Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
All right, today's guest is the co founder of Status Page, a Y Combinator backed startup that lets you create a hosted status page for your app or website.
And you can use that page to display downtime, notifications, performance metrics, or any other information that your customers might need to know.
Status Page launched in 2013 and has raised about $250,000 to date.
Its customers include companies such as Kissmetric, Vimeo, and Kickstarter.
So today I'd like to welcome Scott Klein.
Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Klein (01:02.530)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (01:04.050)
Now you're in Denver now, right now?
Scott Klein (01:06.650)
Yeah, that's correct.
I live here.
Omer (01:08.930)
And so how's the team set up?
Like, where are people?
Because I noticed on your LinkedIn page it said that the business was based in San Francisco.
Scott Klein (01:18.210)
Yeah, I think we just for sales and LinkedIn purposes, we sort of say that the business is headquartered in San Francisco.
Right now we've got eight people.
We're split four, four and four.
But the majority of the development team is going to be built out here in Denver.
And I choose to live here in Denver.
Sort of this big question maybe a couple months ago of like, do we want to move to San Francisco?
We were sort of on the precipice of deciding where to build out the dev team.
And we had taken this lax approach of, oh, we're just going to build this remote company and we'll hire from anywhere.
And we had some sort of come to Jesus moment at some point that just was like, we hate remote teams and we're just the type of people that want to be in the same office with each other.
If it works out for you that you can build a remote team, great.
That just wasn't us.
And so we sort of stopped kidding ourselves and decided that San Francisco and Denver were going to be the only offices.
So I'm here now.
Choose to be here.
No plans to move.
It's a great city.
I've really been enjoying it.
Omer (02:17.920)
Cool.
Now, I like to start off by asking my guests for a favorite quote.
And it's not really about the quote.
It's about really figuring out what drives and motivates them, what gets them out of bed.
So are you a quotes guy?
Is there a favorite quote or just if not, what drives you?
Scott Klein (02:38.270)
Yeah, so I'm, I Guess Markedly not a quotes person.
I don't know why.
I've just never had the emotional response to things you don't have.
Omer (02:48.070)
One of those success post is up.
Scott Klein (02:50.880)
You know, actually, it's so funny.
I, you know, I, so in reading the interview prep, I was just like, hate quotes.
Sort of had this bad reaction to it.
But I forget who I was listening to an interview.
So I guess quotes, no, but like little excerpts from an interview, I think, that aren't meant to be grandiose do catch my attention.
It was a podcast with Sam Harris and he sort of had this passing comment about, you know, wisdom is just being able to listen to your own advice.
And it was so funny because it was so benign.
And he just sort of said it in passing, but it really tackled me for some reason.
And I think that just we'll get into this a little bit later.
But I think as a founder, it's very tough to be grappling sort of with your own personal psychology as a person and as a founder and being a leader and sort of being on this pedestal in a sense.
And so, um, for some reason that was, yeah, maybe a recent quote.
That, that, that was exciting to me, but that may be the only one.
Omer (03:51.030)
I, I, I like that because honestly, that's something that I have been struggling with myself.
Um, and you get to, I think you get to a point where there's so much information out there, there are so many opinions, and you can kind of get sucked into spending too much time listening to all those voices and not listening to the voice inside your own head.
Scott Klein (04:16.460)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think too, for me, I sort of a couple, you know, when you start a company, especially going through an accelerator like Y Combinator, where you're, you're just so off kilter, like it's Silicon Valley, in a sense, it enables you to have a completely unhealthy lifestyle if you want to, where you're just living and breathing your company.
And there's not a time that you pause, go play outside or exercise or hang out with friends and talk about something other than work.
And so, But I realized that the people that I really respected, especially the ones that would come in to talk to us at Y Combinator.
I mean, like, we got to sit down with mark Zuckerberg for 20 minutes after he talked and just ask him about his life.
It was very clear to me that he wasn't a quotes person either.
Or it didn't seem like that.
It seemed like his struggle when he woke up every day was not to find a quote to get inspired by.
It was to be introspective and just listen to himself around, how am I feeling?
Being present and being mindful of his own emotional state.
So that was encouraging in the sense that it was sort of reaffirming to me of knowing yourself and finding inspiration on your own is where you're going to succeed, I guess, in life.
Omer (05:30.410)
Yeah.
Let's talk about where the idea for status page came up from.
