Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a 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.
In this episode I talk to Mike Adams, the co founder and CEO of grain and a SaaS product that helps you capture and share insights from customer meetings.
In 2018, Mike, together with his brother Jake, co founded Grain.
This was Mike's third startup venture after previously co founding Degreed and Mission U, which was acquired by WeWork.
But instead of starting with a problem, the brothers began with a solution in mind and set out to find a problem that it could solve.
As you can imagine, that approach didn't work out too well.
Their first year proved challenging as they struggled to identify their ideal customer profile.
Mike jokingly said that at the time, their ICP was anyone who would talk to them and liked their product.
However, after a year of refining their approach, they discovered their actual ICP and focused on one standout feature that seemed to be resonating the most with their customers and this led them to throw away their existing code and rebuild the product from scratch.
Focused around that single feature, Grain eventually started to get traction when the founders invested more time in interviewing prospective customers as well as their existing ones.
This not only helped the founders build a better product, but it also gave them deeper and some surprising insights about their target customers.
Fast forward to today.
Grain hit 1 million in ARR about a year ago, has amassed around 1300 customers and raised $21 million, including a recent $16 million Series A round.
In this episode you'll learn how Mike and Jake figured out their ideal customer profile which helped them improve both their product development and marketing.
How grain grew from zero to 1300 customers, including companies such as Slack, Zapier, Webflow and more.
Mike shares lessons on how to avoid herd mentality and think more for yourself in order to get more creative ideas and unique solutions.
And we also talk about learning to trust your instincts as a founder when making decisions, even when everyone around you tells you to go another way.
And we talk about how to handle competition and stay ahead when other businesses are copying your ideas, features and tactics.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Adams (02:35.830)
Hey, awesome to be here.
Omer (02:37.510)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Mike Adams (02:41.430)
Yeah, for fear of it being too long just to kick things off.
But I recently got recommended to read the book Boys in the Boat and It's kind of a random quote that is usually not one that gets quoted, but it just, to me it really resonated when you're trying to build a business, you're trying to build company.
This is my third startup and I just feel like it's been true of the best times of all the companies I've been in.
So the story is about some ragamuffins in the early 1900 depression era in Washington state who become the best crew in the entire world.
So like rowing crew and they end up competing against the Germans in the Olympics and they win in Germany while Hitler's there.
And it's really incredible.
And so it kind of follows the story of, I would say, like the main character.
His name's Joe.
And he talks about how, when he's being interviewed about how the boat was something that was like more than the boat.
And the quote specifically is it was a shared experience.
It was something mysterious almost beyond definition.
It was a shared experience, a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long ago when nine good hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love.
Joe is crying, at least in part for the loss of that vanished moment, but more I think for the sheer beauty of it.
Sorry for that being a little bit on the long side, but like, it's a really powerful quote for me of this, this, this feeling you have when you're building something great with other people and you're, you're, you're, you're doing your part, they're doing their part and you can row in unison.
And it's almost beyond words to the point that this man was interviewed in his 90s and was crying about this time long gone because of that bond that he had.
And I feel like startups are that
Omer (04:20.410)
for me, that's great, it's unique, it's got a great story behind it.
And you sharing something, no matter how short or long it is, as long as it resonates with you, is really what that question is about.
So appreciate you sharing that.
So tell us about grain.
What does the product do?
Who's it for?
What's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Mike Adams (04:39.110)
Yeah, it's a really good question.
So we recognized, we started in 2018 and recognized that conversations were going to be happening over zoom and Meet in teams way more than they were going to be happening in person.
And then Covid went bananas and kind of permanently shifted a lot of These things from the analog world to the digital world.
So what Grain does is we record, transcribe and analyze using large language models to identify the core insights and summarize large unstructured conversations down into, you know, specific moments that are portable and shareable.
So I don't know if you've ever used a loom, but a Grain highlight is like a 30 seconds from a Zoom call that you can embed in Slack or your notion or whatever.
And that's kind of the killer feature that everyone's really loved that you can take a voice of the customer and share it or talk about a specific moment when you're coaching during a sales call or whatever else it may be.
Omer (05:33.710)
Okay, great.
So before we get into Grain and the story, I want to talk a little bit about your background.
You have an interesting background.
As you mentioned, this is your third startup, so can you just give us a quick summary of what you were doing before you started grain?
Mike Adams (05:50.110)
Sure.
So my story starts as the first person in my family to ever graduate from college and my dad being a really hardworking construction worker who thought that the best jobs for his kids would be a doctor or a lawyer or any of those ones that you know about.
And I graduated with a bunch of debt and no real clear direction.
I knew I didn't want to be any of those things and moved to San Francisco because my wife had a job.
And so I met, I worked in litigation consulting, which is was great, like very consulting skill set.
I'm really grateful that I have that foundation, but I got bored pretty quickly and met who ended up being my first co founder at a party in San Francisco.
And I got into startups from there.
And so the first company I started is called Degree.
But my first two companies and really like how I got into startups is around solving that problem I mentioned of kind of that gap from holy crap, I have a boatload of debt or maybe I'd even want to go into debt to get to school and I want to figure out what I want to do.
So shortening that gap and the cost there too to kind of go from, to really start and launch a career and in particular acquiring the technical skills that are usually the most important to get that first job.
And so degreed is in that world around credentialing.
And then I started my second company called Mission U, which was a one year school on the back of Zoom.
So Zoom was the only really reliable video conferencing at the time.
And our premise was that we could basically give you what's in a four year, including technical and soft skills in.
