and laws had changed. So I did a lot of studying for that and just, I don't know, just took a break from software and a break from work and did something else and that was fun. But flying's always a hobby I think for me. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Any ambitions to fly your own corporate jet one day?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Not at all. No. [laugh] I think there's a lot. Yeah, I'd have to do a lot more training I think to be able to fly a corporate jet [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh well we'll see what the future holds in. Yeah. So something else I noticed that was interesting about you is that even before you found a dovetail and left the day job behind, which will come too soon, you had a track record of starting things. And we kind of touched on that with your journey into aviation. That was obviously quite a bold thing for a teenager to do, but you also started something called UX Design Day and an open source project called the Buntu Manual. Where does this need to start things and change the status quo come from
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- [laugh] pulling up some old projects there? Yeah, I'm not sure. I think that I've always been interested in solving problems and just building stuff and making things. I've never really been a particularly good programmer, but I feel like I'm okay at trying to solve problems and the entrepreneurial side I suppose. And it's really, it's been something that I've done since I was a kid. I used to sell a lot of stuff on Trade Me in high school, which is eBay in New Zealand. Well you would know that, but Australian people don't know what the hell trade me is. So I, I'd sort of scrounge around the house and sell stuff on Trade Me and I made quite a lot of money actually as a kid selling things on trademe and occasionally I would sell something that mum actually wanted me to keep did. So that would get me in a bit of trouble.
- So I, and would break things into smaller pieces and sell them as individual pieces cuz they're worth more than the sum. So I think I'd always had a knack for, yeah, I'd always make sure I took nice photographs of with the nice camera and stuff and so kind of advertise it cuz I knew that that would fetch more if it had good photographs. So I feel like I always had a knack for trying to make things and sell stuff. And so I thought I saw these opportunities. I joined this Ubuntu project and I can't quite remember how I stumbled upon this community that was trying to make some training material for tu and it kind of became this thing where it was really popular operating system and emerging countries because it was free obviously and flexible and had a lot of translation, but the training material was all in English.
- And so we kind of developed this document that we could evolve and translate and that was just this project that I was working on, but just kind of interested I guess in trying to get out of, I'd always wanted to get out of New Zealand as well. I felt like it was Christchurch especially, I felt kind of constrained. I traveled to Weber and it was lucky enough actually to go to Belgium to develop a summit and was exposed to this whole world of people. But one of the cool things is that when I was growing up, my mom had this bed and breakfast in Christchurch and we were one of the I guess providers for the US Antarctica program, [affirmative].
- Some people might know that the US flies through Christchurch, they use it as kind of a base operations to go down to their base, McMurdo and Antarctica. And they have a few accommodation providers and we were one of them. So every year we would have these kind of scientists and these physicists and astronomers staying from the us, from Germany all over the place. And they would stay with us and often they would be delayed by multiple weeks because of the weather. And Antarctica meant that they couldn't fly down there and some of them were going down to the South Pole to stay there for the whole winter. And so I'd start talking to them about all sorts of things and they'd show me kind of stuff, sciencey stuff. Some of them are working on maintaining telescopes, others were digging drilling massive holes in the ice and going diving underneath the ice sheet to find really old biological samples. [affirmative]
- A friend of mine, he was doing a PhD in geophysics and he would from University of Texas at Austin and he would fly around in Antarctica on a DC three is an old World War II aircraft equipped a gravity meter and that'd fly constantly across the ice at a certain altitude and that actually measure the gravity expensive piece of equipment and that would tell them the thickness of the ice. And it was a way to survey for climate change over the years. So I was kind of exposed to all these interesting people that you just don't get to meet in Christchurch. And I guess that kind of peaked my curiosity and I got involved with these other things that were international, I suppose. And Buntu was one of those.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So looking back on those experiences, those opportunities that you took and the things that you did there, how have they impacted your career path or how have they lead you to where you find yourself today?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Well, I made a few decisions that I guess were at the time not particularly well received by my family. So [laugh], I started doing computer science and design at the University of Otago in Dunedin. And then about a year and a half into it I decided this wasn't for me and dropped out. And so my mom was very, very upset and a couple of things. One was that I didn't really like that style of learning. I really struggled to be taught as in be told in a lecture. I just really struggled to pay attention in lectures and things like this. And I really liked the practical side of it, the labs and just getting in and doing stuff. That was one reason I also felt that the computer science was missing this opportunity with the web back in 2008, 2009, I could of see that web applications were kind of gonna be the thing and Facebook was growing and all this sort the stuff.
