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.
This Week's interview is a story about a bootstrapped software company that generates multi million dollars in revenue, is profitable, and most of the time its employees work no more than 40 hours a week.
The company was founded by a husband and wife team who started out with a consulting business and eventually turned it into a product business that now has three three successful software products and a team of 26 people across the world.
The founders do a lot of things that go against the conventional wisdom that we so often hear these days.
From private offices for every employee to a standard 40 hour workweek, they've shown that you can build a profitable and successful business.
A big part of their company culture was inspired by 37signals, the makers of Basecamp and the book Getting Real.
My guest is a wonderful woman who has an inspiring story to share, and I love how both she and her husband have built a people first company culture.
Now, it's easy to talk about something like that.
It's much harder and rarer to actually find someone who's actually doing it.
I'm sure you'll walk away with at least one great idea from this interview and maybe you'll be inspired to think a little differently about your business.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Wildbit, a bootstrap software company that builds web apps to help software developers collaborate better.
The company was founded in 1999 as a web development consultancy, and it launched its first web app in 2005.
Since then, the company has launched and grown a number of products such as Beanstalk, Deploybot, and Postmark, which are used by over 100,000 companies.
Half of the Wild Bit team works out of Philadelphia, with the rest spread out across the world.
And the company's culture, communication and process are specifically tailored around a remote team.
So today I'd like to welcome Nathalie Nagel.
Natalie, welcome to the show.
Natalie Nagele (02:43.670)
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Omer (02:45.670)
So, one thing I always like to ask my guests is what gets you out of bed every day?
Do you have a favorite quote or just in your own words, like what gets you out of bed and keep working on this business and something that you've been, I guess, doing for almost 15 years?
Natalie Nagele (03:01.090)
Yes, I am passionately in love with the team that I work with.
And the company has kind of enabled Chris and I and the team to live just like a really spectacular life.
And so I get out of bed to be next to them and to kind of have fun and do crazy things together.
Omer (03:23.320)
You know, when I was doing research for this interview, I came to your homepage@wildbit.com and the first thing I noticed was, which it said, we're more than a company, we're a family.
And I was like, really?
Natalie Nagele (03:40.360)
So I know.
Omer (03:41.400)
And then, and then the more I sort of researched and sort of figured out what you guys were doing around culture and team and even just sort of the conversations that we have had so far, it really kind of, it didn't feel like just a slogan.
It really felt like, you know, you guys walking the talk.
So I'm excited about talking about that as well and how you've built that kind of culture within your company.
How many employees do you have right now?
Natalie Nagele (04:09.260)
26.
Omer (04:09.898)
26, yeah.
So I think that's going to be a great part of the conversation.
But before we get into that, um, I want to kind of talk a little bit about the story of how you and your husband Chris started.
Wild Bit and sort of the journey you've taken over, you know, since then to where you are today.
And specifically I want to talk about the three products that are focused for you guys right now and sort of how you came up with the idea for those products.
But before we do that, can you just kind of help the audience in your own words?
Just explain a little bit more about Beanstalk, deploy bot and Postmark.
What are the products and what do they do?
Natalie Nagele (04:50.410)
Sure.
So we, like you said, we've always focused on development tools for other teams that build for the web and we always wanted to take away pain, things that are just your day to day tasks that feel like they should be done in beautiful software instead.
So we launched Beanstalk.
That was the first product and that is get an SVN hosting with deployments.
So it's a lot of like web apps use it to collaborate, to write code and to kind of ship it.
Postmark, our second product, is a transactional email service provider.
So things like welcome emails, invoices, password resets, that kind of stuff.
So it's things that your app produces are really trigger based emails.
We don't do any kind of marketing or newsletters or anything like that.
Deploybot is our third product that does deployments regardless of where you host it.
So Beanstalk, you.
We host your code for you and then you collaborate inside of Beanstalk and then use our deployment tools there.
DeployBot allows you to use our deployments engine, but you can host your code with GitHub or BitBucket or GitLab or wherever you want.
Omer (05:58.770)
Got it.
Great.
So let's go back to, I guess, 1999.
So Chris, your husband, launched.
Started off launching this as a wild bit as a web development consultancy.
And then I think you joined a few years later.
Natalie Nagele (06:15.600)
Yeah, about three years later.
Omer (06:17.440)
Okay, so why don't you kind of just tell me about that in terms of, you know, how did you guys sort of start out and why, you know, you launched your first web app in 2005.
So what kind of.
How did that.
How did you sort of get on that journey and sort of go move from a consulting business to a product business?
And was that something that was a deliberate kind of strategic decision that you were kind of moving towards, or did it kind of more happen by accident?
Natalie Nagele (06:47.560)
Sure.
So Chris was 19, 20 when he dropped out of college and realized that he, you know, he always loves computers and realized that he could make more money instead of sitting in a classroom like running a business.
So he started doing kind of brochure sites with a guy in Romania.
The Romanian story is great.
It's probably a little too long for this, but basically he needed somebody to write better code than he did.
He was not a very good PHP programmer.
And so it was 99, 2000s, and there were user groups back then.
And he found a guy in Romania and he had nothing to lose.
And that's kind of how they got started.
So we did a lot of client services for local bars and restaurants.
Lots of flash, beautiful flash sites.