In one year instead of four.
And we could do it completely online.
And we, that was two years.
We got acquired by WeWork in 2018 and on the heels of that, I started Grain with the recognition that wow.
Like, you know, we recorded every single meeting at Mission U, our student sessions, our team meetings, our admissions interviews.
And there's going to be a giant opportunity and category to make sense of that.
And so that's kind of where we're GRAIN got started.
I had to like have an explicit moment there where I like left ed tech behind because I love ed tech.
And I was like, I'm just going to go into like B2B SaaS and frankly, no regrets.
Omer (07:50.640)
I want to talk a little bit more about how you came up with the idea for grain.
Before we do that, give us a sense of the size of the business.
Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
Mike Adams (08:02.070)
Yeah, for sure.
So we've crossed the million dollar threshold in annual recurring revenue last year and we have about 1300 customers.
We tend to serve a kind of SMB segment.
A lot of tools in our space and kind of video meeting intelligence.
There's a huge, I would say market in sales.
We have sales folks who use our product.
It's actually about a third of our users.
But we deliberately chose not to be a sales only solution.
And we recognize that the kind of 8020 functionality of a tool like Grain is needed across a lot of different rules.
And there's roles and there's a lot of benefit in having one tool, from cost savings to kind of centralization of data and analysis.
But that's a little bit around kind of where we're at.
Team size is about, we're about 18.
Omer (08:51.860)
And you guys have raised about 20 million.
Mike Adams (08:55.620)
Yeah, good question.
So we've raised $21 million in funding.
Our most recent round is our Series A in summer.
It was actually fall 2021, which was a great time to raise.
And we raised from Tiger Global and Unusual Ventures.
And before that we had partnership with Zoom.
They have a fund and Slack and other great venture capital partners as well.
Omer (09:21.160)
Great.
So let's talk a little bit more about where the idea for Grain came from.
You mentioned it a little bit, little bit earlier, but just, just tell me what were you doing at the time and what was the aha moment that that kind of really kind of crystallized this opportunity for you?
Mike Adams (09:37.480)
In that second startup that I started in 2016, I was coming out of actually being part of the coding bootcamp world.
And I had worked at a coding boot camp, actually was one of the first students at one of the first coding boot camps because I want to learn to code in 2013.
And so I worked at a coding boot camp.
And one of the things we kept running into was we'd find out like at the end of the program whether someone was a good admit or not.
And all the data was gone before we could really update our algorithmic process to understand like who we should admit and who, who were going to have a harder time being able to find a job.
And so I kind of took that experience into Mission U when we started, which was the one year online alternative to college.
And from day one, the first person I hired was an engineer.
The second person we hired was in systems.
And we immediately started kind of with this premise that every conversation that's happening, whether it's a student or it's an internal meeting, whether it's a vendor, whether it's, you know, a client that we're trying to sell, that we're trying to pitch our students to, we should capture all of that because it's data that shouldn't be lost and ephemeral.
And so I guess I had that insight two years before grain.
And so then Mission U kind of had a sudden demise.
We had, we'd raised $13 million, we had eight and a half left in the bank.
And this was when we works cap table was really, really big and they were throwing their cap table around with, you know, their stock in large numbers.
That basically kind of is how machine you ended up getting acquired by WeWork.
And they unfortunately shut down the school like soon thereafter, Even though it started an acquisition as like a, you know, we're going to have a WeWork and sorry, we're going to have a Mission U and every we work.
It ended up more realistically being about getting my co founder to kind of go and work with WeWork.
And I didn't really have any design desire or interest to go work with WeWork.
And so I got an intellectual property rights waiver.
And I was even almost considering a pivot of like, let's just take this company and turn it into, you know, what became grain.
But that's the main thing I wanted from the acquisition was an intellectual property rights where it would be free and easy to and then clear to kind of build on that previous experience.
So I guess in summary, like I was always looking from my first startup until, because I've been a co pilot is what I call it twice.
First time I was not the CEO, Second time I was not the CEO, and third time I was the CEO.
And I feel like I was always.
It was always mysterious about, like, where you find that idea that can turn into, like, a real viable business.
And what I had learned, and it turned out to be very true, is that the best ideas usually come in the process of solving your own problems.
Especially if you're in a business position trying to solve business problems, then it's easier to identify B2B problems.
Usually when startup founders are, like, trying to find an idea.
At least when I do my kind of mentorship work, like, 98% of the time, they're consumer ideas, because that's what, you know, is front and center in my life around, like, I need a sports pickup app to, you know, find other people to play tennis with.
I can't tell you how many guys.
I actually think there's actually some successful businesses that have that idea.
But that idea gets found a lot as people are kind of trying to think of something to start.
And I guess one more piece of flavor on that.
I distinctly remember before I started my second company, I was like, I'm gonna be the CEO.
That's gonna be my idea.
And my wife was like, no, you're not.
It was a humbling moment because she knows me better than anybody.
So we're out to dinner, and I'm like, what are you talking about?
I'm gonna do this.
I'm do this.
And she's like, you don't have a very clear idea.
You don't have X and Y and Z.
And I was like, dang, you're right.
And so then I found my partner, my business partner, my second co founder, who had all of those things.
And then I was able to learn a little bit more of those ropes.
And by the time we started grain, I had the network of venture capitalists.
I had the insight for a great idea, and my wife is very wise.
Omer (13:22.660)
They usually are.
All right, so how did you get started with grain?
Did you build an mvp?
Did you start interviewing customers before you wrote any code?
What was the approach you took?