- Yet we were still learning how to build these little java apples and write Python and I kind of felt like the design side was missing. And so that was another thing. And then the other thing is that I got involved in kind of freelancing, doing some design work and just started making a bit of money. And of course when you're a student it's very appealing to not be poor anymore and actually work on for a company that's paying you something. So I decided to drop outta university and I think that that was a tough decision, but the right decision because it meant that I could get into all these sorts of things, these projects, the A buntu stuff, working for Loop, which was the company that AVOs acquired [affirmative] and it was all just kind of fortuitous. There's a lot of luck involved though. The timing was kind of good. And so I think that making a couple of good decisions and just trying to understand I guess how I wanted to learn and apply myself. And I realized early on that it was about just getting stuck in and doing stuff and learning that way rather than persisting with a of learning style that I didn't really work for me. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Has your mum forgiven you?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- I honestly don't think so. No. [laugh] [laugh]. I think she'd still like me to go back to university and get my degree.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Come on mom. [laugh]. Well look, I watched your interview that you recently gave with Give It Enough show, Steve Grace's show. Yeah. You spoke about in that your need, and this is quite common in entrepreneurs, they're rather hard charging types, quite hard on themselves. You spoke about your need to be the best at what you do do and how you've felt pursuing that in your life. You said, and I'm gonna quote you now, I struggle with this, it's never good enough. So I'm always unhappy, which kind of sucks. It sounds like you've got a bit of a battle and like I said, this is an uncommon in entrepreneurs with perfectionism.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Definitely. So the most recent story I have about this is we just painted our house and we started doing it ourselves, my girlfriend, and we painted the front entranceway in the front room and the house needs to be painted. We bought it off a family who had a couple of small kids in the walls were just full of marks and dance and things like that. So we started painting this house and it was actually really cathartic cuz I could do it myself and knew that I was gonna do a really good job and sweat the details and everything. But then we realized it was fricking ages. We did it over Christmas and it took us a week to paint two rooms and we didn't even do the skirting board or the windows or anything, we just did the walls. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is your girlfriend a bit of a perfectionist as well?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Not really, no.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Struggle. I think it was Christmas time we would normally have family come over and visit us and things to do, but we didn't. So anyway, we're doing this and I kind of realized, man, this is gonna take us forever, so let's get some painters in to do it. And we went away for a couple of weeks on a road trip. But it is a struggle because they did a really awesome job and we chose to best painters we could find. I had quotes from five or six of them and best reviews and everything like that. And it's still come back and I'm like, oh this so Lucy's like this is so good, how amazing is this? And everything. And I'm like, yeah, it's really awesome, but oh, there's this little bit here or this bit here. And so for me, always I feel like I don't dwell on the successes or the past as much as I think about what's the next thing? [affirmative]?
- I don't know if you've ever watched a show West Wing. It was [affirmative]. Yeah, it's an HBO show from the late nineties and early two thousands. And President Bartlett, he's played by Michael Sheen's brother, I can't remember his actor's name, but he often ends each episode dealing with some sort of crisis and he ends the episode saying What's next? He doesn't really kind of dwell on the success that they've had if he always look into the next thing. And I feel like that's kind of me as well. We painted the house and the first thing I said was not, oh, I look so good. It's like, okay, now we're gonna do the bathroom or something [laugh]. So [laugh] that kind of annoys Lucy and I think people at work as well where I don't think I dwell so much on our successes. I just constantly think about what the next thing is to do.
- And I don't know why, particularly I think one of the things that's always frustrated me about technology is just how kind of bad everything is. And you see this all the time whenever you see some, an old older person interacting with software [affirmative]. And I feel like you have so much empathy as a designer because you can understand the whole process that went into ending up with something and the engineering effort and the design effort. And then you see the end result, which is, in my case, my mom struggling to do something basic and I find her myself setting S sitting at these ridiculous instructions. The other day in Chrome, she was trying to bookmark something and I was like, oh, or printed or something like that. And I was like, okay, so click the three dots in the top [laugh] and then of course whatever website she's on also had three.menu. And I was like, no, no, no, the vertical three dots, the ones that go like this. So click the vertical three dots, then click more tools than, and it's just painful. So I struggle because it's like I understand the choices in this case the Google Chrome design team has made to tuck everything away. But I also understand the sort of, it's just, yeah, so I see a lot of frustration in software and I kind of feel like, man, it should be better and I feel like we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I was talking to Steve Kru who wrote, don't Make Me Think the other week, and he brought up exactly this point after 40 years of doing what he's doing, he still looks around and sees things and he's like, oh man, why? There's just so many bad experience still around, but he understands what you've said, just how hard it is to shape something that's actually great.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, the classic thing Hub, hub is mum, mum always complains about apps being updated and things changing and of course everybody's always changing stuff. Like the Facebook apps always evolving and Gmail and so on, people, Google's deprecating some service had, we use Hangouts for the last, I don't know, 15 years and they're getting rid of Hangouts this year and so I have to switch over to some other thing. So we switched over to WhatsApp, but of course WhatsApp doesn't have video calling on desktop up until last couple of months ago. So I was like, okay, mom, Hangouts is getting duplicated and I don't have an iPhone so we're gonna have to use Duo to do a video call. But then WhatsApp when I'm not on my desktop, it's just stuffed and I just don't understand how things are so bad. But then I also get the whole heart of sausages made thing. So it's a frustration, I guess,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. And you've acknowledged that this plays out at work as well and perhaps the team gets frustrated with you occasionally on this. What do you do to try and manage this predisposition that you've got?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Well, one of our values is if we do it, we nail it, which has been quite helpful because often I feel like in the past before we had this value, we would take on something that we didn't have the confidence that we could nail it [affirmative]. And so I would rather not do something entirely than ship something that's kind of half baked which has helped us make hard trade offs, which is, well maybe we should not do that yet because we don't have the full confidence in the feature or something like this. So that's been helpful.
- And then obviously just providing some perspective to the team that one of the reasons that we win as a product is a company, and this goes for people choosing Dovetail over other tools, but also people choosing Dovetail as a place to work in terms of our value proposition from employees is the quality bar is high and that's a thing that people wanna be associated with. They want to feel like they're doing really great work and that the craft is valued whether that's an engineer writing code or whether that's a person in marketing or graphic designer or something like this. So I think it's kind of tricky cuz people are drawn to the idea of sweating the details and polishing stuff and releasing things that they're proud of. But the trade off is that it can be tough to have celebrate success and be happy cuz you're always striving for perfection.
