054 - The Gap Between Design and Reality — and How Omar Salem Built Adora to Fix It

Omar, welcome to Ready for Launch. How are you doing today? Good things. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm very excited to have you here to talk about your founders journey and your experience building Adora. It's been a couple years since I had one of these conversations and I'm very looking forward to getting this show back on the road. Bye, guys. Well, before we get into your company, I'd love to sort of do a little bit of a backstory for you. Could you share a bit about where you grew up and what kind of kid you were? Yeah, absolutely. So I was born in Jordan and I grew up in Jordan until I was 10 and then my family and I moved to Sydney, Australia, which is where I am today as well. As a kid growing up, I spent a lot of time indoors tinkering with stuff and especially in my teenage years as soon as I discovered computers. I really threw myself into that self-teaching a whole bunch of stuff and the rest is history in some ways. A lot of it. That's cool. Do you think there was anything about your upbringing that contributed to your decision to become an entrepreneur later in life? I think in some ways, yes. I think watching my parents work ethic growing up, they are very much a, if you're doing a job, you should do it really, really well regardless of what it is. To me, growing up that just felt like the normal thing to do and maybe the average thing to do have come to since learn that it isn't and there were quite exceptional in that way and they really instilled that work ethic in myself. I love that. I've worked at a camera for almost five years, one of the world's most successful design companies. I'd love to know what that taught you, what experience you learned there that you've carried forward into starting to your own business. I first joined Canva in 2018 and the business looked very different back then. There were valued at a billion dollars so it started to become clear that this was a really big business and a big opportunity. But the team was 200 people and that was the entire company and to maybe help paint that picture, we only had a single data analyst in the entire company. So that was the state of Canva in 2018, a very different business. Over the almost five years that I was at Canva, when I left the business, I was leading product growth, which was in and of itself a 200 person organization that I helped hire and built. It was a real full circle moment and a ton of learnings along the way from what does a scaling company look like from the inside. And obviously I played a role in shaping that and certainly in product growth in particular. How do you build a product that today is used by hundreds of millions of people every single month? It's at a scale and now they've crossed four billion in annualized recurring revenue. The business is 5,000 people. So it's a very different business today and getting to see that from 2018 to most recently when I left them and I still do keep in touch with people there, just absolutely phenomenal and has certainly shaped me as a founder going in and building Adora. To specifically jump into some of the product learnings that I've taken with me. Canva as a product is incredibly loved by its community. If you jump on Twitter and search for the words Canva and love, you will just see a sea of people that genuinely have like this this deep passion for a product and software. And that's pretty rare and that doesn't happen randomly either. I think the biggest contributor to Canva's success in the product at least is how it makes the person using it feel Canva has empowered hundreds of millions of people to create designs that they would have never thought they'd be able to accomplish. It has made them feel like superstars and produce these assets that they are really proud of and contribute to growing their business and to real outcomes that are felt by people and a tool and a product that has that empowering effect as much as Canva does. Everything else will follow. Revenue will follow usage and active users and all these sort of metrics outcome based metrics and they all follow from deep value that is unlocked for people. And Canva really, really nailed that and I got to see a whole bunch of decisions that shaped the product to be so valuable from the get-go and I've certainly taken that with me to Adora and the reigning to recreate that feeling of I had no idea that I could do that. And now I look amazing to all my colleagues at work and Adora is going to help me land a promotion. I think that's the sweet spot that you want to be in. Yeah, what do you think it is about the DNA of Canva that really gets that deep passion because I think you're point about making people a superstar is very insightful. And I'm trying to think like what products do I use that sort of give me a power I wouldn't have had and I'm struggling to come up with many but like I'm thinking well video conferencing allows me to talk to my family around the world that I definitely don't love any of the video conferencing platforms so there's very few products that give you superpowers and there's probably even less. That make you feel like you love it to so what was special about Canva how did they cheat that. Yeah, I think that feeling comes from democratizing something that you at one point thought was a job for something else or required a degree or required you to go and learn a whole bunch of stuff and was something you know there are people are figured out and you're very far away from figuring it out. So in the case of design when you see you know businesses putting up posters on their walls that look amazing you will look at that and say wow that's you know they must have hired a graphic designer or someone else does that and thinking of parallels whether it's video editing products or even the product that we're using now to record this podcast previously that's a studio setup with you know microphones and equipment to switch the mic on. Or off and switch cameras and do all these sorts of things and now it's a product that you can spin up yourself and be able to do something