Omer (07:31.890)
Oh, I miss those days.
Natalie Nagele (07:33.370)
Oh, yeah.
Well, imagine nightclubs too.
You know, everything's like booming.
And techno music was great.
And so he did.
That's.
That's kind of how they worked.
And we always had remote people.
Eastern Europe, Romania at first, and then some Russia and things like that.
And.
Yeah, and that's kind of what he was doing for a while.
We met, we started dating.
So I had no technical background at all.
But as most family businesses happen, I just basically said, how can I help?
So I started doing QuickBooks and I started sending invoices and just slowly getting in anywhere I could just to support it.
We were living off of the income of WildFit, so it was my job to make sure that I could contribute towards that.
And then eventually we got into much more complicated.
We left the web design world and moved more to applications, and we started building social networks.
And that was kind of our last niche before we moved to product permanently.
But during that time when we were kind of transitioning to social networks, we were also, we were doing some of these sites for marketing age marketing companies in Philly or restaurants.
And they had a need, and this is around like 04ish.
They had a need for sending email newsletters.
And back then there wasn't really tons of options.
And so we had decided, hey, we can build something.
We always wanted to build our own little application.
We could build you an email marketing solution.
And if you guys just contribute, I forget how much, some nominal amount towards the development of it.
So we didn't have to do consulting work those weeks when we were building it.
You could use it for free forever.
And then we'd have this little app.
And that was actually our product, Newsberry, which is no longer alive.
But that was our first foray into building product.
And then we kind of let.
Then that just worked on its own, so.
So that just never really had dedicated people.
We just ran it a little bit here and there and it grew kind of whatever.
And we continued to focus a lot of our efforts on these social networks and had some really spectacular clients who basically in their projects ended up helping us fund the development of Beanstalk, which was our first and our oldest current living product.
That was started because Chris was managing a lot of SVN repositories on the server.
And it was a giant pain, adding users, removing users log, all this stuff.
It was just really, really difficult.
This idea.
We could just have SVN users on the web.
We could host them for people.
We could create a nice UI on top of it so you could manage users, you can see commits and you can invite clients and do all this stuff.
He went and asked some of our friends locally in Philly, hey, would you, if I gave you this product, would you give me your source code and store it on the Internet?
And they're like, no, you're crazy.
Why would I ever give you my precious source code to.
On the Internet?
But we had nothing to lose and managing SCN repos was a pain.
So we built that and we built it while doing client work.
And we were able, we were making so much money in client work that we were able to hire somebody in Russia who's still with us today, who was able to work on it while we were doing client work.
And then he would switch back and forth to client work a little bit.
And then once we built Beanstalk and it kind of took off, we, you know, that that feeling of building for yourself was just so strong.
And we just kept, you know, kind of moving more and more resources and energy and our own mental energy, you know, into Beanstalk and what can we do with it and how awesome can we make it and kind of set an internal goal.
So, like, our goal is to not do client work anymore, but the only way to do that at Wildbit was to not fire anybody.
It meant that we had to make enough money with Beanstalk in order to make sure that anybody who was still doing client work would transition to Beanstalk.
We would have enough money to pay their salaries.
Omer (11:16.180)
Why was that important to you?
Natalie Nagele (11:18.980)
Well, our teams are family, right?
I mean, I don't.
Yeah, I mean, it's just the way.
I don't think we.
I don't think there was a.
Like, I don't think there was ever a question in that conversation.
I can't remember ever sitting down with Kristen being like, should we fire people?
I mean, maybe we talked about it, but it was really just like an honest, like, well, if Beanstalk got big enough to support payroll, then it was a legitimate product, and Wildbit was this team of people.
So, you know, until it can do that, then it's not really a viable business on its own.
I think we weren't a big team back then, either.
But it was enough where we waited and waited and kept doing client work, and we did just incredible clients who understood it and loved that we were doing a project and kind of knew it was coming to an end at some point.
And then when I was ready, I kind of.
I went to Chris's dad and I said, I need a loan.
I need.
I forget how many weeks.
But we used to bill weekly iterations for consulting.
I said, I need eight weeks.
Maybe it was 8 or 10 of a loan of my consulting revenue when I'm going to just turn it off.
Because I just need to know that I can pay salaries if for some reason, Beanstalk doesn't continue to grow in the way it's been growing.
So he gave us a loan.
I drew on it just a little bit to make sure that we had some padding in the account, and in six weeks or whatever, we paid the whole thing back, and that was history.
Omer (12:36.830)
I'm curious about Beanstalk because you said that Chris went out and talked to people, and everybody said, no, you're crazy.
I'm not going to give you my source code.
I'm not going to put it on the Internet in the sort of the customer validation kind of model, that kind of would be like, okay, the market's telling you that there isn't a need for this product.
And a lot of people maybe would have said, okay, not a good idea.
I'm going to move on and look at something else.
So what was it that kept you guys going and believing that this product was worth building?
Natalie Nagele (13:07.720)
I think Chris never believed in asking a customer what they want.
So, I mean, I think in the customer validation, if we had been mature enough to do something like that, we probably would have asked more, like, do you feel pains in these areas?
What are the parts of your day that are really annoying when you're writing code?
And probably would have gotten to the point where we realized, yes, people feel pain in managing these repos.