- So I think that I'm probably a lot more patient now than I was a year ago. One of the things that I find that's helpful for me is just remembering that Brad and myself as founders have for most context out of anybody in the company because we've been doing it the longest and we also have the lUXury of being able to see what's going on from our perspective. And personally, I have a quite a high level perspective because I also talk to investors a lot and can compare us against other companies and have drinks with other founders. And so the thing is that not everybody's gonna have that level of context, and so you have to be patients, not really anyone's fault, you just have to build up this context and provide perspective and hopefully you get the point to the point where the organization is consistently shipping really high quality stuff. So I think patience. Patience is the key.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Yeah, that's often a lesson you can only learn through experience. It sounds like you've come to some great insight there about yourself and how to adapt to make that better for the team that you've employed.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- And when you're in a startup as well, you're hiring new people all the time and everybody's coming from a different background and a different kind of career path and they've worked in different cultures and different environments, different set of principles, [affirmative]. So it takes some time for people to adjust. It's not just simple stuff kind of fitting into the culture in a social sense and everything. It's also how people work together and collaborate. That can be quite different if you've come from a software company like Atlassian versus you've come from a larger, more established business or agency or a consulting firm. So I think just appreciating that everybody has some time to adapt and that when you're hiring as fast as we are, the average tenure is something like six months. So it's difficult to and ensure that we're always crushing it all the time on schedule because it's just too much expectation for the team. We're hiring around one person a fortnight at the moment. So that's the amount of context that people have. Our retention rate is a hundred percent, so we haven't had anybody leave. So yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, that's something to be really proud of. [laugh], and this might sound a little crazy to the conversation, but Dovetails a bit famous in the Uxr community, but there might be some people that are listening that haven't heard about it yet. Just for those people, what is Dovetail?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, famous. That's a word that I never thought that we would be associated with, but that's cool
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You heard it here first.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, [laugh]. So basically we are a software platform, a collaborative software platform for people who do research, and that sounds quite vague, but we're basically a way for people to organize unstructured data to make sense of it through analysis and to store their insights, retrieve insights through search and discovery and collaborate across teams, across departments. So it's ideal customer for us is sort a medium to large SAS business that has multiple products and multiple teams doing research. So for instance, we have Shopify as a customer, get Lab Square VMware. We also have a lot of what I would call non-software, what is called digital transformation type companies. So Volkswagen and Porsche we have banks and insurance companies like Unica and Austria cba. So basically the product is not a lot of research software is focused on the collection of data. So you've got survey tools, you have usability testing software, you have NPS type things like Voice at a customer or cx.
- We don't really care how you collect this data, this unstructured data, but we help you make sense of it through transcription, tagging, tools and video type stuff. And then once you've made sense of it, come up with some insights, hopefully you store them and present them through Dovetail and we can get rid of PowerPoints and PDFs and long form reports that people don't read. So that's the future, at least for us, is building out this rich collaborative dynamic research report that's not a kind of dusty thing. And so yeah, that's a very long winded. One thing I hate is elevator pitches or even the concept of an elevator pitch because businesses are very complicated [laugh] and being able to describe your business in one sentence is just so vague. I really struggle with that otherwise, or you resort to something stupid with the Uber for research, which of course doesn't make any sense. So yeah, you end up, if you ask me what we do, it's a long winded answer and thankfully though, if people are in the space, they get it. You're like, oh, it's a research repository product, they get it. But if I'm trying to describe it to anybody who's not in for design or research community, it ends up being this super long winded answer, [laugh]. Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm sure that most of the people listening to this will get it. So it's great to have that description from you. Benjamin, before we get into the future for Dovetail, take me back to the beginning. So you joined Atlassian as a product designer in 2013, and by December, 2016 you were promoted to a lead designer. Then about six months later you said goodbye to what seems like a great job that also had stock options to work full-time on your new startup at that time Dovetail. What did mum think about that decision?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- [laugh], this was the second decision that she was very unhappy with [laugh]. It's so funny. We really struggle with even hiring today people leaving in the eyes of their parents leaving these kind of really comfortable jobs that almost sound too good to be true. And of course the thing is with Atlassian, right, it's a pretty sweet gig from their perspective. I took my mom through the office a few times and she's like, wow, you can magnums and they're on tap, basically you've got free beer, you've get to walk up to work in shorts and a t-shirt and [laugh]. Then on top of all of this, you're paid really well and you have stock options and why would you ever leave, right? Because from their point of view they're used to working for one company for a long time. So makes sense. Yeah, so in my case, I started as a designer and I started working on Jira and that was cool.
- Some pretty hard challenges with J. I was working on the CanBan boards, which called Green Hopper, and then it was renamed to Jira software, JIRA Agile, sorry, then Jira software. So I was working on a green hopper, it's a small team, 12 of us or so the design team for Jira was only maybe six people and trucked away on that. Then I moved on to some onboarding stuff after a year or so working on the growth team. Then I was fortunate to be part of this vision project and so I just moved around a bit working on various parts of Atlassian. And so the thing is that Atlassian changed a lot while I was there. It went through a lot of growth from 2013. You understand that the company was 500 people when I started the design team was 17, and when I left the company was 1500, 2000.