that even five years ago was the realm of professionals so Canva. Unlocked that very thing when it comes to designing in terms of concrete things in the product I was love to just kind of get down to like concretely. What are some things that contribute there I think that the biggest the biggest driver is focusing on delivering value first and waiting for all of those outcome metrics revenue etc to come later and that's that's like a lot easier said than done. A tangible example is a so canva has a very very generous free tier you can jump on to canva you can start designing and creating assets there are a lot of free images you can walk away with something that looks incredible download it in high definition not have a watermark placed on it there are some other tools that are trying to do what canva does that will stamp a watermark on the free assets and if you think about what does a watermark do and how does that take away from someone feeling like a superstar if I have a small business and I want to put up my menu on the wall. If I have a watermark on it that says created for free on canva.com you just kind of take away from that experience and you are degrading the value that you're providing. Canva continues to have one of the most generous free teas and products on the market almost like a lot of people said it was too generous and there were many conversations internally that said hey should be you know stop giving away some of these things for free because if this new feature that is really highly requested. If we put that in our paid subscription people will upgrade for it but decisions consistently time and time again for the majority of these features were to put them in the free product and trust that if you create value over time people will know. naturally start to have more advanced requirements and will naturally upgrade to the next year up when it makes sense for them. That might take a month, that might take years, but this is a really long game of providing value and trusting that revenue and all of these other outcomes will eventually if you do right by the customer in the beginning. Yeah, that's a spot on. I make a lot of little trip videos through this like mobile app called InShop and they also give quite a lot of way in their free tier, but watermarking is this thing that they also allow you to remove, but you have to sort of watch a two-minute ad every time you want it. I'm like grateful that they let me remove it, but every time I go through this video making process, I have to stop and watch this ad so that I can remove this watermark and I definitely feel that pain and I would love it so much more if it didn't make me do that. But I'd love to know, you saw a camera go through like 25x gross to 200 to 5000. Is there anything you saw during that time that you think maybe worked really well at Canva, but you definitely don't want to try in your business or you think you definitely just wouldn't want to do it at an early stage startup like you're building? Yeah, I think, and this is not just Canva specific. I think this is a thing that I see consistently in some founders who leave a large company and are starting something is knowing when to borrow lessons and processes and things that work and knowing when not to. Specifically, I mean, for example, a big company that is making a lot of revenue and is established and has large teams and processes can afford to do a whole bunch of things as a small business and somebody starting out, you will not and should not do whether that's things across culture and team like the sorts of perks that are offered to business decisions. I spoke about the generous free tier, for example. Canva today can continue to add a whole bunch of stuff to their free tier because they have a massive revenue engine and machine. So they can afford to do that and they can afford to keep doing that over time to build the most generous free tier that they can. A startup starting out doesn't actually have that much time to start collecting revenue and doing all the things that they need to do to keep the business alive. That's one example. There are levels to, you know, I think in lessons to providing free value and you should, but you wouldn't blindly borrow all of the lessons and decisions that a big company would do and how they think about product and philosophies. Those don't always neatly translate to a startup or as you're starting out. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't want to spend this whole time talking about Canva because we're here to talk about Adora, really. I'm wondering at what point did you realize you were ready to leave Canva and do something new? And did you do that with like, did the idea come to you that spurred you to leave or did you think I need to leave and I'll figure out what the idea is later? For me, starting my own thing has always felt inevitable. It wasn't a, it wasn't a question of, am I going to do this one day? It was merely a question of when is the right time to do this? And every single role that I've taken has been with that lens of what are the skills that I can acquire that are going to make me a more effective founder. And if you actually look back across my CV, I stayed in each gig for like a max of one year because I got to the one year mark and I was like, okay, I kind of, I see, I've learned what I need to learn, I've seen what I need to see onto the next thing. And Canva was the only company that kept me very challenged for more than a year. And that's because every six months at Canva, it felt like a whole new company. And I was learning so much. And even by the time I got to the end, it's not that I stopped learning. There was still a whole lot of stuff to learn. And when I left the business, there were 3000 people. And that's a completely different journey with its own set of challenges that come in that product role. So I think it definitely wasn't the question of like, should I do it? It was when. It got to the point at Canva where, so when I left, I didn't have a concrete idea. I had a couple of things that I was thinking about. A couple of very different spaces. One was the product