Because, you know, if I think about this not as a business and what I know about your business and the size of the business, you'd kind of think of it as if I had that idea to build a status page with somebody, I'd be like, is there really a business there?
Scott Klein (05:50.579)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Omer (05:51.700)
So how did that idea come up?
Scott Klein (05:53.540)
Yeah, you know, it's funny because we actually had the same thoughts.
And so the idea was bred out of a couple things.
You know, we were, my brother and I, co founder, we're working at a company and I was a product manager there and I would have many times ideas on the weekend like, oh, it would be so great if we could do XYZ feature.
And I found this vendor that can help enable that.
Delivering text messages is a good example.
And so I'd come to them and say, hey, there's this awesome company, Twilio, that we can use to deliver text messages and we can build this feature into the product.
And.
And I would immediately get met with a lot of pushback around, oh, what's their funding style like?
Are they going to be around?
We don't know anything about this company.
Do they actually deliver on what they're saying?
It was very clear to me that there was this gap of information between a company, what they do and their operational excellence and how well they actually do what they say they're going to do.
After Steve and I had left the company that we were at, we started doing some contract work or consulting and we were sort of met with the same pushback.
And I mean, these people are paying us $100 an hour to build a website for them and we had to have conversations with them like, we shouldn't be hosting your own email server.
There's many people that can do this for you and do it a lot better than we can.
And so it just became very clear to us that there was this gap in information of how well do you run your site when you do have issues, how well do you communicate around them?
And so there was this room for us to build a tool that was Just something that gave some transparent window into the operations of a company.
On a sort of tangential note, we deal with this around security, where it's not necessarily like.
It's not necessarily around how well you do security.
It's how well you present yourself as doing well in security.
Right.
And so, you know, if I can draw the analogy, it's not necessarily, are you running your site perfectly with perfect uptime and perfect operations?
It's more so are you dedicated to the cause, do you care about your customers?
And are you not hiding from anything that goes wrong?
So, as a developer, and we both come from a development background and seeing what companies like GitHub and Heroku had done in the early days around status pages, I think we were just the first company to say, hey, we care about this.
We want the Internet to break a little bit less.
And step one or step zero even is just, let's get people talking to each other a little bit better around issues that they're having and around good times that they're having too.
Omer (08:37.830)
And it's not just about, I guess, reducing some of these issues.
It's about being better, communicating to your customers.
Scott Klein (08:47.100)
Yeah.
Omer (08:48.060)
I mean, when I was at Microsoft, I saw this a lot as well, where we were working on products that there was a lot of emphasis put into minimizing downtime performance, a whole bunch of sort of those page load metrics and so on, but not a lot of time put into some kind of status page where you let people know what's going on.
Scott Klein (09:15.260)
Right.
Omer (09:15.820)
And whenever the idea came up, it sounded like, yeah, that's a great idea, we should go and do that.
And the next day everybody would get back to doing everything else that needed to get done and the backlog and all the other things.
And for some reason, this was a feature that everybody acknowledged was important, but it always had this sort of habit of moving further down the priorities list.
And it sounds like that's sort of how you tapped into this.
And the thing I wondered about was if that was the case with companies where they felt it was important, but they just weren't kind of putting the resources toward it.
Would they be willing to pay for it?
Scott Klein (09:54.940)
Right.
Omer (09:56.780)
And I think the answer is yes.
Right.
Based on what you guys have done.
But how did you sort of approach that, figuring that out?
Scott Klein (10:05.750)
You know, to be honest, we weren't sure.
And I think this is the ethos of starting a company.
You have this figment of an idea, something that you just believe the world would be a little bit better, a little bit better at if it existed in the world, and you find within yourself the ability to go forward and build that thing, and so you just do it.
I think at the beginning stages, we.
We had no idea, maybe, much like this podcast, whether it was going to be successful or not.
But you have this glimmer of hope that even in the worst case, if this thing exists, okay, the world may be measurably better, and my life as a developer could be measurably better with this thing existing in the world.
I think what's contributed to our success and much of where we are very lucky to have done this business is that we didn't realize the degree by which people were interested in this and that we're willing to pay for it.
And also, it turned out to be a little bit harder of a problem than we thought.
And I think for a lot of the reasons that at Microsoft, you guys maybe didn't get started on it is because it takes a while to get humans communicating well enough with each other.
And you have to make.