- The design team was well over a hundred people, [affirmative]. And so it went through a lot of growth, obviously went from private company to public company. And so I was just, I wanted to get back on the tools and make more stuff. And I saw this opportunity to build a product for researchers because I'd been following this journey with design tooling for as a designer. So I used Photoshop originally, well before that dream weaver and Flash and stuff, [laugh], we were using Photoshop to make design mockups and atomic design. Design systems was emerging. Obviously Photoshop wasn't really designed for that [affirmative]. Then you had Sketch kind of come on the scene as a purpose built vector editor for UI design specifically. Obviously they launched symbols and libraries to do design systems and then Figma. And so I sort saw firsthand and experienced it firsthand what software purpose-built design software could look like [affirmative]. And as Atlassian hired researchers, I realized that they were essentially using a flexible tool for everything. So nothing that they were using for analysis was built for them. So spreadsheets, Google Docs, confluence and they're just trying to bend it in a way that worked for them. And a lot of the time it was just sticky notes on a whiteboard. So I thought, man, this must be something we could do for researchers. So that was the hunch.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That was the hunch, that was the hunch you observed them using and struggling with the software.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- And it's one particular moment where we were, I was doing this project with a researcher and it was called Engaging First Impressions, and it was about the onboarding experience for Jira and Confluence in the first seven days. We wanted to understand why people tried the product and didn't convert. So every company has this problem. So we did a diary study and the researcher that I was working with, she ran this diary study through a combination of Tumblr blogs and Tumblr diaries, and then also using Google Docs and spreadsheets, and then finally printing out all of the entries and cutting them up and pieces of paper and putting them on a whiteboard. The whole thing took maybe three months to make sense of, and I saw this and I immediately latched onto the Tumblr part where she so basically created a separate Tumblr blog for each participant, gave them the username password and said, log into this and write your diary entry as a new blog each day.
- And so I was like, man, this sucks. There's gotta be a better way to do diary studies. And of course I found Dout, and back then they were doing a lot of video stuff and I was like, well, what if you can't do video SMS email? I'd also gone to his conference where Fisher Pi were talking about an interceptive texting research study that they had run in China on how people used their dishwashers in small apartments, [affirmative]. So I got thinking, I was like, man, maybe I could do something where it's like, we'll send some text messages and emails on a schedule over a week. We can do this kind of longitudinal study. It's a bit like a survey tool. So I built that and then got a few paying customers and I did this while I was at Atlassian on the weekend and on weeknights for six months. It got a little bit of traction, but it wasn't really going anywhere. Certainly not lucrative enough for me to consider leaving Atlassian to work on [affirmative]. But I did notice when I talked to customers that they would well, we also saw this in the revenue [laugh], is that people would buy it, that do their study, and then they'd export their data and cancel. So, which is a
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Nightmare from a product entrepreneurship point of view. That's
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Not what you Yeah, well there was definitely no SAS business there with that a hundred percent churn. So I talked to them and I was like, what are you doing with the data when you export it? And then they showed me, well, we're doing all this analysis, it's all different. Some people are doing it in a spreadsheet, some people are doing it on my whiteboard even in a physical kind of journal, just like jotting down annotations and notes [affirmative]. So I thought, all right, maybe analysis is more interesting. So then I went deep into that space, looked at academic software like InVivo Max, QDA, Atlas ti realized that there was an opportunity here to disrupt those by building a cloud collaborative product that was priced more affordably. And then convinced Brad, my co-founder about the idea over a few months and then finally left Atlassian to build that. So that was kind of the journey. It did take a long time though,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. So there's a few things in there that I want to go into. Starting off with, how did it feel on the day that you left Atlassian?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- [laugh] Look, Atlassian was very good to me and it's a very good company. And so I took the sabbatical for three months and I did my flying and I wanted to think about, I talked to a few people and they were like, look, you can go on the startup path and it's gonna be hard and you're probably not gonna be successful. And I was like, okay, that's cool. And I always had this itch to scratch with building a startup. And I also should mention that I talked to Mike and Scott before I took the sabbatical [affirmative]. So I had a one-on-one with each of them and talked about what I wanted to do, talked about this product and things like this. And Mike was like, well, it's really hard building a company and here's all the reasons why it's gonna be difficult. And he didn't really try and sell me on staying at Atlassian.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- These are the founders Atlasian too, for people that don't know who Mike Scott are.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, yeah, Mike, yeah, that's right. Yeah, Mike Kind Brooks and Scott va. And so we talked about that for an hour and a half, and he was like, at the end of the day, it's your choice, but these are, it's a very different kind of landscape to start a company now than it was when they started Atlassian. And I talked to him and then I decided I'd take three months off, think about things, and then I came back to it lastly after three months off and I'd been chipping away on Dovetail and I was like, look, I'm passionate about this thing. I really need to go and do this. So yeah, decided to leave, put in my notice, and then I spent four weeks talking to everybody and having conversations and doing kind of a brain dump, [affirmative] and then wrapped up. So the plan was we were gonna spend a year, we gave ourselves a year so we kind of worked out how much we'd need to spend in the 12 months to live. And then Brad and I put some money in a bank account and we said, this is how much money we have. If that runs out, we're gonna call it quits and we're gonna go back to in his case, he would've gone back to Atlassian, I may have and we'll just give it a go. And so that was the mentality.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it was very much calculated risk,
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Definitely. And of course walk out and if you quit, then your equity goes. And so obviously left a fair amount of money on the table, but I also felt like the timing was good. You have to consider these things. In our late twenties, we didn't have any kids. We were happy to stay in Sydney for a while. We felt like we had a good amount of experience from all the things we'd learned at Atlassian [affirmative]. And so it felt like a good time to try. So it was a very calculated risk. And if it wasn't gonna work out, I think we would be at peace with that. But I definitely felt like I had to scratch that itch and I'm pleased that I did it then and didn't do it earlier because if I'd done it earlier, I wouldn't have had all of the knowledge that I built up from Atlassian. Things I'd learned.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So now that you've done it, have there been any moments that you've doubted yourself or the idea
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- All the time? I think as a founder, I think you have feel a lot of responsibility. I feel, because I've talked about this in the past, but one of the problems or the anxiety that you develop is that you kind of sell this dream and it is a dream. You have a bit of evidence, a bit of traction. You have some customers, you have a product, but what you're selling is this, well, we'll be like the next Atlassian or something like that. Of course, that's what the investors want to hear. They want to get a big return. That's also what employees want to hear. They don't want to leave just like I wanted to leave Atlassian. It was a calculated risk. They don't wanna leave a company like that or whatever they are, wherever they're doing at the moment, [affirmative] without believing it, that this could be a good option long term. So you have these expectations, I guess, from the team or the people you've convinced to join you from investors, also from friends and family, you know, you've taken this risk on, made this decision. That's, and in the first couple of years we were really, I don't know, just heads down trying to prove ourselves.