Mike Adams (13:39.440)
Yeah, it's a really good question, I think, because I came out with this recognition around kind of these data pipelines of you're generating a whole bunch of different conversational data.
It's unstructured, it's not really useful, and you need to go through kind of a refining process, and then there needs to be a distribution process as well.
I kind of on the whiteboard, even when I was still at Mission U. I actually called it Zebra at the time, but it was just a concept of what needed to be solved.
And for me personally, and then I just from there went out and said, do other people have this problem?
And so at the time, hardly anybody was doing the vast majority of their conversations over zoom, almost not very many.
So I first had to kind of start and find those folks.
The thing that I guess I've learned when it comes to starting things is you want to find an idea that has the best ratio of value, a differentiated value, and the least amount of behavior change.
So if you can find something that people are already doing, and then you can do something on top of that that like, massively adds a lot of value, that is going to be a far more likely, you know, product to get adoption than if something's super valuable and awesome.
But they're going to have to change everything about their workflow.
And that's what makes, like Slack in particular, like a really interesting and unique.
In fact, in as we don't sell Saddles here blog post that Stuart sent to the team when they, like, launched in 2013, he specifically calls out that, like, the definition of innovation is how much behavior change.
And Slack calls out that they were requiring a lot of behavior change of their users.
Stuart Butterfield can pull that off because he's Stuart Butterfield.
I would advise most founders to just try to stay within the realm of the least amount of behavior change and then try to find those opportunities where there's differentiated values.
So to tie that back to grain, I was looking for the T for the.
For the teams that were already recording, they were already transcribing, they were already finding value, and there weren't very many of them.
But I felt like that was the part that was going to change because of the unique value.
And so then once I started building, we started building solutions for them, it really was just like tinkering.
Like, we were in my.
My brother's, my co founder, and we were just in the shed in his backyard in Menlo park, and we would come up with this idea where what if we added a timestamp next to the note that you took in real time?
So there's like a cognitive connection between, like, me thinking something and typing a note, and then the root material in the recording that that's related to based on the association of when it was typed.
And that insight turned into a quick little prototype.
It ended up, I'd say, being the kernel of grain, even though in the end we're Actually at a place now to where we're increasingly deprecating the encouragement of a user to, you know, mark down a moment of cognition, because AI is increasingly just faster and easier and better at, you know, now when you fin a grain recording, you've got like an instant, you know, 10 bullet points summary of the meeting, and you didn't have to take any notes at all.
So, but that's where it started.
And then people really liked that idea.
And I had to kind of pull it up apart and say, like, what is it that people like about this?
And then that has kind of been really important as we move into an AI world, because it still carries through.
What they liked about it was that it was a.
It was a link back to truth.
It was a link back to reality.
That there was this backing up evidence of the ephemeral world that we live in so much of our working days, that I can grab the moment where the customer said it instead of regurgitating what the customer said, or the moment where we agree to it, instead of like, hoping that you trust my word that we remember, you know, the agreement or the commitment the same way.
And that was like the kernel, I would say, of truth that we've built, you know, the entire thing of grain around.
Even though when I started the company, we didn't.
We didn't know that that was what was going to be it.
Omer (17:24.450)
Yeah, I think you mentioned that when we were talking before that it took about a year for you to get to that sort of pivot where you realize that this was the one thing that users cared the most about, and everything else was almost like a distraction to them.
Right.
Before we talk about that, I want to go back to something you said earlier about really finding the right problem to solve, which is the way we should be doing things.
But you also told.
You made a kind of a confession before we started recording about you didn't quite take that approach in the early days.
Can you tell us about that?
Mike Adams (18:03.000)
Yeah, exactly.
So you hear this phrase a lot, and it's what I mentioned you before the show is we did that.
It's not what you're supposed to do.
You're not supposed to start with a solution and then go and try to find what problem it solves.
But we did that, and it did, I would say, in general, work for us, but it's a tough kind of foundation to build from because then you kind of have to, like, work backwards into, you know, an ideal customer profile or a Persona or whoever it's for.
And it's been a challenge for us, as we've said from the very beginning, that we want to be horizontal, we don't want to be a verticalized solution.
We want to be, you know, the best tool for, I would say, small teams.
So if like you're a sales leader at a startup, like you should absolutely use Grain over, you know, the best in class enterprise solution that's going to cost you 10 times more.
But one of the challenges of building for a lot of different Personas at once, and when you kind of start with like a solution that backs into solving a problem is you realize, especially if you create a pretty great solution, which I think, you know, we did at Grain, it solves a lot of different problems.
And the long tail of solving those problems is how you build great businesses and you have to make choices.
So as the time's gone on with Grain, we've just gotten more and more narrow.
I would say we describe our strategy now as a T shaped strategy to where we're building to kind of the 8020 solution that anybody.
It's simple enough.
What people love about our product is it's just kind of intuitive and it's not overbuild, it's not overcomplicated.
So it works for everybody.
But we still have to have that kind of deep spike to where we know the first person who's usually going to adopt it and that we build for their use case and then it can kind of spread from there.
And to be frank, like, that has been a real journey.
It's been tough to kind of figure it out because there's a lot of little spikes, you know, from the T where you're like, is it this one or is it this one?
And if you start specifically from a really clear understanding of a problem and then you work and then you test different solutions against it, which is the more traditional path.
I would say you can kind of avoid some of the challenges that we've had going the other way where it solves so many problems.
It's just a matter of like, how do we think strategically about which problem to focus on as like the deepest spike and as the core focus.