We took some opinions sort of up front about how the tool triggers should work and what checks and balances we should have in place with the tool.
Features that it should have versus features that it just absolutely should not have and will never have.
And it turns out to be a harder problem.
And even more funny than that, when we first started out, we would get people that would email us in a seemingly angry tone that we would get confused by.
And the emails would say something like, I can't believe you guys are asking money for this.
I should just go build this in a weekend and I'm never gonna pay you for this.
Or they would say, you guys are thinking about this all wrong.
Why can't I just send you an email with my status information and that go up on the page?
And when you're very young, those things grip you because you don't know quite yet how the company is going to work out.
And for better or for worse, we sort of just stuck our heads back in the sand and thought, you know, on principle, we're coming from a good place.
We're developers, we're building the tool that we would want to exist.
And a lot of those people are customers now.
Like, after you eventually, like enough people jump on your bandwagon and say, yeah, these guys are doing it at least right enough for me to pay them.
You realize that they have very vocal opinions, but not very strong ones.
And so that was a tough lesson early on that I think we got really lucky with and we just sort of stayed the course and, you know, things worked out for us.
Omer (12:52.070)
Yeah, I think I've heard that from a few people about hearing.
And it kind of goes back to what the quote that you mentioned earlier, that there's always this danger in those early days that you could just say, well, maybe we should go and just move on to another idea.
Right.
This, this thing doesn't sound like it's going to happen, or, or maybe what we think is a great idea doesn't seem to resonate in the market.
Scott Klein (13:19.930)
Sure.
Omer (13:20.890)
And so it's kind of having that, that belief to, to keep going.
So what, what advice would you give to somebody maybe who's listening, who's in a similar situation, has a product, thinks that they're solving a problem, but they're very early stage, and maybe they're getting mixed feedback at the moment.
Scott Klein (13:39.350)
Yeah, I think that what we did early on, and I would.
If I start a company again, I'll tell you, the one person I'm gonna have with me is a salesperson.
And what that translates to is just a, like a vicious appetite to just be close to your customers at all stages.
And so even when your product is nascent and it only may be solving one specific thing, spending as much time as you can with your customers and trying to figure out, does this help you at all?
Like, at all?
Like, are we getting at the root of something that is hopefully going to eventually make your job a little bit better or your life a little bit easier?
We had that person, it was our third co founder, Danny.
And Danny's days were spent on the phone, most days, most every day, or he was in email just nudging people, following up.
And I think in the early days, too, it's very hard because you come to these companies at a deficit and they know it, you know, Hi, my name is Danny.
I have this new product.
I would like you to try it out.
Can we grab 15 minutes on the phone?
That's a very tough pitch to get across.
Right.
But I think that in general, people had.
We, you know, at the end of the day, if you can get no one to spend time with you, you're probably not solving something that needs to get solved or you haven't built out enough of your product.
But I think as an entrepreneur, like your job and sort of the advice that I would give is you have to be world class at listening to your customer.
Not necessarily the words that they're telling you, but the emotions that they're exuding and sort of their mental state and the way that they're describing how your product may or may not fit into their thing.
Right.
Because there's.
You come into these conversations and you have an idea of what your product eventually will be and that's sort of what you're pitching to them.
And they have a jaded, incomplete view of what your product is right now.
And so you're immediately at a deficit right when you come into those conversations.
And so making sure that you spend a good amount of time handholding people, following up with them.
I'm a firm believer that a sales co founder is somebody that can make or break good business because the typical developer duo of a front end and a backend person will build products and they will just sort of exist and then disappear into the ether because nobody took the time to convey the value prop.
And so even if it's just, if you're a single founder or it's just two of you, having somebody that's going to spend at least half the day working on getting people to give you feedback as alongside building features is absolutely critical.
If you look at the lean startup, this is why they sort of advocate doing sales and product dev at the same time.
Because you just have to continue to do both.
They are not siloed activities.
And so I think it was just.
I attribute the vast majority of our early success to having somebody like Danny around who was able to spend a lot of time with customers and just make sure that the product that we were building was the right thing.
And then when you couple that with, yeah, it's something that they actually do want, it makes it easier to sort of get started and for you to ask money for your product.
Omer (17:06.180)
So talking of Danny, he wrote this blog post a while back on kind of like describing how you guys got to your MVP.
And it was called 5 Steps to $5,000 in monthly recurring Revenue.