They don't have the visibility that they want, and the solution is storing your code on somebody else's server.
But, you know, like, it was the.
You know, it's the usual, like, if I asked my customers what I wanted, I would have created a faster horse.
Right.
I think that.
I think Chris just knew that in his mind, he was a big 37signals follower.
And I think just back then he was determined and knew that he was going to do it.
And again, we had very little to lose.
It's much different today.
Omer (14:00.710)
And the other thing is, it wasn't like you guys sort of sat in a room and kind of brainstormed ideas about what product should we go and build.
I assume from what I understand, it was more about you were already experiencing this pain or he was experiencing this pain.
And if nothing else, it was going to solve a problem that you guys were having.
Natalie Nagele (14:21.030)
Totally.
And that's actually how Postmark was born, too.
We were running Beanstalk for a while and sending commit notifications, user invites, password resets.
And I was doing all the support at the time.
And people would email support and say, I invited my client.
And he never got it.
And Chris would have to log into the server, look at the logs, there's this whole mess.
He said, we need better visibility.
We ran an email product before, so we knew a lot about email.
And we were like, we have a problem.
We're going to solve it.
And spend three months.
Built an entire product in three months.
I mean, very scrappy, but built an entire product in three months.
And it was, again, it was just to scratch our own itch.
Omer (15:02.470)
That was Beanstalk.
And so Postmark came, what, about three years later?
Natalie Nagele (15:09.830)
Yeah, postmark came in 2010.
Yeah, the year my daughter was born.
Our oldest was born.
Yeah.
2010.
Omer (15:17.030)
Cool.
And deploy bots how did that come about?
Natalie Nagele (15:21.430)
So deploybot has a very different story where Beanstalk and Postmark were scratching our own itch.
One of Beanstalk's main value props to our customers and why they love it so much is because we have these deployment tools inside where you write your code and you set up your servers where you want to deploy to, and we can automatically deploy to staging on your pushes and just to kind of really automate the deployment process.
And as the market changed, GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab became much bigger, and we were seeing customers shift in the customer base, and even our own customers were using other tools.
And we were like, well, nobody is still giving them the deployments that they want, so why don't we just spin out the deployment engine of Beanstalk and call it its own product?
So we did that, and it actually took off.
People love it.
I mean, it's like a nice little product and it's growing.
But that one, you know, was not maybe done for the right reasons.
We didn't stop to say, who are we solving this problem for and what.
How do we want to solve it?
You know, we definitely built that to make money, which is not something that I think I would recommend to anybody again.
Omer (16:35.050)
And so as a consequence, would you say DeployBot is.
Is currently less successful than the other two products?
Natalie Nagele (16:41.690)
Sure, yeah.
I mean, it's the youngest too.
But deploybot did not see the.
It saw a faster growth in the beginning because the deployments industry is very active right now, and people are trying to solve deployments and figure out how modern web apps are being deployed.
So it had a much bigger growth in the beginning, but we are not actively solving some major challenges.
So we're not keeping that growth, I guess, alive in a way that we'd like.
So we're trying to figure that out now.
We're starting to really focus on who and what and that kind of thing.
Omer (17:14.570)
Now, the first product that you launched, Newsberry in 2005, you eventually ended up shutting down that product in 2011, about six years later.
And this is interesting because when I looked into this and realized, you know, in terms of, okay, let's look at, you know, maybe, you know, mistake you guys made or a failure you had along the way then newsberry was.
Was that product.
But when I kind of dug into it, it was like, well, this product was profitable.
It was making you around $75,000 a month.
And yet when I talked to you, you still considered it a failure.
Natalie Nagele (17:59.500)
Why we built Newsberry, not understanding the audience at all the market for newsberry was marketers.
And we, to this day, we're just starting to learn how to market better.
And so back then especially marketing was a bad word.
And we kind of stifled that growth pretty dramatically because we were so dogmatic and stubborn about things that we just didn't understand.
We had customers asking us for templates.
You know, we want a Halloween template and we want a Christmas template.
And we were like, that's stupid.
It won't render right in the, in all the email browsers.
You use our standard gray and blue template.
It's foolproof.
You can't screw it up.
And, you know, like, in hindsight, that was so silly.
Or, you know, like, we believe that you didn't want to dig into an individual subscriber.
Why would you do that?
They're bulk mailings.
You're sending to thousands of people.
You don't need individual subscriber data.
We just, we were so far away from, from the customer and at that point, so young to not even realize it, you know, to think, you know, I think part of that too is we were still doing a lot of client work.
And with client work comes this like, I know better.
You know, like, you're hiring me as the expert.
So just listen to me.
I know better.
Which is, you know, a terrible client perspective too.
But most, when you talk to consulting companies, that's what they fight against the most.
And I just, I think in the end we had some really loyal, loving customers who were really sad to see it go.
But Chris and I looked at and said it was a distraction and we're not good at this business and just kind of turned it off.
Omer (19:32.870)
Was that a big hit to wild bit revenue just to turn that off?
Natalie Nagele (19:37.430)
No, you said it was.
How much?
Omer (19:39.750)
I think the number I came across was like 75,000amonth.
Natalie Nagele (19:43.670)
I think that was a year I'm going to look at.
I have to look up the blog post.
I don't remember.
It was a long time ago, so.
Omer (19:49.440)
Yeah, okay.