growth space, which is how Adora was born. And then the other was education, actually, that I started doing some research and exploring. I probably took a few months before after leaving Canva, before landing on the idea for Adora and kind of assembling, partnering up with my co-founder and assembling the early team. But yeah, it was this inevitable feeling of a need to go out and start my own business. That's cool. I definitely had a similar career path. I didn't do the one year. I sort of did the two year version where after about two years, I felt I had learned everything I could at a company and I would move on. You talked about thinking about what skills you could acquire to become a good founder. Were you still strategically choosing those different roles at different companies and planning what skills you needed? Or was it something a little bit less intentional? That's a great question. Yes, there was some intentionality with the sorts of skills. Or just more so what I was curious to learn and to see the insights of and see how things operated. I started out my career actually in software engineering. So I did that for a year before realizing that it wasn't just engineering that I cared about. I was building a bunch of side projects and launching them. And I realized that I had been doing some data analysis. I had been setting up MailChimp and sending some emails. I had been doing the backend and the front end from the engineering side of things. And I enjoyed that entire spectrum. My next role was when I discovered that product management was a role. I had never heard of the two words individually, but I hadn't heard of them put together. So that was my next role at Freelancer.com. And I got to see what extremely data-driven product management looked like. All the PMs were very technical and got to see what that world was like in Freelancer. My next role was actually very different. It was a much more mature company. It was a media company in Australia. And I joined them to figure out subscriptions and how we were going to get people to pay for news online. This was back in 2015 or 2016. Before subscriptions for news were obvious or figured out. The New York Times was just starting to do it. And I thought that that was a really interesting challenge. And also doubles up as a way for me to see what non-tech startups look like. And when the year came up there, I got out of there and knew for sure this time around that that was not for me. But I learned a whole bunch of skills around how to manage different stakeholders, especially those outside of tech, the editorial team, all of the journalists, all of the different teams that contribute to that experience. So a lot of valuable lessons there. So some intentionality with kind of like a curiosity lens of I wonder how these things work. And I bet that I'll be able to learn some really valuable lessons. The idea of jumping into being a founder feels like the thing you could endlessly decide that you need to learn another skill and don't never make that leap. So what was it that led you to finally think you were ready? I think the decision there was, I think you're right in that call out. The decision there had more to do with where I was, life stage wise. I had the time and still, till now, I don't have children. I've got a lot of energy responsibilities and commitments wise. Like all of these things just lined up. And I felt like I had this 10-year window ahead of me where I can really pursue something and build a big business. So I'd say the decision there was mostly around that kind of window that I saw ahead of me now and knowing that every year that this is delayed, that window gets smaller and smaller in some ways. It doesn't become, it's not impossible, obviously. There are many stories of people starting and growing businesses under much tougher circumstances. It just becomes harder. Yeah. Okay. You mentioned when you left, you had these two avenues, product growth. or education that you sort of researched. How did you go about that exploration and eventually come to a focal point? - Yeah, it was a really fun period. I was just gonna say, I think this more open-ended exploration, I remember even a month, less than a month out of my role at Canberra. I was just in my notes app on my phone all day, every day. Just adding to different ideas, giving them names, and just kind of writing down before sharing with me on externally, just that process of viewing problems through this lens of which problems can I go off and solve? It's a really, it's an awesome exercise and I looked back at that window of time where I was just kind of always in my notes app, just jotting stuff down as a really, a really fun time. In terms of the process of ideating and then validating, so I had two buckets of ideas. One was centered around product growth and the other education, and I'll talk a little bit about the education stream, just briefly in a sec, but on the product growth stream, I had worked in growth roles for a decade by this point, and I had seen different techniques and patterns and things applied in all of these businesses that had material impact on active usage and revenue, things like different onboarding patterns and techniques to how do you salvage and grow subscription revenue and everything in between. So the lens that I applied in kind of this bucket of ideas and the problem may is, was which of these can be productized? Which of these can I offer as a product so that any business can borrow some of the learnings and hopefully see the same results that canva and other companies that have worked out have seen. So that was the product-based bucket on the education bucket. I had built and launched a side project, actually launched it on product hunt twice back in 2014. It was the number one product of the day for one of those launches, and it was in the education space. The product was called Brain Pump, and it collated a bunch of those educational videos that you see on YouTube sometimes that are like five minutes long and they don't assume that you know anything about a topic but they teach you a whole bunch of stuff. So what is photosynthesis