Omer (20:13.040)
When I asked you about your ICP before we started recording, you said in the first year our ICP was basically anybody who would talk to us, anybody
Mike Adams (20:23.080)
who thought it was cool.
We were like, isn't this cool?
Yeah, that is cool.
Omer (20:28.320)
Great.
You're our icp.
Awesome.
And it took about a year for you to start to get some clarity.
Like, how did you figure out who to focus on, because that's always one of the hardest decisions for any founder to make.
Mike Adams (20:41.200)
Oh, man, we've done it so many.
It's a continuous process constantly.
And, like, we just did another wave of it and it was like, eye opening.
And then we compared it against the positioning that we did six months ago when we just did it.
And we're like, oh, my gosh, this is so different.
Largely because the large language models, like, came into fruition and GPT4 just got released yesterday, and, like, the world is changing under our feet.
So that was part of it.
But we're constantly doing a qualitative research process of talking to our customers and our users.
It's just the way we go about it and what those interview guides are and what we're looking for, that usually changes as we've evolved over time.
Because you go from the early days where you're just trying to do something called evaluative research.
I actually have a blog post on this.
If you go to mgadams.com, i think I don't write a lot, so it's like the second blog post, but it's under the Founder's Guide to understanding your Users.
And I wrote this, like, two years into grain, having gone through kind of phase one, which was like, first thing you need to do is, you know, have this kind of evaluative test to make sure that what you're doing is, is.
Is even, you know, a problem that people, you know, want solved.
And then you kind of need to do, you know, different series of tests, but at the beginning, you're kind of going from nothing, putting it in front of people's faces.
And you should read the mom test if you haven't.
Anybody who's podcast, because Rob Fitzpatrick really enlightened me around, like, how when you do that work, if you present too much of yourself with it, people will, like, try to protect you and they'll, like, say they won't tell you the truth.
They'll be like, oh, I think it's actually, I would totally use this.
And they're like, never going to use it.
So what we would do is we would actually distance ourselves.
We built this, like, especially when we did that kind of pivot about a year in.
We ran this process pretty rigorously.
We brought people into our office and we just had them, like, go through it, and we pretended like it was somebody else's product and we didn't even build it.
And we were the third parties that were just, like, trying to get feedback for somebody else.
So they were like, oh, yeah, I hate this.
I love this.
And that was, like, huge because the first time we went around, it was our friends and they were all like, oh, yeah, this is the greatest thing ever.
But it didn't really give us the clarity that we needed to know exactly who we were building for or what the roadmap should look like.
And so we knew it was definitely like a leaping moment when we did that.
I would say we threw all the code base away from the first year and we started over from scratch.
On that insight.
I mentioned that process we ran that was, I would say, more rigorous and better at distancing and getting that truth and just really understanding whether or not putting something in front of people, they would use it and why that was the foundation of kind of the next phase of the business.
And then I would say we launched that into the world and Covid hit, and we actually had like seven or eight YC companies that all got funded that were literally just doing what we, like, launched and pushed in the market about a month after Covid.
And yeah, it was kind of a wild time.
And so then all of a sudden you're in this world where you're like, whoa.
Like, clearly, if we're having, like, YC companies literally rip off everything about our website and then copy every feature that we do, like we, you know, just word for word and pixel for pixel, basically, we're clearly have solved something in this kind of second phase.
So then what you're looking for is that kind of, like, more around the product market fit.
You're like, clearly, we built something of substance and value that people care about, but, like, who cares about it most?
Who's willing to pay the most?
What are the messages that resonate and what are the features that they need?
And then how does it grow inside of an organization?
And that's been, I would say, the subsequent set of qualitative processes that we've run.
And not to shill my own product, but we use our own product for that, which is like, we literally couldn't do that if we didn't have all of those meetings being recorded.
Because, like, our head of product, Jeff, will go and interview 15 people.
So he interviewed our 15.
He just did this one, interviewed 15 of our top 40 accounts.
And.
And we had an interview guy that was trying to understand the commonality between them because they're very different.
Like, our.
Our user profile is because it's horizontal.
It's not clear exactly who is using it for what.
And we ran that qualitative process.
And oh my gosh, by the end of it, I watched all of them.
He watched all of them.
We were like clipping out the moments and then, and then collaborating and building our hypotheses.
And then we realized like something that was insanely counterintuitive, that honestly, I had no idea was rooted in reality until I heard like 10 of our top customers say in the exact same way, like just over and over again.
I was like, okay.
I didn't realize that we were actually like valued in that way more so than this way that I thought we were valued before.
Omer (25:09.800)
What was it that they said that kind of gave you that insight?
Mike Adams (25:13.240)
You know, specifically what we found was that like, we've always positioned ourselves as like almost kind of in the research space.
Like if there's a vertical spike that we go on, we've always been more about like product insights and user insights and user research.
So a lot of that is biased by the fact that we did have product market fit there, and we still do.
But there's a lot of issues that are associated with the frequency of use in that use case.
Product managers love to say they talk to product, sorry to customers.
Most of them don't, you know, user researchers.
You're now a big giant company where you need, you know, all sorts of, you know, different, you know, situations versus a smaller company that can kind of pick it up, which is more in line with our self serve motion.
What we, what we learned was that like, you know, for our most successful accounts, almost all of them had kind of come through a salesperson who was looking for a cheaper version of the, you know, $150 receipt products that are built specifically for sales.
And then from there they would advocate for the customer to the product team to try to say, like, let's build this feature.