Well, may Maybe.
Well, maybe 75k a year is.
Is a little less of a hit.
Natalie Nagele (19:54.800)
Yes, yes, yes.
No, it definitely wasn't.
Omer (19:56.800)
All right, so I want to pick up on something you said just a few minutes ago, saying that marketing was a bad word.
And I came across some.
An article where you had said that we're not very good at marketing and that both you and Chris had really been focused on the product.
And it wasn't until recently that you even hired somebody to, to focus on growth or marketing.
But it, it you seem to have done okay.
So I. I want to kind of just dig into it a little bit about if.
If you guys.
If nobody until recently was focusing on growth, how.
How were you growing?
Natalie Nagele (20:46.980)
I think we got very lucky with.
When we launched.
So Beanstalk was launched at a time when there wasn't a lot being launched.
There was no product hunt.
The launching SaaS businesses was rare, and people talked about it.
And so we launched Beanstalk.
Success was directly word of mouth, Word of mouth and integration.
So we told people about it, people told others about it, and then we integrated with some key other, like, apps that kind of fit really nicely that we integrated with Basecamp, Fog, Bugs, things like that.
And back then, you had, like, a really symbiotic relationship with those other apps.
So if, you know, we integrated Basecamp, Basecamp shared it with their users.
We gained a lot of Basecamp users.
Basecamp, Beanstalk users use Basecamp, you know, so there was this really nice relationship.
And we've looked back at analytics and things like that, and there's direct correlation with, like, some of those integrations or even sometimes launching certain features because people just talked about them, because things were much more quiet back then.
And I think Postmark, we got lucky because we marketed it to Beanstalk customers because we had Beanstalk as the perfect audience.
So that's more, I guess, in line with building an audience ahead of time if you don't have a Beanstalk, you know, really spending some effort and energy building to an audience.
When we launched Postmark, we made 6,000 the first month.
I mean, we were floored.
Like we launched.
It was outrageous.
And that was all because we just had an audience who loved Beanstalk, loved Wildbit, and we built them something.
They're all building web apps and they need email, and this was perfect.
So I think we got, you know, we built really great products and a team that's really amazing.
And I think it was really just word of mouth.
We write some, but nothing like no strategic content strategy or anything like that.
It was really just word of mouth.
Omer (22:33.190)
What did I mean, like, word of mouth?
Were you guys, like, going out to events or were you kind of just emailing everybody you could think of or how were you doing that?
Natalie Nagele (22:40.470)
Beanstalk was definitely.
We, you know, we went to.
There was, you know, future of web apps was back around back then.
And we would go and talk to people we knew, a bunch of friends.
And then I think people, like, people blogged about, you know, the people would use a tool, blog about it.
Their little following would blog about it.
And you know, and it was just, it was easier to get that virality, I guess, so to speak.
I mean, I don't know if it's technically can be called viral, but you know, just that kind of idea, like when it was so much less noisy, it was like, did you hear about Beanstalk?
Oh, did you hear about Beanstalk?
Did you hear about Beanstalk?
That became like a thing that really worked in our favor because it was 10 years ago.
Omer (23:18.040)
Yeah, yeah.
And then you mentioned kind of integrations.
So can you kind of give me an example of what maybe a Basecamp type integration look like?
Like what, what were you doing to integrate with a product like that?
Natalie Nagele (23:34.530)
Well, if you were working on a project and, you know, you would integrate, you would link that basecamp project to a repository in Beanstalk, a commit would be made, a deployment would be made, and we could post a message in that Basecamp project.
So you could keep your customers up to date or if it's an internal thing, your team up to date on where the progress of that project is going.
Same with ticketing with Fogbugs.
If you attached a ticket number to a commit and said closed, then it would go into Fogbugs and it would update Fogbugs and say, this ticket is now closed.
So that kind of stuff really, if you think about version control and writing code as a piece of a workflow, finding complementary pieces to that workflow that kind of can all plug in together and create a more seamless workflow.
Omer (24:19.940)
You know, one thing just kind of hit me was earlier you mentioned that, you know, Chris wasn't a great PHP developer and you don't, you know, you weren't a technical person and yet you've built a company around helping developers with these great tools.
Natalie Nagele (24:34.420)
Yes.
I don't know how to explain it.
Honestly, Chris always, I mean, Chris is really technical.
He.
When he wasn't writing code, when he started early and he decided he wasn't writing code, he got really into UX UI design, really studied that a lot.
We did usability testing, all kinds of stuff for our clients.
So he's really into that for once.
Wild it became what it is today.
Chris took on a lot of the infrastructure stuff, systems.
So he was kind of leading our systems from when Beanstalk was born.
So he kind of understands the tech technically very well.
I want to say that we hired, and these people are still with us today.
We hired people that we really, really trusted and that have always felt like they've skin in the game.
And neither Chris nor I could say that I could look at that code and say, oh, it's nice, pretty code.
But I trust the team so much to write really fantastic code, to care to write it, in a way so they don't have to wake up in the middle of the night and fix bugs, and a way to make sure that our customers are.
Are treated with respect and we're not testing in production and we're not wasting their time.
And, you know, there's like this.
Philosophically, I think we agree, we have the same values and we just got really lucky and that kind of spread out.
And then after a while, you start getting a good gauge.