or how are tables made? Those sorts of videos that you might sometimes get on your feed, I was obsessed with them. So I had, I was 18 at this point. I had built this site that just had a collection of a couple thousand of these videos categorized when one video finished just playing. It played the next one. That site had a million videos watched on it. Teachers were using it in some lesson plans. There were like lesson plans posted online where teachers said, "Give your kids an hour of Brain Pump time." So it was really cool to see and it was a lot of fun building that. And that was kind of like the first taste of building something and having it used by many, many people online with no permission as an 18 year old. You kind of published this thing and now it's being used all over the world. So there was kind of a pool that I felt to explore the education space a bunch more as well. Ultimately decided on product growth 'cause that's the space I knew best. It was easier to think about how I could grow a big business there and monetize it. But education was one that I explored for a little bit as well. - What was that process you used to figure out? 'Cause you had this obviously successful start in education. So where how were you assessing whether it could be a big business first is like something in the product growth side of things? - Yeah, that's a good question. So on the education side, I had the project in my notes app, the title of the note was Spongebob. So I wanted to build this product or as exploring this product called Spongebob that was founded on this pretty crazy statistic that I read only six or seven percent of online courses that are purchased online. So you'd ask it to you to me these sorts of courses. Only six percent are actually ever completed. And I saw that start and I was like, "Whoa, that's not good." People are buying these courses and they're just not being completed. And the hypothesis that I had back then is it's because these courses are not as engaging as they can be. So people aren't retaining the info and don't keep going with the course to completion. I was looking at some examples from, if you look at, you know, Duelingo and how they teach courses online, they have just cracked the perfect mix of gamification with things like streaks, breaking lessons down into chunks, notifications on your phone, things that you do daily. So you kind of look at some of the biggest and most engaging learning experiences whether it's like coding type sites, like codecademy or Duelingo, they have kind of mastered all these different techniques to get people to come back and stick. Now whether the content sticks or they're learning useful stuff depends from person to person, but they have really nailed the engagement piece. So the idea where Spongebob was to help course creators and educators create courses that have the exact same engagement techniques for whatever course they wanted to teach. So if it was a Gardner teaching how to propagate plants and they had this course, how do you make that as engaging as what Duelingo has done to language? And now Duelingo is actually rolling out and has rolled out to music and mathematics. And that's because they're not only about languages, they have figured out how to teach things and how to keep people engaged over a long period of time. And this is why they've seen so much success there. So that was the idea for the education bucket. And that was kind of an in-delete for me. And I felt really passionate about that idea. What made me pause was the realization that I myself personally have never purchased an online course. Never, ever. I haven't purchased nor completed an online course. I don't even know what they're like. It's all based on this hunch that, hey, maybe the teachers and the course creators could make things a bit more engaging. So I kind of caught myself in that moment and I said, "Oma, what do I actually know about this space? It's going to take me a lot of time to ramp up on the problems of the creators and the educators and the problems of the consumers and the people buying these courses on the other end as well." It was more of a more murky, unknown space for me compared to the product growth space that I know inside and out. OK. Interesting. So more focused on where you felt your expertise lies. Exactly. Where did I have an unfair advantage? And it was certainly not in the zero courses completed, Cap. Did you think that you understood the mechanics of engagement, though, from looking at those platforms like Jury Lingo? No, not at all. I didn't even use Jury Lingo. So it was like all of these things hit me at the same time. I was like, what am I doing? I did. I was reading a whole bunch of white papers. There are a lot of literature out there on both aspects of engagement rate of these online courses and completion rates, a bunch of studies on those. And there's also a bunch of studies on the gamification techniques that Jury Lingo uses. So I was reading the white papers and trying to understand what works and what doesn't. But from a personal connection to the problem, I very quickly realized that that was not there. So then where did the idea for Adora come from? And how did you decide that that was the one you were passionate about enough to go forward with? Yeah. The problem for Adora came from a pretty deep frustration that I experienced at Canva and every single role that I've worked in, which is nobody knows what the live product experience looks like. So every time you run into a pretty frustrating experience, you're on Airbnb. Airbnb has an amazing product, so they're easy to pick on. But you're on Airbnb and you run into this flow where it's asking you to verify something, but the button goes somewhere else. And you're looking at this thing and you're going, does anyone actually use this? Like does anyone know that? I'm struggling in this part of the product and this part of the product needs attention and to be fixed. And the answer is no. It's really, really hard for companies to see what their live product experience looks like. The product is especially now the way that we build products. It's super complex and