And then the product team would adopt it, and then the marketing team would adopt it and then we kind of spread from there.
So I always thought before this that we kind of entered through product and then we spread to the team.
In fact, that's what was in a series H pitch.
And it was very, very clear after a qualitative research process, we actually enter far more often through a sales and revenue team motion and then spread to the team from there because they have so much more, a higher frequency of usage.
There's existing tools in the market that we are get, we get compared against and that we can, you know, stand out in terms of our simplicity and our affordability and our accessibility.
So once we have that insight, it's really changed a lot around, I would say, the prioritization on our current roadmap.
Omer (26:50.810)
I think that's such a great point.
You're right.
I think we hear people talking more about that they talk to customers than actually the number of conversations that are going on.
But if you hadn't gone through and done these interviews, then maybe you'd never have had that insight and you'd still be thinking product as a point of entry and everything you'd be doing in terms of messaging and onboarding and whatever could still be focused in the wrong place.
Right.
So there's definitely value in doing it.
I know in the kind of after that year when you sort of reap, you sort of pivoted.
You were using LinkedIn and Twitter for thought leadership, but you were also doing user interviews with people in the first 30 days of them signing up for the product.
Can you just explain what were you doing and what was the motivation behind that?
Mike Adams (27:49.010)
Sure.
So this is like three years ago.
What we did was it was mostly userinterviews.com, but we had just a landing page.
And so for the people in userinterviews.com, we didn't even use the landing page.
We just said, hey, we targeted product managers.
Those are the people we thought it was for.
And we said, hey, here's our research process and it's going to be this kind of onboarding interview where I'm going to show you how to use this like brand new product.
It's behind a page, like a beta wall.
You're getting beta access to it and it's free.
You don't even have to pay for it.
So I'd go through my interview process to kind of like make sure there's a lot of qualification in there, making sure that they were the right person I was looking for.
And, and then I would onboard them on the product and then I would.
And then I would follow up with them in 30 days and almost all of them would agree to follow up and then we would kind of submit the bounty for the payment.
I don't know if they still allow you to do it that way, but that's how we did it.
And it was awesome.
We found seriously our first 15, 20 customers that way.
And then we opened it up a little bit to trying to drive some traffic to the landing page, but we kept it in closed beta.
And it was actually right when Covid hit that we had a board meeting and one of our investors really urged us to go out into the market.
And to try to capitalize in the moment because we all thought it was going to be two weeks.
We're like, oh my gosh, this thing is perfectly positioned for remote world that we live in all of a sudden.
And we might as well.
If we don't launch now, then the window is going to be gone and it's going to last two weeks.
And it turned out it lasted closer to two years.
And honestly that was a mistake.
That was a major mistake.
We should have stayed in closed beta for longer.
You know, it's this really difficult balance, especially if kind of like what I was saying about consumer products where they're kind of obvious.
I'll be honest.
Like, grain is not the most like differentiated insight in the world like anybody who works in a digital environment.
It's just that I was in a digital environment like years before everybody else.
And so I was able to connect some of these dots and find the right investor, partners and team and we built a great product.
But like, man, we, we, we invited just an absurd amount of competition.
That is really, that's really tough.
It's tough to kind of get to that, that breakout when there was also this comp.
There's also this component of.
In 2012, like, money was flowing, sorry, 2020 and 2021, money was flowing like candy in the private markets because the interest rates were so low.
And so we're in a different market now, obviously with the interest rates higher.
And you know, venture is an ads, you know, desirable of an LP asset, as it was.
And so there's going to be less competition, there's going to be less money in our space.
And so it's good that, you know, we have that position.
But just to like really tie it back to your original question like that, that was the right move, was to try to really curate the right people in and just get them using the product.
And for the first year, frankly sometimes two or longer, like you look at Notion, you look at Figma, you look at Airtable, a lot of those products were very, very small user bases for three, sometimes four years.
And then they made and they just kept perfecting the craft until they got it out.
If Covid didn't hit and we didn't get kind of like rushed into the market, I think that we would have had a lot more time to get that craftsmanship.
Because what you don't want to do is build in a silo.
And when you're building first customers that are in your beta, even if there's only 10 of them, but they're the 10 people that you think that you're trying to surf for.
You're not building in a silo as long as they're in the middle of your process and you feel like they're pretty representative of the 10,000 people that you want to go to after that.
And it allows you to kind of get, make, get further progress in your area of insight and innovation before you kind of put it out into the world.
And then anybody who's like, oh, that's a really good idea.
I mean, we actually had like a few of our kind of folks that ended up copying more or less word for word what we did, some of which are actually really good competitors that have innovated a lot and pushed us to be better down the road.
So there is some good that kind of comes out of it, but you know, you're splitting a little bit of market share.
But most of those came from that early beta.
They were like, literally in our early beta trying our product.
And some people even like pivoted their.
They pivoted their entire company when Covid hit, their business died.
And they're like, I'll just do.
This is a really good idea.
I'll just do what these guys are doing.
So that's another like, counterintuitive lesson you always hear, like, don't talk about your competitors and blah, blah, blah.
Like, it's true.
You should absolutely, like build for your customer for user.
But at the same time, competition in SaaS is fierce.
And I wish I would have been a lot more, I would say careful and contained around who we were showing the product to in those early days.
And I wish we would have left it in an intubation period for longer because then as soon as you put it out into general release, you just, you've got a whole different set of problems that you're trying to solve and it can take you a lot longer to get to the.