You know, I don't know if the code's good, but I know if it's breaking a lot, it's not good, right?
Or I know when, you know, some things should take not so long or some things I know are going to take longer, and then it turns, you know, it turns into a lot of trusting and believing and kind of that.
Omer (26:10.050)
So apart from word of mouth and the integrations, sort of.
You mentioned he gave the example of Basecamp.
It doesn't sound like there was any kind of concerted effort to say, let's focus on marketing.
Right?
It was almost like let's.
That conversation didn't happen.
And a lot of your focus was going into just trying to build great products.
So what.
What is.
Can you.
Can you kind of give me a kind of a sense of what that means?
I mean, different people would have different.
Different interpretations.
But for you, for your team, what does it mean to build a great product?
Natalie Nagele (26:45.330)
I think for us, design is extremely important.
We want to build things.
We innovate a lot on experience.
We're not necessarily.
We invent a lot of infrastructure and things like that, but we don't invent technology, so to speak, but we really, really try to innovate on the experience, because a lot of our products are basically putting a UI on something that's technical that you would normally to do on your server or whatever.
So for us, it's the detail and the thoughtfulness that goes into the experience that a person has.
So it varies by product.
Postmark is a great example.
We believe that Postmark is an infrastructure product, and that nuance means that we aren't focused on templating or visible, maybe UI features, but we're focused very much on the experience your app has when it comes plugs in a piece of its infrastructure to somebody else.
So it has to be extremely fast, it has to be extremely reliable.
It has to deliver Those extremely important messages, not just to the inbox, but as fast as possible to the inbox.
And so when you think of it from the user's perspective, like, what is the most important piece?
What are the core function that they are relying on you and kind of excited about, then you really focus on that.
So I don't like feature wars.
I don't want to go into feature wars.
I don't want to, to ship things for the sake of shipping them.
I want to make sure that they're really directed at like, making our customers lives better with the way that we're building it.
Omer (28:19.140)
So, you know, one thing I kind of, we talked about this a little bit earlier is, you know, conventional wisdom always says focus on one thing, one product, one business, whatever.
And you guys haven't done that.
You've, you've got multiple products.
I mean, albeit it's still targeted towards the same customer base.
Have you, have you ever had any, any conversations internally about, you know, should we focus on one thing?
And, and why is it that you haven't done that?
Natalie Nagele (28:50.510)
We talk about all the time internally, externally.
I have friends who are founders of other companies and every time they see me, they're like, what are you doing?
But I think, here's the difference between how I view Wildbit and I think some of my friends and others who run other software companies.
Wildbit was born from the team first and the products came second.
Which means that if a product dies, the team doesn't die.
Right?
Like, I didn't rally a team around an idea that then if the idea is dead, there's no company.
So for us, for Chris and I, the most important thing is to make sure that Wildbit is around for the next 15 years.
So that means that we prefer to hedge our bets a little bit and say, let's work on a few things that are great.
Let's work on things that make us really happy, that are fun, that we feel like we're really solving problems.
And if that means we can't, I mean, all we're doing is maybe not growing as fast as if we were focused on one, but we're totally okay with that.
We don't need to grow at any lightning speed.
We need to go at a pace that's sustainable.
So for us, it's like, I always think we're product agnostic at Wildbit.
I don't know what the next product's going to.
Well, I know what the next one's going to be because we're building it, but I don't know what the one after that's going to be, because for all I know, the market changes.
And the only thing that I can guarantee is this team is capable of building amazing things.
So as long as we sustain a company for that environment, for that team to build amazing things, and I'll build a to do list app in five years, I don't know, whatever it needs to be to make sure that we have a company.
So I think it's a risk thing.
And it's also a just.
We really like building things.
And beanstalk's 10 years old.
You get the itch.
You want to build something new and you want to.
You want to get excited about something else and solve a problem in a different way than you've seen it, then you solved it 10 years ago when you saw it very differently.
Omer (30:38.650)
Are you familiar with the book Good to Great?
Yes, because you just remind.
When you were talking about that, you just reminded me of that.
And I think if people aren't familiar with it, it's a book by a guy called Jim Collins, and it's called Good to Great.
Why Some Companies make the Leap and Others Don't.
And it kind of really looks at what the difference is between good companies, mediocre companies, and sort of really great ones.
And one of the concepts that he talks about in there, based on the research they did, was about getting the right people on the bus, which is that instead of, you know, instead of like figuring out, okay, this is what we're going to go and do, and then finding the right people to help, you kind of go and build that, it's kind of the other way around, which is figure out how to build the right team first and then, you know, then go and build a product or a business or whatever that is.
And it's.
It sounds like you've done the same thing.
Natalie Nagele (31:35.490)
Yeah, I think that's what really makes us happy.
And maybe part of that is because I'm not technical, like, I'm as technical as I am right now, or.
We have always wanted to build a great.
Like a.
Build a place where we really enjoyed working.
I don't think we ever pictured a company with 26 people.
It was always smaller in our heads, but I think the idea was always to just do things that are really fun in our own way.
I think back to client work, it was, I don't want to do this.
I know that's wrong, but I'm going to do it for my client because he believes in it.
And this time you can say, well, we believe in it.
And so that's kind of always been the mission.