sophisticated with logic that dynamically changes the product, whether you are a paid user or a free user, for example, whether you're a team admin or not, the country that you're in, the device that you're on, think about experiments that may be AB tests that teams are running. So there are all these permutations and your customers are kind of living in their own multiverse, right? They're all experiencing your product in a pretty different way. Some of them have created many files on your platform, and others have created zero. Some have just onboarded and others need to update their credit card, right? So you've got all of these permutations and all of these things are built by different teams at different points in time. So the onboarding team builds something and then the monetization team builds something later and you just have to hope and that's what a lot of businesses have to do today. It's their only option. You just kind of have to hope that these things will make sense for people as they're stitched together. And there are some ways where you can get a shallow level of visibility. So for example, the way that we dealt with this at Canva and the way every business deals with this right now is if you want to see what the experience looks like, you pretty much have to sign up to the product with a demo account or a test account or something and run through it yourself. And you grab some screenshots and you might put them in a whiteboard and now you have a white board or a storyboard of that experience. Some teams then take that a step further and they say, okay, well, I need to know how many people make it from step A to step B in this flow. So now I'm going to go to my analytics tool, which is somewhere else. I'm going to find the tracking events, hopefully they're tracked. They're going to look something like check out underscore step underscore five and you're just going to have to hopefully the analyst helps you or you figure that out in some way. And then you stamp those numbers and you bring that context into that whiteboard file that you've started to create. And now what you have in front of you is a shared source of truth in that moment of the experience that you can bring in your team, designers, operations, whoever needs to look at the product to improve it or to assess something. The only problem is it immediately goes stale. If I have that same question next week and I say, hey, what does that upgrade funnel look like? Then people have to go off and repeat that entire process. They have to go off and take the screenshots and maybe ask an engineer to flick a feature flag for you and find that spot in the product, take the screenshots, repeat that entire process. So the problem and pain point here for me came from just a very deep frustration for why can I see my own product? This is the thing that we charge for. This is the thing that my own customers use all day, every day. Why is it so hard for me to see? Hmm. Yes, I live that frustration every day. I see in my role as a design consultant where even if it's clients that I work with regularly, we will do a version of a design and we will have that all those different states of those flows mapped out at first. But these things live in the client's world and they can update things and their marketing team can change copy. There might be a bug that an engineer fixes without design and these things just evolve. We sort of, you know, the teams I worked with said, well, we can't maintain that sort of truth in design because so many people can change the product. And so then if we want to do a new version, you know, like make some improvements, we have to go in as exactly as you said and try and log in, try and figure out what states exist, but you can't mimic all of those things with one log in. You can't be the person who has no account set up and the person who is a heavy user at the same time. It's almost impossible to get that right and that just leads to a degraded design experience because you miss things. That's absolutely right. It's fun. You need to be able to reach all those areas of the product and for something like your logout, marketing site and pages and blog posts, you can open a new window and you can see that. It's static. It's easy to get to. You might not know which ones exist and don't, but you can get there. It's the dynamic, hard to reach spots of your product, but if you really think about it, there's a lot of your product that you don't get to experience yourself. Even if you have the luxury of working on a product that you can dog food and use yourself day to day, you're not running into the your credit card as expired state often, your customer. You're not running into that marketing promotion that only some people are eligible for and it triggers a dialogue in the product that your customers are. It's actually really, really hard to get a sense for the true product experience across the board. The point that you made around the visual source of truth is what we call it and that's what we're building with Adora. That point on you have your design files at the beginning and if you kind of know what the state's and permutations are designed for, you've probably got error states and you've got empty states and all these sorts of things and you've got your design file meticulously set up for that moment, which is amazing. The point that you made around people just go straight to production and make things like copy changes. If you need to change some copy, you don't need an updated design or to go back and update that design file because you can do that in code and that's easier. What's happening now is the incremental changes that you're making without needing to update the design file are only going to get bigger and bigger. It goes from update some copy for me to add that button and maybe reorder the buttons. You can do that yourself pretty easily in code. But now with AI, you can say, I want a new dialogue that shows when I click that button and we already have the components in code, you don't need that design step for that anymore. You can say, I want to reorder this onboarding flow completely around. I want