I, I think we would have gotten to the place where we're at now faster if we weren't in kind of such a rush from what happened with
Omer (32:23.790)
COVID is that the main reason you, you wish you'd stayed in, in beta for longer?
Mike Adams (32:28.760)
I think, I think it's just really like when your product bottoms up strategy like grain is the better the product is, the faster you, the better, you know, more likely you are win.
And especially when you are in a product that has like, it's.
We're not notion where it's just static.
I mean, not, not to dunk on notion, like incredible product Incredible engineering, but there's no real time components of it.
There's no video, there's no audio, there's no, you know, transcription.
Like, like you can in our product, like literally make a clip of what someone said 10 seconds ago.
There's a lot of like, innovation and technology that goes into that and there's a lot of technical upkeep that goes into that too.
And I would, and I would say a lot of the functionality that we've built over the last couple of years, like in particular that live sounds really, really cool.
People don't really care because they're in the middle of a meeting and they don't have time and very few people end up getting a workflow.
Like, I use it because I'm a CEO and I'm a power user and I actually just use it like 15 minutes ago before I got on this podcast.
But like, most people don't.
And it ended up being a giant waste of roadmap.
And again, that's just kind of like, I think we would have gotten to that insight faster and we would have had less distractions.
If once you kind of go out into the market, it's just like it's a total rat race, especially if you have something that's relevant and it's unique.
And I'm not going to say that we were like, there was other, There was other what we cannot, what we'd still call competitors that were in this space before we were or like right about the same time that we were.
But we, I would say, really went, I would say defined this, this motion of creating like shareable snippets from these calls that has turned out to be like, really, really important to this use case.
And, and that while we're still differentiated because it's a really complex, you know, interaction model on the front end to build and none of our competitors have been able to do it even close to as good as we do.
It still was something that I wish we would have been able to like kind of build more of the tooling and the ecosystem and the pricing models and ICPs and stuff around that.
So that when we went to market, our onboarding was better, you know, our, our, our, our service was more reliable, you know, and those are all kind of like lessons in hindsight that I, I would say I would take into doing something like this next time maybe I build a product that is less dependent on real time challenge, you know, technical challenges, because they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're Beasts.
But, yeah, I would say that's kind of my big takeaway of, like, why I wish we would have been able to stay in a little bit longer.
Omer (34:51.750)
There's so much more I'd love to talk about.
You know, you were driving some growth through partner channels like the Zoom app marketplace, product hunt launches.
You also told me that 60% of your signups are coming through SEO now.
So the work that you've been doing over the last few years has obviously been paying off there, but we don't have time to go into all those things.
What I want to talk a little bit about is this conversation we had a little earlier about herd mentality and some of the challenges that's caused for you and your business.
Can you maybe give me an example of that?
Mike Adams (35:28.100)
Yeah.
I think the one we talked about before the show is just a very vivid example is svb.
We had multiple term sheets on the back of our Series A for a venture debt, and we talked to the masses and the crowd, and everyone was like, go with svb.
And maybe that was the right decision.
Like, in the end, it's actually looking like it's going to work out.
We're going to keep our money there.
You know, they got a bridge bank, but.
But, man, that was not a fun Friday.
It was not a fun weekend.
And all of our money was tied up there because of the covenants that we have on our venture debt.
So we.
The whole reason we went with them was because of kind of.
That was the consensus.
That was the belief.
And, you know, my instincts actually kind of wanted to go with a different partner that we had a term sheet from, and I just kind of ignored it against the consensus.
And that's one example.
Another example is what we were just talking about in terms of launching early.
I did not want to launch when we did.
I did not want to.
I didn't think it was the right move.
There was a lot of good that came from it, to be clear.
There was a lot of good that came from it, but I kind of got talked into it and I felt like we needed more time in the container, and it put us on a very different path.
That in some ways was better and in some ways was worse.
And I would say in a lot of ways, I wasn't necessarily prepared for since I. I kind of allowed myself to be more or less convinced because as a founder, there's this typical thing where you're trying to be humble.
You recognize you don't know everything, but then there's moments where you Just get reinforced over and over again where you're like, I know a lot more than my investor here.
This investor does, and in some ways, they know more than I do in other areas.
But when it comes to my product, comes to my business, when it comes to our strategy, if anybody else knows that better than you do, you should try to learn as much as you know from them as you can and then make your own decisions on first principles.
But the last thing you want to do is outsource.
Like, another example of this is we raised the Series A. I was always against advisors.
And then we got basically kind of like, pressured into taking on an independent board seat, because Tiger doesn't take board seats.
And so we brought in, you know, an advisor that was a really smart, talented person who worked at a really big company and gave us a lot of advice that was not very applicable for our business.
And so then we followed that advice kind of blindly, and we spent a lot of money in areas that were just like, literally zero dollars in roi.
Like, it just made no sense for our business because it was a playbook that was applied that someone else had.
I tried to be like, oh, you know, I'll learn from other people.
You know, I don't want to, you know, be a know it all.
But it was also kind of against my instincts of what I did.
And every single time that I, like, end up outsourcing the thinking, which happens a lot, frankly, when you're a founder, when you're tired, when you're exhausted, and you're just like, man, I can't.
I'm just like, every day I'm just waking up and just trying to, like, slog through it till the next day.
And that's when you have to be really, really careful about outsourcing your thinking, because you're going to pay the consequence of the decision.
Because whoever told you doesn't have any accountability.
They just have their playbook.
And if you try to be like, oh, I don't know anything, this person knows something, and let's just do what they say, it's going to be the wrong call most of the time, especially over your instincts.