And because we don't have a product to tie the whole team to, that choice to build or not build or, you know, how many to have really becomes our choice to make.
Omer (32:24.610)
Yeah.
Okay.
I want to talk a little bit about team and culture as well.
And you have on your homepage a section which says the rules that shape how we live and work.
And I think, you know, people listening to this should go and check that out@wildbit.com I'll include all the links in the show notes.
One of the things that kind of struck me there was you.
You talked about most things are not urgent, Be patient, stay calm, go home.
And I know you also have a culture where you encourage people not working more than 40 hours a week.
What's.
What's the.
Where did that come from?
Why do you do that?
Why is that important to you?
Natalie Nagele (33:12.260)
I think after a while you realize that hitting a deadline isn't going to create some hockey stick growth.
So you quickly get that out of your head that, like, we have to launch this feature tomorrow, otherwise, you know, everything comes crashing down.
But I also think that.
We don't do good work when we're under some kind of immense stress.
And so we know that as a team, we have to create space in our existence for peacefulness and calm and focus and all of those things.
And when you have a team, that's.
A lot of us have been together for a while, but also we kind of evolved together.
We got married around the same time, some of us.
And now a lot of us have kids.
And you really understand the necessity of life outside of work.
And so we kind of believe that works.
Our company's job is to enable us as individuals to have, like, a really fulfilling life so that, you know, your work is obviously fulfilling, but it should enable you to have those other really important things that are fulfilling your family, your hobbies, your just ability to breathe and to think.
So I think that's extremely important to just remember, I mean, we're not saving lives.
This isn't what we do here.
So when we have an outage and it sucks, and we know very much how much we are hurting our customers, businesses, and they rely on us.
But as a team, we have to focus on solving the problem and remembering that nobody's going to die because we're down, so it's not going to help if we're stressed and anxious, it's much more useful for us to just focus on, okay, we can't change it, it's here.
So now let's just figure out how to get out of it.
And I think that's just over the years we realized that that's an extremely important part of who we are.
And we really value people on a team who are like that.
And it's difficult when you have people on a team who some people really enjoy being under stressful environments and it's just not, it doesn't exist here, you know, I mean, we have fires and you know, obviously like you have like three bad weeks when shit's just always blowing up and everybody's frustrated, but the ultimate goal is that that doesn't happen.
Omer (35:18.590)
Yeah, it's funny you said about, you know, people are not going to die.
I remember when I was at Microsoft, you know, used to have, there were moments when you had like really stressful days and I'd come back home and I'd kind of, you know, just be kind of filled with all this stress and these thoughts and you know, what a tough day had it been and all of this stuff.
And my wife who's, who's a very quiet and calm person.
You know, she's a stay at home mom now, but she used to work as a mental health therapist.
And when I kind of looked at the kind of things that she was dealing with and when she was working with psychiatric patients and people who had to try to kill themselves, it really put things into perspective for me.
Like what you said.
It's like with what we're doing, nobody is going to die.
Natalie Nagele (36:05.720)
Yeah, right.
Omer (36:06.440)
And it's like when you, when you, when you kind of, when you sort of see that and realize there are much bigger problems in this world, I think that really helps to, to calm things down a little.
Natalie Nagele (36:20.840)
And some of that comes from experience.
Right.
You know, that an outage isn't going to kill your business.
You know, like I, there's a very few, there's a very short list of things that'll kill my business.
And so when you realize that, I always tell a team, like, what's the worst that'll happen?
Like the very, very, like the very worst.
We lose an entire product.
We're still together.
We'll figure it out, we'll build the next one.
You know, like when you start putting things into reality, it like de.
Escalates, I think a little bit.
And it's really important to have that openness, that cleanliness in your mind so you can focus on solving the issues.
Omer (36:50.470)
Yeah, I love that.
One of the other things that I noted on the site was you.
You kind of had this statement about we're driven by one metric, our customer success.
And is that really the most important thing?
I mean, do you, do you kind of look at that above revenue or profitability or those kinds of metrics?
Natalie Nagele (37:13.210)
I mean, I think they all.
Everything feeds into those.
I very much.
I mean, we're not going to be profitable if we're not building things that are solving true pain and really making our customers lives better.
But from a product standpoint, we absolutely, like, we very rarely focus on the dollars because that's, you know, that's going to happen if we do the right thing.
We focus on, are we solving actual pains, we talk to customers, we watch what they're doing, and we make sure that we're really making them successful, especially in what we do.
They're building software.
And so if their software is great and we were part of it, then great.
We're really excited that we contributed and we made sure that we enabled them to build really great stuff.
So their success is absolutely our success.
Omer (38:03.810)
And then the, the final one I wanted to call out of the sort of the seven rules that you've listed on your site was the best work happens in peace and quiet or when you're not around a computer.
And I thought that was a little funny because I think both you and everything that I've done, you know, it's about being in front of a computer.
Natalie Nagele (38:28.130)
Right.
Omer (38:28.450)
And that's what we're all about and that's what we try to do.
But.
But I also realized personally that some of the best things that I've done have been in situations where, you know, I'm.
I'm in a completely different environment and able to think better or I just have a piece of paper with me and I'm able to produce something better than I would have if I sat in front of a computer.
So I really love that.
And I sort of, kind of,
Natalie Nagele (38:57.350)
kind
Omer (38:57.430)
of just kind of elaborating on that.