- And so you feel that weight all the time. And of course, if things don't go that well, then you have a lot of self doubt. And the thing that I helps me now is that I feel like we've built up a team of people that are pretty good at what they do and hire people that are smarter than you and then you de-risks the whole business. So I think that definitely have a lot of self doubt. And then in a product, I mean I think Brad and I are pretty surprised at how popular it's been and how much people like it. We are our own biggest critics I guess. But what we just started it out and we were like, well, let's build this kind of editor that you can tag, you can select the text and you can tag it. [laugh]
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Works really well for doing that, by the way, [laugh], you nailed that one.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, so that's right. And so how products, they have a few kind of cornerstone features that I guess are the things that, just like for Jira, it's the workflow management stuff, [affirmative] and that's the kind of secret source that has to work really well. But a great product has a few of these and I feel like we kind of got that first one really. And then we did the video stuff and that's been good [affirmative] but I still feel like we have a couple more of these kind of really wow things to build. So yeah, I definitely have self doubt, confidence, anxiety type problems, but you just have to reassure yourself that we're just gonna take it one thing at a time and just try and make a lot of good decisions one after the other with the information you have.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think Seth Goden calls it Dancing with Fear
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- [laugh]. Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. And there's all sorts of stuff you can do to de-risk it, you know, can hire great people. Obviously you can have a bit of money in the bank by doing some venture capital. There's all sorts of stuff you can do. So it's just a matter of just going through and de-risking stuff and trying to believe a lot of it's naivety too. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, you need a healthy dose of that. Otherwise anyone looking at starting a company would, because the reality is often not as glamorous as the stories that we read about in the media.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, absolutely. I mean, nothing is an overnight success. One thing that I like doing is using the way back machine to go and look at old websites of successful companies before they were successful. So I go back and look at Slack when it was a gaming company and Intercom and how they had a really bad website when they started out. And I look at Atlassian's old website and a lot of people don't realize this thing takes this ages, it takes a long time to really become an overnight success. There's a lot of groundwork that has to go into it beforehand. We've been going now for almost four years and I feel like we're just recently at an inflection point where we're starting to be reasonably successful and it's kind of taken that not much time to get there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, one of the things I really like about the Dovetail story is that, you mentioned this earlier that you bootstrapped to business profitability before you accepted outside investment. Was that a conscious decision that you made?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, absolutely. We were originally not gonna take any VC money so we wanted to build, I call it a happy, healthy, crunchy company. So similar to Basecamp similar to Buffer, perhaps [affirmative] Zapier, just a company that is kind of got all this foundational stuff, it's just sort of trucking along. It's got a good model, pretty patient VC backed companies are stressful because obviously the desire is to grow quickly but you can also just grow slowly and you'll get there eventually, hopefully. So originally, but the goal was Brad and I were gonna try and make 120 grand and that would pay our of $60,000 each, which we cover our rent and some food and stuff. So we got there. But the problem is that, you know, can survive as a two person company for a while, but a few things happen. You get a bit bored of one another, you get kind of sick of one another.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative] You were working from each other's kitchens, weren't you?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- We were, yeah. So we started taking Wednesdays off to be part bit of focus time. You also missed a lot of the cultural things of having a team Friday drinks team lunches, just people to hang out with. It's quite alienating, isolating for me, at least my whole network in Sydney was Atlassian because I'd moved here for the job. So we would make a point of organizing a breakfast each month with our friends at Atlassian just to stay in touch. And if we didn't do that, people would just forget about us, I suppose. So [affirmative] so we wanted to get to 120 grand. And the thing is, as we got there and then we had, I don't know, a hundred customers or something, and you realize that with two people, you know, can't take a holiday. At the same time, Brad as the only kind of real engineer was the one who was always on call 24 7.
- And because all these customers were overseas, he was getting woken up at three, four o'clock in the morning we had support to deal with and we kind of realized that we just weren't really providing a good experience for those 100 customers because it was just the two of us. And if we wanted to provide a better experience, we would need to spend more time on support and everything like this and less time building new features. And so that kind of limits your ambition, [affirmative]. And we hit, we'd hit that goal and so we were like, well, what are we gonna do? Is this, we're like 20, I don't know how old I was, 28 or something, 29. And so it's like, okay, this is, what do we do now? Is this the rest of our life? We just keep growing revenue, take home a bigger sort of share [affirmative] so it can actually be quite stressful doing this bootstrap company. So we decided to hire an engineer, Chris, who was our first hire, [affirmative], and he joined back and this was sort of 2018, I guess. Is this Chris Mor and No, this is Chris Maneuver. Mors joined us about just over six months ago, [affirmative]. So yeah, we hired Chris and we gave him the hundred 20 grand instead of paying ourselves to salary. And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is after, how long had it taken you to get to this 120 grand?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- It took about a year
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Of not paying yourself. This is not paying yourself, working in each other's kitchens, none of the That's that you had at last. Just
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Spending our savings. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So it took about a year and it was actually quite relaxing. It was quite nice. We just kind of chipped away. I was looking at Caril, so I, we'd just go up and meet at the cafes at Caril there by the bridge, and it was nice and sunny and just kind of enjoying sitting. Of course we worked on whatever schedule we wanted to, we didn't have any meetings. That was great. Literally no manager, no meetings, no performance reviews, nothing like that. Just kind of chill really just focused on building the product. And our velocity was really good. We were shipping one feature a week at least so it was quite satisfying. But we hired Chris and we were like, okay, let's do this. And then we still didn't know if we wanted to take any VC money or not, but by this point some venture capital investors had started reaching out and we started chatting to them.