And then second of all, you're the one who's accountable over it, so you might as well go with what you think is best and that you have control over, because it's also really, really frustrating and energy draining when you've made a decision or you've gone down a path that you weren't super excited about or you weren't aligned with.
And then it Turns out to be the wrong path.
And now you've got to spend all of the energy to kind of like undo it all while, like, you know, begrudgingly, you know, feeling like, man, I should have just trusted my own instincts.
So that's kind of like, I guess the my big takeaway, you know, over and I didn't really have that takeaway when I was a co founder twice.
It's really more has been when that's the CEO.
There's a difference between like being respons for, you know, the curriculum, the programming, technology, like I was at Mission U and being responsible for the whole business and the cap table and the people inside of it.
And it's really overwhelming.
It really is.
And it's something I have to be very vigilant on of being, you know, really rigorous and making sure that I'm not outsourcing that thinking.
Because you as a CEO or as a founder, you can't outsource that accountability and you're going to pay the consequence no matter, you know, whether it was good advice or not.
Omer (39:36.030)
Yeah, I think that's a really powerful lesson in terms of trusting your instincts.
And it's not always like, go with your instincts, but if something deep down is telling you something doesn't feel right, you should pay attention to that and at least explore that.
And as you said, the thinking behind that, to make sure you're comfortable with making the right decision, it's the blindly
Mike Adams (40:00.990)
following and outsourcing to someone else's authority that you just cannot do.
Take people's advice, but break it down into its first principles.
Apply it to your situation, your knowledge, and then make a decision off of what you think is best.
Not just like, oh, I'm tired and they know more than I do, so let's just do what they say.
Like, that is a disaster.
Omer (40:18.540)
So do you think there's a danger that you become a bit of a micromanager in terms of like every decision?
Like, if I talk to your team, would they say he's kind of hands off, lets us make those decisions?
Like, where's the balance when you have to kind of walk that line between giving people trust and some level accountability to make the decision.
But ultimately your head is on the chopping block.
Right.
If things don't work out, I think
Mike Adams (40:46.440)
until you have very clear product market fit, which usually sometimes happens in series A, sometimes has series B, you should maintain as much of that control as possible while allowing decision making at the edges.
So like, you have to take accountability over the core strategy and those core decisions and then allow people to, within the context of that decisions that's made to, to solve the edge case problems, to solve it out on the edge, you know, to solve it out as you take it to those end steps that as a founder you almost certainly don't have time to do.
And they're going to make mistakes.
Absolutely.
But the thing that you can't really do is split up a strategy amongst, you know, a mix of executive minded folks and more like dependent.
So there's this kind of progression of dependent ICs.
So IC meaning individual contributor, independent ICs, and you know, and then you continually progress up until you get to become an executive and the people you partner with and the people you put into those kind of decision making roles, if you go back to back, they have to be able to operate and have prior experience at that executive level of ownership.
And I love Peter Drucker's book, the Effective Executive.
So I guess I'm already skipping to one of your, you know, rapid fire questions at the end.
But like if you haven't read the effect executive, please read it.
And if you're finding yourself in this like, balance that I'm talking about of like how do I strike this balance of not being a micromanager but also like seating, you know, keeping enough control that you can kind of shape the craft of the product and the outcome and the process.
Because if you don't give that, if you don't give people clarity about what they're trying to do and they don't understand that you're not going to be happy with this role and it's not their fault, it's your fault.
Because you took someone who probably didn't have the prior experience, they didn't have a playbook or it was the wrong playbook and you were tired or exhausted or overstretched or whatever, or trying to focus on something else and you hoped that if you gave them a direction to run that they're going to kind of figure it out and they just don't have the context.
They just don't.
Unless they're your co founder or unless they're at that executive level, they almost certainly don't have that context.
It's very, very rare.
And so your average person that you're hiring in your business needs to be able to kind of work in an environment where, and that's what I think is oftentimes easier about hiring engineers at startups.
It's really hard to hire great engineers, but it's not that difficult to manage great engineers because you have a product development process where they, they, they, the spec is laid out, the requirements are clear and they execute and they, they give feedback and they contribute on the edges.
But ultimately like it's very uncommon and it probably shouldn't be common for an engineer to, to set the strategy or to, you know, they can influence and get feedback and absolutely should be part of the process.
But oftentimes you're not expecting an engineer to just be like, hey, here's a feature, go figure it out.
The product manager does a lot of that work up front and that level of work needs to be done whether it's in sales or whether it's in marketing or across the board.
And it's, that's just kind of the paradox of being a founder, especially the CEO is you just don't have really time to do that.
But I would say I would just catch this with another piece of advice which is I just hire slow.
Like hire really, really slow, especially in an environment like this.
But do the job yourself, know exactly how to do it, especially if you've never done the job before.
Like I've never done sales, never done marketing.
I haven't done a lot of these things.
I was always a product person and I wish I would have spent more time on the front lines of doing those jobs before.
We tried to hire people to do those jobs hoping that they would come in and like teach us.
And in many ways they did, but they just oftentimes don't have that full context.
So to wrap up the answer, it's like I think that the smaller you are, the more centralized decision making and control should be and the more focused on that, the people that you're hiring should be able to, to usually be pretty technical and you know, they're, they're executing and contributing inside of a well scoped problem as opposed to just kind of like the free, the free and easy path of like go figure this part out that I'm too busy to figure out.
And that just, it doesn't, in my experience it doesn't work.
Omer (44:40.560)
Yeah, that's great answer.