You also, at least for your team that are based in Philly, you also have offices for everybody.
Right.
You're not an open plan kind of environment.
And, you know, again, I think we talked about this a little bit earlier and certainly, you know, me coming from Microsoft, you know, that was definitely an environment where, you know, Bill kind of felt like everybody does their best work in a private office.
And that was a big thing for developers.
And ultimately everybody had their own office to kind of work and think and everything like that.
Although recently that started to change a Little bit.
And they're kind of, you know, exploring kind of more open plan kind of environments.
And then there are other people as well.
You mentioned, you know, the guys at Fo Creek, and I'd spoken to Michael Pryor, who's running Trello now, and, you know, he talks about how important it was for him and Joel to.
To have offices for their team, to have the right environment, to be able to do their best work.
But again, it doesn't come cheap, Right.
And there's a cost associated when you're running a business to have that much kind of space for everybody.
And then the second thing is everybody looks at Facebook and all of these companies and their open plan, and it's like this huge open plan, ridiculously sized building, and it works for them, so it's got to work for us.
Right.
So why do you kind of still believe that having offices is the right thing for you guys?
Natalie Nagele (40:26.490)
I think it kind of.
Some of that goes hand in hand with the 40 hours and working through.
I've interviewed so many people for a job, and they say to me that I work so much better at night or at home.
Friends who say I got to get all my best work done at home.
And I always challenge them.
Well, why do you think.
Why do you think night is your best time?
What did you do all day?
Well, all day I'm distracted, right?
Somebody comes up, they tap me on the shoulder, they walk by.
I know the headphones.
People yell at us all the time.
Just get expensive headphones.
But that's not the point.
Visual noise is just as distracting.
But if you read the science, I mean, there's people where it was written, I don't know, so long ago.
And knowledge workers require a tremendous amount of time to get into flow, into focus.
And I don't care what it costs in more offices, you cannot convince me that the cost of losing that focus constantly is cheaper than adding more square footage.
And so my goal is for us to work as efficiently as possible.
I'd love us to work three days a week if we could figure out how to do that.
I'd love us to work a shorter date.
Whatever it takes to make sure that work is there to enable us to live this great life.
And in order to do that, we have to keep.
Get the best work we can done during those 40 hours.
How can you do that if people are walking in front of you and it pulls you out of flow, it pulls you out of your writing, it pulls you out of your coding.
You know, our previous office before this one was, by the way, a lot of this has to do with the remote team because the remote team always had privacy.
You know, they're working at home and we have a requirement that you have to have a dedicated workspace to work at Wildbit remotely for this reason.
And so it was actually when we started building a local team in Philly, we realized how important it was to make sure that the team did not lose their.
Well, I guess to back up, when we built the office in Philly, we brought a bunch of people here on H1BS who had worked, like Dima who built Beanstalk and Ilya and Eugene had been with us for a long time.
We brought them to the US on H1B visas.
And so they had this big culture shock.
Like, they loved being in the office, but they were so unproductive because our first office was an open floor plan just by virtue of the fact that we didn't have a lot of money to spend on an office back then and, you know, didn't know yet what we really needed.
And so we actually got these like Herman Miller cubes that were, you know, didn't look like cubes, but they were cubes to try to just, you know, they were like these pod looking things to try to block out some of the distraction and the noise.
And even that was enough.
And the team was saying, like, we want to go home and work because, you know, the washing machine goes off, somebody's making coffee, somebody's doing this, and you just can't get deep inside into it.
And so when we were looking for a permanent space, we rented, we were in 10,000 square feet and there's only 12 of us.
And so it was an extremely important piece to make sure that everybody had a door to close so that they could get in, do their work and get out, you know, And I think that's what, that's where we really focus.
Like, I don't need a keg in the office because then that means you just stay here longer.
If we want to have a happy hour, we'll have a happy hour, you know, but there's no reason for me to provide amenities for you in my office.
Just to encourage you to stay here longer.
I want you to get out.
Go, go spend time with your family, your friends, ride a bike, whatever you need to do.
Omer (43:47.360)
Love it.
I love it.
All right, let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Natalie Nagele (43:53.680)
Just.
Omer (43:54.010)
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Natalie Nagele (43:56.090)
Okay, here we go.
Omer (43:57.690)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received.
Natalie Nagele (44:02.650)
It came from my friend Peldy, who I think you interviewed.
He said, do the important things yourself.
And I was sitting in Bologna with him, and Chris and I were telling him that we were going to hire this consultant.
We were hitting a plateau.
We were all stressed out.
Hire this consultant to help us make decisions.
And he looked at me and said, the important decision do you have to make because.
Because only, you know, the important decisions.
And we didn't listen to him, and we hired the consultant.
We spent a ton of money, and it didn't work.
So I think that that's one of those things that I always come back to.
Omer (44:30.840)
You know, it's funny because he.
I mean, Peldi was one of the first 10 interviews that I ever did back in 2005.
And one, he's a great guy, but he's just got, you know, so much kind of great advice to kind of share.
And I remember that, you know, Patrick Mito, we talked about Patrick McKenzie and who was on the show as well.
And Patrick had said the same thing.
You know, he said Peldy had given me some advice, and I didn't listen to it, and I wish I had.