Scott Klein (17:21.420)
Yep.
Omer (17:22.220)
And then he wrote a follow up called growing from 5,000 to 25,000 in monthly recurring Revenue.
Let's kind of talk a little bit about that because he described these steps where he said, you know, find a problem worth solving.
And I think we've talked a little bit about that.
Was, was there anything else that you did in those early days to try and validate that this was a meaningful problem that you guys should be investing your time in?
Scott Klein (17:48.630)
I'm trying, you know, it's.
I don't know.
This is a tough question.
We didn't do anything special.
There wasn't any, you know, we never did any sort of growth hacking thing.
There wasn't any big trick that we pulled as a publicity stunt.
I'm sort of a. I'm sort of a traditionalist as it comes.
And in terms of our business, we're a B2B SaaS business, right?
I mean, people.
People are spending not their money, and they're spending other people's money, and they're trying to reduce sort of the pain of their job and the time that they spend doing some things.
So I think that, no, there was nothing special that we did.
I think it was a pretty basic, like, let's just build the product and ask people for money, and then we'll sort of figure out based on their answer where we need to go next.
Did I answer the question?
I think I lost track of sort of exactly what you were asking.
Omer (18:42.780)
Yeah, I was just wondering whether you did things like customer development type interviews.
Scott Klein (18:49.740)
Yeah, we may have.
I think that obviously, as we're building features, we're in contact with customers.
So two things.
One of the cool things about early customers.
And I'll contrast this in a minute with where we're at now.
One of the cool things about early customers is they want your things so bad that they'll say, hey, this is a great product.
It would be awesome if it had X, Y and Z.
But, like, I don't have anything like this right now, so I'll pay you for it because it's better than having nothing, right?
And so they would give us money and we would get to work building features that most people were asking for.
Now contrast it.
Now we have people that say, hey, I love your product.
We cannot buy it until it has X, Y or Z.
So the problem set changes a little bit as you sort of grow up as a company.
And Danny may have alluded to some of this in some of the blog posts.
But the second thing is that the best customer development story is yourself.
We came from a development background.
We had struggled in product management roles and in contracting consulting roles.
In the sense that we wanted this product to exist.
We knew it would have helped us out.
And so I think that the best customer development you could ever do is with yourself.
It's something that you've had some pain around because it makes it easy to get up in the morning and work on something.
Because you know, you know that if this thing exists and eventually if I would have been fired as CEO, you know, six months into the company, that my next job would have been a little bit better because status page was in existence.
Right?
So I'm definitely a firm Believer in sort of yourself as the customer development thing.
I think one of the.
The toughest.
So Steve and I's first product that we built was in the music industry.
And I have no problem telling people now we had no business being in the music industry, not necessarily because we weren't technically competent enough to build a product that could have helped them, but it was just very tough going to, like, conferences and things that we needed to do to get customers to ask them for money when, one, they don't have a ton of money, and two, when we're not really musicians, like, we didn't go to shows.
It wasn't really our thing to be like, in this indie music scene.
And it just felt we had a great amount of.
I did at least like this imposter syndrome of you're sort of throwing technology at a problem that you've never really experienced before.
It just gets weird, Right?
It gets weird and it gets tough.
And you don't have that same conviction of, you know, if I were to get fired tomorrow, will I be happier if this thing is still around?
Right.
You sort of didn't really care.
So it's been easier with this company because we were customer development story number one on multiple occasions.
Omer (21:36.070)
Yeah, I've seen that a lot, I guess, over and over again.
I think the first big takeaway for me has been really focus on solving a problem, not finding a solution.
Scott Klein (21:51.430)
Right.
Yeah.
Subtle.
But, yeah.
Omer (21:54.450)
Yeah.
And someone sort of once described it as a difference between a vitamin and a painkiller.
And.
And I think a lot of the times we look for these vitamins that we think are going to be cool ideas, but really people are much more interested in the painkillers.
And if you can figure what that out is, then you've got a much better chance.
And then the other thing is if it's actually a pain that you're having yourself one, there's almost some instant validation there anyway, because this is not some kind of random idea that you had on how you can use technology to do something, but you also start to get some deeper insights into that problem that you wouldn't if you weren't that target customer yourself.
Scott Klein (22:42.240)
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think that most importantly, and the toughest thing for, you know, going back to the music industry thing, I could only pretend as like a primate with a neocortex to, like, empathize with these musicians, but I didn't have that visceral response to the product.