- And we got to, would've been June or July or August or something, 2019. And we were sitting on $400,000 a year or something like that. So we were chilling, kind of profitable just the three of us. But again, it was a bit stressful because we had all these customers, a lot of them were big companies that were trusting us with their data, that is really their customer's data research participants. And we were all doing it all from Sydney and we were still missing the kind of office, the culture, the vibe and stuff. Still just three of us. We were actually working outta Fishburners for a little bit in Sydney as a co-working space. And so we hired a couple of people and one of the problems was that we really, really struggled to hire because if it's risky joining a startup, it's even risky here joining a startup, it doesn't have any money in the bank. [laugh],
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You don't tell people that though, right? That's not part of the dream that you sell?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Well, we're trying to be really honest. And so we told, yeah, we were like, guys, we have about a hundred thousand bucks in the bank and we make $400,000 a year, so if we hire you be burning money again. So we've been another sort of six months into a profitable or whatever, [affirmative], there's not quite a great story. And then the other problem is that there's no validation other than the only validation we had was our customers. So in terms of pitching somebody to join this company there there's no kind of litmus test I guess other than the customers we had. And especially for someone who doesn't understand research and design as in an engineer you can't like the product, what's the point? How does this work? Why are people gonna pay for this? You can't really pitch the product. So we realized that we needed to grow the team and it was pretty stressful just being three of us. And we were struggling to hire. So to essentially decided to do the best by the customers and just to make sure that we could be sustainable we thought we would de-risk it by raising some money. So we talked to a few VC firms and Blackbird ended up being the lead in the round, and that was actually September, 2019. And then we didn't announce it for a few months. [affirmative].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what was it about Blackbird? Why Blackbird and why not the other investors that had approached you in the past?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- It's a combination of things. Blackbird obviously have a great reputation in Australia and slowly in New Zealand for being very founder friendly, which is a great aspect. We were very honest with them about so our partner Blackbird's, a guy called Nick Crocker, he came up and had lunch with us, he in Melbourne. And we were extremely honest about what we wanted to do with the business. We didn't wanna give away lots of equity. If we wanted to retain control of the board of a majority shareholder vote, we were basically gonna do the round on our terms. And if the VC didn't like that, then they're not gonna get it. And that was just it. And a couple of other firms were like, wow, we have minimum ownership thresholds and so you're gonna have to give us more of your company. And we were like, well, stuff for you then.
- So we said no to them, but Blackbird was, I think that kind of saw, because that's more about betting on founders rather than their philosophy is basically if you have good founders, then you'll have a good business. And even if the business isn't perfect at the time, the hope is that the founders can get it there. So we were just upfront about the challenges. We had talked through what we were gonna do to solve them and I guess they just liked us. And so we kind of got along and I think there was a philosophical alignment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And how has it changed the business since taking on that funding, deploying that capital? What has it done for Dovetail?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, it's a good question. So somebody asked me this the other day, were like, do you think you'd get where you are now without taking a VC money? And I don't think so because we've spent quite a bit of capital on our office, for example, which is just nice place. And Surry Hills we just wouldn't have had enough capital in the bank to afford that. So we'd still probably be working at a co-working space. It makes a big difference. I feel like your office is your manifestation of the culture [affirmative], and when people walk through the door and they kind of see the vibe, they see the design and the illustrator did this awesome mural that's on the wall, it just makes it so much more exciting for them to consider joining Dovetail. So I think that our hiring wouldn't have been anywhere near as good as it is at the moment if it weren't for the funding, obviously the validation and everything like this.
- So it certainly helped us become a more attractive place to work. And then the validation has I think helped us when some enterprise customers and [affirmative] just been a bit more, I guess, you know, have to think about customer confidence and there's all sorts of stuff you can do to try and build that. And having a couple of news articles and stuff that we can share, at least back then was helpful to build some confidence [affirmative]. So I think that we may have been able to get to where we are now, but it would've taken a lot longer and it would've been a lot riskier cuz Brad and I would have been literally putting our own money in. Whereas this way we sell a wee bit of the business, we get a bunch of cash de-risks it for us, and we can use that. And it's deploying capital's kind of tricky actually. We don't make a reasonable amount of money off of the product, and so we're not that far off profitable month to month. So we need to figure out, well how do we smartly spend this money to grow? Which is a pretty difficult challenge actually,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. And you mentioned before that there are strings attached to outside money. What strings are attached to the money that you've raised? What do you need to demonstrate to investors and how is that shaping the decisions that you're making at Dovetail?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, that's a good question. So literally we don't have any strings attached. We managed to get a really good terms, great economics, and so that's, Brad and I still have full control of the company, so that's really good [affirmative]. But I think that it's more of an intrinsic expectation or I wouldn't call it pressure, not at all, but just this feeling that we gotta grow at a certain rate and don't wanna let people down, wanna deliver on what we said. Maybe it's more about that. I talked earlier about selling this dream and you obviously paint a vision when you go raise money, you sort of tell a story. I think of raising money as a narrative. You basically build the story, build the narrative, and then you find evidence to support the narrative. A lot of companies go evidence first where they just deliver a bunch of metrics without telling the story around the metrics.