to move the last step to be the first step and now you can do that in code and an agent will go off and make those changes and the engineer can push that change and the design file has no idea. The staleness of that file is only going to grow because it's not only copy changes that teams are making now. They are making more fundamental changes, incremental changes directly in code that bypass that design process altogether. Designers for the most part, enjoy this because the incremental changes that the AI can do by itself is not the creative changes and explorations that designers enjoy doing on the other end. That will still live in the design files. You're going to see the disconnect between the latest design in Sigma and the production just continue to diverge. Yeah, I'm seeing it already with clients building their own components and developers saying, you need to tell us if you're adding stuff to the code base. But anyway, yeah, I mean, it's an obvious problem to solve. How did you figure out how to start building this? What were the first steps you took to turn this from an idea and opportunity into a business? Yeah, it's a great question. I think that the word that you use, that it is an obvious problem, is right. The entire time as we were thinking about this idea from the beginning, we were thinking surely someone's on this. The more obvious that it felt, we started speaking with a bunch of product and growth and design leaders from across different industries. They all had the exact same pain point once we got to it in those conversations. Many of them used the exact same word that you just did, which is, this is obvious. Why hasn't this been solved? We've been having some people that after our conversations a week or two weeks later, they will run into that problem again. So someone internally will say, hey, we have to audit these flows or does anyone know what this or that looks like? Then they will ping me and they'll say, hey, I just ran into this again. It's one of those things where once you open people's eyes to something that has just been accepted as the status quo, which is your product is always going to be a little bit hard to see. Do this exercise, use a journey mapping with a capital UJNM where you go off and it's a process and it takes a week. People had just got in use to that and accepted that. In terms of the tangible first steps that we took, the first was go and speak to a bunch of product leaders in the space, understand how they might be dealing with this. or how they're addressing this problem. And we came across some pretty, pretty nifty solutions that different teams had to the same problem. Atlassian, for example, they have a, fortnightly, I believe it might be a monthly team meeting for their heads of products, where each head of product is designated a core journey that they are responsible for. And in this meeting, all of the heads of products come together and they have to open up their browser, share their screen, and step through that journey together. And what that did was it just created this level of accountability that you weren't going to weasel your way out of this with a document or a slides or something like that. You were responsible for that journey. And now it was on you to continuously audit that journey all the time to make sure that it doesn't drift unintentionally. So we got to see all of these kind of nifty processes and solutions, data dog with every PRD, with every product requirements doc that the product managers had to put together. It had to have the user journey at the top. And it needed to show where is the person before this feature that you're proposing and where do they go after? So we just kind of got to see all of the different ways that people were working around the lack of visibility that they had. And it looked usually like a process or assigning someone some responsibility. Stripe does something similar as well. - That's so interesting. You must have seen some really fascinating processes that I'm sure lots of teams could learn from if they didn't just buy your product. - Okay, so you did a bunch of research. I think that just confirmed to you that this was a big problem to solve, right? How do you go about building that, of building a solution, deciding what that solution should be? - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the, there are a couple of steps to your right. We had, we're kind of staring at this problem. And it felt like it was this opportunity that no one else was looking at for some reason. And naively, we just kind of went in and we said, "Okay, if no one's solving it, like we're going to give it a red hot crack. We're gonna go and do this thing." Now, the first steps tangibly were one on the product and design, like what was this thing going to look like? How was it going to feel like? And on that front, we decided to make it look really familiar to teams, the teams that we spoke to when they were telling us about mapping journeys and mapping their flows and doing these audits. They always showed us a whiteboard. And whether that's in FIGJAM or Miro or another whiteboard, they would bring up a whiteboard that had, I'm sure you've seen many of these, had different screens next to each other. It had arrows between them. It was stamped with some numbers sometimes. It sometimes had some anecdotes from support or from user research. So, you know, you'll have a sticky on it that said, "People really struggle here." Or had another sticky that said, "This is the experience today, but next week we're shipping something else." So they kind of created this blueprint for that experience on a whiteboard. So we knew from a product and design perspective, we wanted it to feel familiar in that way. It's an infinite canvas where you can go in and annotate and look at your journey in that way. But importantly, none of this could be manual, right? And that's a decision that we made very early on that has made our lives over the last two and a half years, much, much harder than maybe they needed to be. But we made the decision that Adora needs to automatically map a customer's product. It needs to automatically update