You know, so maybe we should hire Peldi for a little while.
Natalie Nagele (45:08.330)
Everybody should hire.
I mean, Peldi is one of my favorite people in the world.
This isn't a talk about Peldi.
Peldy is.
I.
He's.
Yes, he's extremely special, I think, because of his Italian.
He comes off so.
So casual when he gives you advice and you're like, okay, okay.
But really, he should be like, do it.
And then maybe then everybody would listen to him.
Omer (45:25.780)
Yeah.
So if anybody hasn't listened to that, you can hear Pelosi's interview by just going to ConversionAid.com eight.
Number eight.
And you can listen to Patrick's interview by going to ConversionAid.com 44.
Okay, let's keep going.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Natalie Nagele (45:45.710)
So I'm going to cheat.
I'm going to give you two, because they come in a pair.
Everybody on my team reads two books.
One's called Deep Work, and that's by Cal Newport.
And then the other one is Getting Things Done by David Allen.
To me, focus, work and clarity in your mind are the most important thing to do anything.
So they're really important.
Omer (46:06.270)
Yeah.
And both of those, I think, are great books.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Natalie Nagele (46:15.120)
Shut up.
And listen.
Is that a characteristic?
Omer (46:17.920)
That's good enough.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Natalie Nagele (46:24.320)
I was going to say slack to make a joke.
I use Omnifocus a lot, obviously.
Big Getting things Done fan.
But I also started something recently that I love.
I write down.
This is going to sound crazy.
Every morning I have a little notebook and I write down everything I want to do by the hour.
And all it does, I don't have to follow it, but it carves out specific times that I give myself for really important work.
And then I know that when you get to that point, you have a lull and you're like, what should I do next?
And you want to switch to email.
I schedule email time so that I know I can't open email right now.
And then I can go and look and actually do, like, important work.
Omer (46:59.860)
I really like that because I know that some people actually go as far as planning those things and putting them into their calendar.
And I tried that, but I hated it because then I'd look at back at the end of the day and say I didn't get half those things done and I'd feel crappy.
But if it's kind of a list that's hidden away somewhere but still mentally helps, you kind of call out your day.
I like that.
Great tip.
Natalie Nagele (47:18.430)
Tiny, tiny little 3 by 5 Moleskine notebook.
So it's like totally hidden away.
No guilt.
No guilt.
Omer (47:24.510)
Great.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Natalie Nagele (47:30.030)
Chris and I would start open a little small boutique hotel on an island somewhere.
Omer (47:35.230)
Love it.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Natalie Nagele (47:42.350)
I came to the United States in 1989 as a Jewish refugee from Russia.
Omer (47:46.990)
Wow.
Natalie Nagele (47:48.190)
Yep.
Omer (47:49.150)
Oh, yeah, I noticed.
I think I checked.
Saw somewhere in your maybe profile it said that you spoke Russian.
That.
That explains how you speak Russian.
Natalie Nagele (47:57.550)
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yep.
Omer (47:59.790)
Awesome.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Natalie Nagele (48:07.190)
Well, I have kids, so I can't not say kids.
I mean, we travel a lot with the kids.
That's important.
But I think right now I'm focusing a lot.
I've realized there's a lot I need to learn about myself and how to just be a more focused, kind of better person.
So I've been spending a lot of time internally just thinking about who I am and how I can become a better wife, mother, CEO, human.
And that's been really great.
I know you're into meditating.
And so I've been reading some stuff too and just kind of figuring out how to get better at being me.
And I think that's opening up a lot of understanding of how I can be better.
Omer (48:40.160)
Awesome.
Natalie, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
And as I told you earlier, I think you're one of those people that as I sort of started to do research, I was like, I don't think I can cover everything I want to with you in one interview.
So I'd love to get you back sometime and, and maybe talk about some other things.
I, I just love your thinking and the way that you and Chris have, have kind of shaped this business and the way that you run the business.
And I also really love the way that you're challenging these assumptions about, in order to build a successful software business, you have to work long hours, you have to spend, sleep under the desk and all of those kinds of, you know, things we hear about.
And it's, it's, it's an inspiring story with what you've done with Wild Bit.
And I also love the fact that you kind of have this, this, this patience that you, you guys seem to have and sort of have baked that into the culture where you're not trying to be sort of a fly by night and build something and, and go and you know, go and IPO or something, you know, tomorrow.
But it's much more about building a long term sustainable business and how important sort of having the right people on board is for you.
So I love that.
Now, if people want to find out more about wildbit, go to wildbit.com and from there, right at the top of the page, well, just a little bit below, you're going to see links to Beanstalk, Deploybot and Postmark and I'll include a link to those products specifically in the show notes as well.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Natalie Nagele (50:23.060)
Twitter's fine.
Omer (50:24.420)
What's your.
Natalie Nagele (50:24.940)
So just at NatalieNagle.
Omer (50:27.300)
Okay, cool.
So that's Natalie and then N A, G, E, L E. Yeah.
Cool.
Natalie Nagele (50:33.820)
Yeah.
Sweet.
Awesome.
Omer (50:35.620)
Thank you again.
It's been an absolute pleasure and I, I wish you guys all the best.
Natalie Nagele (50:40.020)
Thank you.
Thank you.
This was fun.
Omer (50:42.180)
Cheers.