- So for us, I told this narrative and then I feel like we need to deliver on that, otherwise we're sort of going back on our words. So that's the sort of pressure I guess that I place on myself, but it's not, I think there's this misconception that in the early stage investors are trying to control the company or set the direction or anything like that. Honestly that's the worst thing they could do because the founders have the most amount of context and the most amount of skill and experience to actually execute on everything. So if the investors are even getting involved at that degree, it doesn't help. So they're kind of there as advisors and connectors. If we want a connection to somebody we can reach out to them and see if they have an intro or something they can do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like you've found some great investors there to help take Dovetail to the next level.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, we're very fortunate. I think we are also quite intentional about choosing an Australian lead for our first round [affirmative] we didn't want to go down the route of getting an American investor from day one as our lead investor. And I think that that's again, baby steps calculated risk. We didn't want to go. A lot of people will go and I'll raise a heap of money from an American investor off of not very much. And I think it just puts so much pressure on you, [affirmative]. So we kind of intentionally chose Australian lead invest that we liked. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm. [affirmative] cliche, but the most valuable resource we all have is time. And I imagine when you're the CEO of a fast growing product company that might feel like it's an exceedingly short supply, what things at Dovetail do you actually focus most of your time on?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, so yes time is in short supply and
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We are running out of time on this interview, [laugh].
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Oh, that's fine. So I have this friend who's a CEO of 150 person company and they've had a really interesting journey to get to where they're at and who said to me the other day, he's like, man, scaling a company as in the culture, the team, the organization is way harder than finding product market fit, getting to your first million in revenue. And I agree with that. I think that a lot of my time now is spent on trying to think about how do we steer the company in terms of its culture, the values, the principles that we have, and how do I provide as much perspective and context as I can so that everybody can make their own good decisions without me being the bottleneck. So I delegate a lot of things like day to day stuff, and I've been doing more and more of that where we have now a really great head of product who came from safety culture, [affirmative] Brian.
- And then we also just hired a head of marketing Susan, who is from booking.com. And so I've got two quite experienced people running product and marketing, which means that a lot of the day to day stuff and how do they actually build out their team And the strategy is that's what they're working on, [affirmative]. So then I can think more about, well how do we set a longer term vision and what sort of things do I need to say and do to shape the culture especially when you have new people joining all the time. So a lot of it's kind of guidance and just thoughtfully thinking about how do we use events, all hands meetings my one on ones with my direct reports and try and help them be better and coach them. Yeah, [affirmative]. So it's probably more thoughtful, a lot of deep thought on the business as a whole and less kind of functional work. I'm not designing and running campaigns or anything.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think you used an analogy and something I was watching that you talked to before, which was moving from a pirate ship to the Navy. Oh yeah. Becoming the Navy. I'm not sure who actually originally came up with that analogy, but I thought that was a brilliant analogy. What, what does that analogy, what does that represent?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, so it was Reid Hoffman who wrote a LinkedIn article about this for Uber when Uber was going through its Turmoils with Travis as the ceo and they were trying to reinvent themselves and Reid was talking about how they need to transition from being a pirate ship to being kind of this navy which is more sort of sophisticated and has multiple fleets with their own kind of commanders and can operate effectively at scale which means having a shared kind of culture and understanding of what's right and what's wrong and the of stuff. So as well as things like a chain of command and all sort of stuff. But I think one way to think about it is that you have to design the organization. I had this one belief that I had that's changed is that if you just hire great people that you get along with, then the culture will be just self developing. And that is not true at all. You can have awesome people, but you still need to shape the culture in intentionally [affirmative].
- So a lot of what I do is observing and then also calling things out where it's like, hey, this is a bit weird or reinforcing saying this is actually a good example and trying to say we should do more of this kind of thing, [affirmative]. And I think that being intentional about shaping the culture and design, really designing the culture, looking for problems, solving them is how you can scale an organization and do it where you are not the bottleneck. If I'm constantly running around having to make decisions on everything, then I haven't done a very good job. So empowering people to make their own decisions and make the decisions that are gonna be hopefully better than even my decision cuz they have more context and are equipped with the knowledge to do that. So [affirmative], I think that's where the pirate ship to Navy thing is cuz pirate ships, there's kind of no chain of command, there's just a bunch of, it's a small team that's got a shared culture, a shared understanding.
- The incentives are really clear whereas a Navy is quite a different outfit. And so this other article that I read is about how you don't wanna go full navy because then you end up being quite bureaucratic. So what you want ideally is pirates in the Navy. So you have these sort of small teams that have their own kind of cultures and can move quickly while still operating within the broader strategy of the company. And so I think that, I don't know much about Google's internal culture, but from the outside it seems like that's kind of what they do. They sort of have a lot of small teams that are often sometimes competing with one another, but they're all trying to move quickly and do a lot of things while operating in the broader culture and value system of Google
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. Just being mindful of time and bringing us down to the close. Just a couple of final questions for you, Benjamin. What are you not willing to compromise on as you build Dove to
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- [laugh]? Yeah, hard question. Not willing to compromise on, I think that probably bad culture fit people, [laugh] [affirmative]. And I think that this is, I think again, this is kind of one of those things that I've probably learned over the past 12 months or so. I think a hire that is not a great culture fit can have this magnitude kind of effect where they just really slow the company down and piss everybody off and everybody's talking about it. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort as a manager. And it's like, you know, can have somebody who's extremely skilled [affirmative]. I don't know if you saw this thing that Atlassian came out with a couple years ago, but there's no assholes rule [affirmative]. It's a bit like that. It's, I didn't realize, I think you can have someone who's really skilled but is not a good culture fit and it just really can be toxic. And that's kind of one thing that I just don't feel like we're gonna compromise on or tolerate. It just creates this real unhappiness [laugh] and it's amazing cause it's like one person.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And definitely that's not what you need when you're trying to move at speed and scale. So yeah, it's really, you say that.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, and I think that culture fit is kind of a bit of a, it's not a great term because it implies that you have an existing culture, it's never gonna evolve and everybody has to fit into it, which is not true. So we talk about it kind of more as culture ad I think all the recent new hires we've made are just amazing and they're coming in and they're really adding to the culture and it's actually quite cool. So we're sort at this inflection point now where people are starting to established groups where they're playing Dungeons and Dragons or going hiking together, whereas before with when we were just 10 or 12 people, you didn't really have a critical mass. It was either everybody went to do this activity together, had lunch together or nobody did. And so now we've got almost 30 people. It's kind of like, okay, people have shared hobbies, [laugh].