these user journeys and that can't come also with an engineering tool on their team. So traditionally in product analytics tools, an engineer has to go in and actually like tag up the events on each button or have the foresight to even know that we may want to track this in the future. The reality is most of the time when you think about have a question about the experience, it's not tracked because you just didn't have the foresight to have that question when you built the feature. And that's totally normal. And that's just the way most teams operate. So that decision to make it automatic as seamless as possible on the customer was an engineering decision that we made. And then we started to very quickly pull a bunch of proof of concepts together for what are the different sources or ways that we can go and capture these screenshots? Where do they come from? Do they come from the code base? Do they come from staging? Do they come from a crawler type bot that we can set up? And it can go and use the product. Or does it actually come from directly what customers are experiencing? And that's the one that we picked. So to give teams a visual source of truth, we want to get them as close to the truth as possible. And the truth in this case is what did somebody actually see? So the integration that we use is directly at that customer client point. So as they are using your product and browsing through your journeys as they do normally, they are doing the mapping for you. A whole bunch of technical complexities come with doing it in that way. A whole bunch of privacy and masking tooling that we had to get right out of the box. So it's made it a much harder product to build. But now two and a half years in, we have a product that can automatically map it. Customers entire journey, keep that real time and up to date and show you all of the different corners of your product. That delete workspace model that people see once a month. Like you will see that. Because as soon as it's experienced, you will have that visibility across the board. Mm. And I imagine that trialing all those different techniques you went wrong a lot, or you came across a lot of roadblocks. Did it take you a long time to figure out which technology was the right thing to go with? Yes. We did spin up a bunch of proof of concepts just to get a feel for what is possible with each one. So for example, one approach that we explored was a Chrome extension, like a browser extension that you install, and then you were running through your own product. And Adora is doing the hard work of capturing the screens, making them full screen, stitching them together. All of that stuff, we make that easier. So we're saving you screen-shotting and then lining it up in the future and cross devices and that type of stuff. So we did explore that for a little bit. Ultimately, we came to the realization that it needed to reflect the actual user experience. Anything that's not the actual user experience is not your source of truth. So any other reconstruction of the experience on staging from your code, your components, any other way to see those screens and see those journeys is not your source of truth. Because they're going to be-- to give you an example-- if you went to the code base and you said, I want to try to build a source of truth from the code base. That's great, because that's accessible. You can integrate it pretty quickly. It's all predictable. And within-- you have a whole bunch of control over it. But you don't actually know how these things are composed on production when they meet dynamic business logic. So when there's business logic that says you're eligible for a marketing promo, but you've got to upgrade first or something. All of these things happen on production with dynamic user data. So that's a decision and a realization that we came to relatively quickly. But we did explore those other approaches, because they would have made our lives a lot easier on many fronts. Mm-hmm. You were building this, I think, for about 18 months in stealth. Who is your team that you had pulled together from your initial idea through to the end of your stealth? I had to choose those people and who to bring on. Yeah, we were in stealth for 18 months. We're still in-- by the time this podcast airs, we will have launched publicly. That we were in private beta for another year after launching out of stealth. So the period leading up to launching out of stealth, the team was very lean. It was six people all up, including myself and my co-founder, Nathan. Nathan is the CTO and the technical side of the business. The rest of the team were anchored by a really senior and strong front-end engineer, similarly, on the back end and full stack, a person that did both front end and back end and had a whole bunch of knowledge about mobile tech and Chrome extensions and a real like Swiss army knife of skills, because he had worked across Android iOS, back end, and front end. So I think early on, you need people like that who can flex and can give you quick guidance and expertise on demand and aren't necessarily anchored to one-- particular thing, even the senior frontender that we had on the team was also a full stack in Juni. Even the back end I was doing some frontend stuff, it wasn't always the best, but no hesitation to jump in and kind of contribute wherever we needed. And then we also had a product designer. Everyone on the team at that point was really senior, had at least a decade of experience behind them and that allowed us to keep the team much leaner than it could have been. And also created this environment where we could fully place a lot of trust across the entire team, because everyone had done this before, not start-ups, but had done what they have joined Adora to do for a very long time and created a really high trust environment where we could get by with minimal meetings and just really move quickly to build the core product. Did you expect to be in data for a whole year? Yes, so post the stealth launch, we then entered a private beta phase for a whole year after that. What, what have you learned from that? Like what, did anything surprise you about