Right.
Like, I was more concerned with, like, database tables and how we were doing code deployments than I was like, what is this doing for them?
We're asking them to give us money.
What is this doing for them?
We just didn't know enough about their life.
And more importantly, we had never been in their position and struggled with the problem set enough to say this is a solution worth building.
But with Status Page we have.
And so the neural pathways in our brain are much more lit up around this being a problem that people have and also the solution that we're building and how well it's solving the problem.
So, you know, it's not impossible if you're not like, if you've never been in sort of the market that you're building a solution for.
It just makes things a lot more difficult.
And so I think that, you know, when I think about Status Page and sort of my life and the problems that I'm going to work on into the future, like them being problems of that I've experienced or solutions that I wish existed because I.
That would make my life better, I think is going to be like requirement number zero.
Like nothing's going to get off the ground unless I can say that I feel confidently that this is, this thing should exist.
Omer (24:16.230)
How long did it take you to get your first customer?
Scott Klein (24:20.550)
So we, we did this funny thing where we started doing contract work two weeks on and two weeks off, I think where we, we had, we had a great client that we would build.
We were building website stuff for us.
We started working part time on the product, I want to say in October of 2012, and by February of 2013, was our first customer.
So it was like, I would say four months part time before we had something that we felt comfortable with that we could show the world it existed and ask for money for.
Omer (24:54.220)
Okay, and then so after that first customer, what did you guys start to do to.
To market the product and get the word out there?
What were some of the tactics that you were using to define that second and third customer?
Scott Klein (25:08.550)
Yeah, well, we're part of this community.
I mean, all the customers that were the first sort of credit cards in the door, I knew on a personal level because we were using their products.
We would go to conferences, I would see them, I knew them by first name.
I had told them long ago what we were working on.
So it wasn't like we just unveiled this curtain and all of a sudden the product popped out like we were seeking feedback along the way.
And so it wasn't like we were going blind into who we were going to sell to.
Like the first 20 people in the door.
We knew on a personal level.
And so it was rather easy for us to do so.
And I think that I remember in the early days seeing tweets from people that we never knew that had just stumbled across our site that said stuff like, I can't believe I haven't found this yet.
Why did nobody tell me this thing existed?
And so I think in that sense, we did get a good bit lucky in that we just had people so excited about our product.
We're also a very chatty group, right?
So sort of like the smaller company DevOps community is small.
And so word, I guess, traveled rather quickly in that sense.
And so it was easy for us to get some inbound customers pretty quickly, but it did take a while.
I mean, you know, so we.
Our first revenue was middle of February in 2013, and when we had entered Y Combinator in June, I think it was, we only had like 20 paying customers at 50 bucks a month.
But in those days, like, if you got two customers in a week, that was like, holy cow, like, like, we're, we're killing it.
We're crushing it, you know, like, like it's, it's, you know, it's a small win.
And when we look back on it, it was very small dollars, but it was, it was a good moral victory of just like somebody, somebody had to like, go to their manager and say, I need the credit card for this thing we're going to buy and implement.
Right?
That's, that's, that's way more of a win than the $50 you're getting because it's somebody voting to say, I believe in what you're doing and I.
And I want you to continue, and we're fine showing our customers what you have built for.
For us.
Omer (27:17.650)
All right, that wraps up part one of the interview with Scott Klein of Status page.
In part two of this interview in episode 87, we talk about the experience the team had going through Y Combinator, some of the pressure that the co founders felt during that time, and also some of the unnecessary stress that Scott felt he put on himself and how he wishes it had been more of a fun time, and some of the lessons he learned there.
We also talk about a powerful lesson in challenging your assumptions and how a super simple idea that an advisor gave them turned out to be an incredibly powerful way to acquire customers.
And this was something that the team had just assumed wasn't going to work.
We also talk about why you should stop paying attention to what others are achieving and focus more of your time and energy on solving the right problems for your customers.
And we also talk about how easy it is as an entrepreneur to feel stressed all the time and why it's important to find balance in your life so you enjoy the journey and not just the destination.
And finally, we also cover what the difference is between good quality content and great content.
And we'll share an example of a site which, outside of the tech industry, which actually is a great example and is doing some amazing creating some amazing content.
So you definitely want to check that out too.