- But I think that yeah, you want people who add to the culture and have the right kind of attitude and that is pretty vague. It can cross all sorts of different things, whether how they communicate with other people, they take feedback on board, how do they collaborate their working style and just a kind of attitude. Startups are really difficult and if you're negative or pessimistic it, it's really tough because there are a hundred problems at any one time that you can point out, but that's always the case. And so if you're constantly just pointing out the problems, then it's really tough to keep people motivated. So I think that you sometimes just have to almost be naively positive and optimistic even in the face of yeah, it's this interesting thing, it's called this article on this by my coach Ed Batista. It's called the Cognitive Dissonance of a ceo and it's a bit like this dancing what was it? Dancing with the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Dancing with the, yeah, dancing with, yeah,
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- It's a bit like that where if you're on the ground at a startup, you can see all the problems, but somehow you still have to remain optimistic and positive in spite of all of that. And that's a hard thing for people to do cognitively but necessary. So I think that that's difficult to get.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It might have been Ryan Holiday or someone else that I was reading recently and the notion that they were speaking of there was don't wish for a life with no problems, wish for a life with better problems. And I think that's one of the things with businesses, they're always gonna be problems and in life in general, but if you get caught up in those and dwell on them and let that seep out and negative toxic energy into other people, that's when you're, you might leave that company.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. It's all about being pragmatic, right? You're not trying to put out all of the fires, [laugh] always on fire, it's just how big is the fire? And then you turn your hose towards that fire and then there's another smaller fire that's kind of a grass fire, you don't really worry about that as much until it gets outta control [laugh]. So that's kind of the approach ever gonna be perfect, which is hard if you're a perfectionist, but I think that just learning to let things go and actually not try and solve everything at once as well as a good mindset.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what's in store for Dovetail?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, well a lot. So we've got a lot going on at the moment actually. We are growing a team quite a lot. We're running out of office space, we're working on expanding the office and don't get me started on commercial leases and office expansion stuff. It's pain in the ass.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Surely there should be some opportunities coming up with everyone vacating CBDs.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, well we wanna stay where we are, but we wanna expand into the downstairs part of our building [affirmative]. So that's happening. But we product side, we're working on a whole heap of really big things at the moment, which is kind of in hindsight a bit of a mistake. I feel like even though I'm aware of this, that you shouldn't just couple massive projects together and you should instead break it down and ship iteratively. We still sometimes end up in the state where we have all these big projects, so we're trying to wrap this stuff up at the end of this month and have a whole bunch of stuff to release. But in terms of the company, we probably wanna be 40, 45 people by the end of this year really trying to grow. Obviously the product team we need more engineers, more stuff to do, but our marketing and go to market side is a little kind of under loved.
- And so we're growing our marketing team as well this year. And our new revenue team, which is, it's not really sales, it's more like procurement assistance and customer success type stuff. So that's all sort of happening. And then the product it's going through quite a big evolution where we are, we've done this analysis thing now for three or four years, [affirmative], where you launched a video stuff and it's a pretty good tool for tagging and for a researcher to use as their sort of productivity tool. Where we see the next big opportunity is this research repository space. So really changing the way that people stakeholders consume research insights. So rather than stuff being pushed out to stakeholders through PowerPoint presentations and synchronous meetings and reports that are really long and wordy we want to change that whole kind of interaction pattern and make it instead of a self-service pool kind of model where a product manager or a executive or a designer or a salesperson can just log into Dovetail and search for what they want [affirmative] and pull the insights out of the research rather than a research team having to push it to them.
- So that's kind of our big thing that we're working on. If you can imagine an internal YouTube or an internal Pinterest for your research data [affirmative] where you can just go in there, browse around, save stuff to playlists or things, put them on boards and share it. That's the sort of approach that we're taking. So a much more collaborative consumer kind of focused product. And so we've got a lot of work happening at the moment to reposition the product to say analysis is one tent peg and this repository stuff is another. But yeah, that's kind of our big thing
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it sounds really exciting and definitely something that's really needed from the researchers that I speak to. So thanks Benjamin. It's been a really great conversation about product and entrepreneurship today. Thanks for so generously sharing your stories and your insights.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- No worries, Brendan. Hopefully it was somehow somewhat cohesive [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh look, I'm sure no doubt that people listening to today's episode will have taken something away from them and I wish you all the very best with the future for Dovetail. It does sound really, really exciting.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Awesome. Thanks Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- For people, Benjamin, that want to find out more about you and Dovetail, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Well, you can go to our website, I suppose dovetail app.com. Fortunately we don't have the dovetail.com domain name yet, but or just Google us and find us on LinkedIn. I guess. We have a blog where our content team works really hard to produce good content [affirmative] so feel free to check that out. It's called Method and Madness. But yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is really good content. Sean's doing a great job.
- Benjamin Humphrey:
- Yeah, hopefully we've got some pretty cool stuff lined up for this year as well, so I'm looking forward to it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great, thanks Benjamin. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here. Also, everything that we've covered will be in today's show notes, including where you can find Benjamin and Dovetail and the Dovetail blog. If you enjoy the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in design, UX, and product, don't forget to leave us a review and to subscribe. And until next time, keep being brave.