And on that note, let's, let's wrap up and get onto the lightning round.
So got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Mike Adams (44:56.760)
Work on emotional intelligence.
I went to Stanford touchy feely class on a weekend, so I didn't go to gsb.
But you can just, anybody can sign up.
It's one of the most life changing things I ever did.
I had a lot of reasons that were going on my life for why I did that.
But I was given some advice to work on my emotional intelligence and to grow as a leader.
And I'm really glad I did.
And I still have a long ways to go.
Omer (45:18.580)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Mike Adams (45:21.620)
So the effective executive by 3D Drucker that I mentioned earlier is life changing.
Once you kind of really have like a clear definition of like what an executive is and it helps to kind of balance that.
Like what can I expect from this level of person versus, you know, that level of person?
Good strategy, bad strategy.
I read recently, which is just really, really game changing around focusing the limited resources that you have and doing it in a delir, deliberate and intentional way.
And then also loved recently, which is a product marketing book by the Silicon Valley Product Group.
Omer (45:50.640)
Great.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Mike Adams (45:55.120)
Do it your way.
Authenticity, vulnerability.
Like just embrace yourself and who you are.
You're there for a reason.
Like you're taking risks that others either are and now they're your competitors or haven't and there's just, there's a reason where you're at and believe that there's good in just who you are.
And while you're always trying to get better, I would say like lean into what makes you unique and what you believe is true.
And for me a lot of times that's authenticity and vulnerability.
Like I just, I always try to just lead from being from a place of reality as much as possible.
Omer (46:32.740)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Mike Adams (46:36.660)
It's super trendy right now.
But Zero, which is a intermittent fasting app.
I started it on January 1st and I'm on like day 70 or something right now fasting.
And so I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it.
It's just for me it's great because it just regulates my glucose levels.
I don't track them closely, but I just like feel like more balanced energy instead of the spikes of eating snacks.
And then the other one is Strava.
Just get outside and ride a bike or go on a run.
And the more that I track it, the more it motivates me and there's a social network around it.
Omer (47:06.680)
How many hours do you fast each day?
Mike Adams (47:09.000)
I try to hit 16, so I've at least hit 12.
I only have one day that I only hit 12 and every other day that I didn't hit my goal.
It was like 14 or 15, but most of the time I do 16.
Yesterday I did 22.
Omer (47:19.560)
Wow.
Wow.
Mike Adams (47:20.600)
I just didn't eat dinner.
Omer (47:23.960)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Mike Adams (47:28.040)
Oh, my gosh.
My wife won't kill me because it's her idea and it's such a good one, but we do home exchanges.
We do home swaps where we stay in someone's house and they come and stay in ours.
I don't know if you're seeing the holiday or whatever.
It's like, that's real.
We do it.
We just did it with a family in Hawaii.
And the services that are out there right now are just like so archaic and old and crappy and they're like not brought into the modern world.
And just like, there needs.
There's absolutely an opportunity, especially in an economic downturn, for like someone to.
I would probably build that if I weren't building grain because it's just something I.
We.
We.
We live.
We've done.
Yeah.
Over 10 home swaps over the last decade.
And every single one of them is an amazing experience.
We save tons of money.
It's.
It's.
We go to places we wouldn't otherwise go.
It's awesome.
So there's definitely a business idea there.
Omer (48:09.810)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Mike Adams (48:14.130)
I met my wife when I was like 14.
We didn't talk for near decade.
Basically we were just in the same grade.
And then we started dating after Thanksgiving.
We got engaged by Valentine's Day and married by May.
So from basically cold turkey to married in like six months.
I went to byu, so it's kind of more normal there.
Yeah, it was, it was kind of wild.
But we got engaged after only dating for like two months.
And when people find out about me, that's.
It's pretty shocking that like any person would.
Would do that.
And I'm glad I did.
It was awesome.
It worked out.
I. I probably married up higher than I would have if I would have waited longer.
Omer (48:55.720)
Your relationship sounds like a hockey stick growth curve.
Like not much happening for a long time.
And then.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Mike Adams (49:05.080)
Family.
I have three kids.
Golf.
I freaking love golfing.
It's just the, like, even if you're playing the same course, it's just every time it's different.
Every shot is different.
It's just like managing your mental game very Similar to poker, frankly.
And then last one is fitness.
I've just learned that holy crap.
Like if I can get my endorphins going naturally, it just changes everything about my long term mood, my short term mood.
I'm.
I'm just better in every way.
So I've developed a lot of routines since COVID hit actually was right before COVID to where it finally culminated.
I didn't Ironman last year because it was just like so obsessive.
I just was.
Got so obsessed with it and it was.
It's something that I want to carry forward for the rest of my life because I had like seven or eight years where I basically didn't do any working out or any fitness, any running.
And I just.
Life is way better when we got endorphins flowing through your body and your outside.
Omer (49:55.350)
Thank you man for taking the time to share your story and I think a lot of really useful lessons and perspectives on the journey you've taken so far.
If people want to check out grain, they can go to grain.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Mike Adams (50:14.070)
I'm reasonably active on twitter, so it's twitter.com Michael Glenna and then my email if you ever want to reach out to me.
I'm pretty responsive.
My Twitter DMs are on email.
I just Mike at green.
Omer (50:27.530)
Com awesome.
Thanks man.
It's been a pleasure.
I wish you and the team the best of success.
Mike Adams (50:32.370)
Thanks a lot.
It was a lot of fun.
Appreciate it.
Omer (50:34.930)
Cheers.