what you were expecting to launch first is what you actually figured out that your customers needed once they got into their hands? Yes, yeah totally. So maybe two things on this front, the first is why were we in private beta for another year after being in stealth for a year and a half? So when we came out of stealth and launched Adora and this was kind of the first time we were sharing our vision for product development and this problem with the world. It was actually a a single organic LinkedIn post and a single organic post on Twitter. I hadn't really posted on Twitter before, so it was the first one there. Both posts went super viral across the tour. We had 500,000 impressions, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments and thousands of people joining the waitlist. So that's what we launched when we came out of stealth, we launched the waitlist and we had heads of product design and growth from a wide suite of industries and companies from the tech companies that we had dreamed to be on that list. Two e-commerce brands, like heads of digital T1, e-commerce brands and retail brands, fashion brands. We had some airlines that you'd recognized joined the waitlist. So we just saw this resounding resonance across the board of people saying, "Oh my god, this is exactly what I've been missing. I have always wanted to see what product looks like. I am in here in data products trying to figure this out or I'm watching a hundred session replays and spending all this time that I don't want to be spending to try to piece together the experience." So we saw that really resonate with the market. So best case scenario for a waitlist launch official. From there, we were super methodical with how we wanted to validate Adora. So we validated that the promise is there, right? That very emotional reactions, like visual reactions to the product and the problem that we're solving, which in B2B software is pretty rare for people to have that sort of reaction. So we saw that at the top of funnel, we like to call that internally. This is like the promise market fit. The promise is really resonating. Now the next part of the puzzle that we had to validate was, can we deliver on this? Can we deliver on this in a repeatable way that meets their expectations and hopefully beats their expectations? And what is the willingness to pay? How much are they willing to pay for it? Now before the waitlist launch, we're working with a number of design partners. So it's not like we weren't working with companies and building the whole time. We're actually very actively building the product alongside some really great companies that have given us a ton of feedback. After the waitlist launch, we decided to continue that mode of working and onboard a cohort of customers into this private beta every single month and test and validate and see the gap between that promise market fit and then the real PMF, the product market fit. And we did that every single month where we continually brought more companies in. There were of course paying at this point and validate the product itself. And now a year on from that, we have seen what works. We have built all whole bunch of features off of what we've seen, resonate and work and where we have seen gaps. And now by the time this is aired, we have now launched Adora and anyone can sign up and get integrated and use the product self-service. Well, if you want to talk to us, you can do that. But really it took that year of working with companies in batches, hearing their feedback, shipping to them and repeat to get to this point a year on. Are there any expensive mistakes you made along the way? Yeah, a ton. A ton. I mean, building, building products in the space, just generally, from even a cost perspective of very expensive. Screenshots is an expensive business to be in. We also work with a number of companies who are processing many, many millions of end-user sessions every single month. We work with Notion and Canva and Linktree. So screenshots are expensive. Just I know that's not what you meant by your question, but that's where my mind went. Building with AI and building AI features that's also really expensive, especially in the R&D sense and to try to figure out what's going to work or not. From a decision and things that we've done in the product that were costly, I would say finding the balance between the core of Adora, which is the visual source of truth, all of your screens, all of your journeys. This is the thing that underpins everything in Adora. Finding the balance between that and then all of the things that we are building on top of that. So we have a visual analytics product that works on top of the visual source of truth, where you can now count how many people click on different buttons or see different screens. And if you've seen product analytics product, there is a ton that could be done better there in a more visual way. But there's also a whole bunch of table stakes features that if you don't kind of catch yourself, it's very easy to start building things like charts and dashboards. And that's where the gravitational pull takes you is to build charts and dashboards when you start counting things. So we went down that direction for maybe like a month or two and then pulled ourselves back out to back to the visual. So we do offer some rudimentary analytics just to help you understand how people are using the product, but you won't see a dashboard with many charts on it or anything like that in Adora. That's not what Adora is for. So that was one of those mistakes that we had to learn early on. But I think with that comes now we know where we play and where we don't play. You know, we're not a replacement for your analytics products. And we won't be. We're a complementary tool that gives you a very different lens on your experience. We show you usability insights and UX tips and where people get stuck and how you can make your product better. We're not going to show you what your day 14 retention is and you know that cohort over time and let you slice and dice in that way in a table. That's not who we're building for. So that also came with a good learning that now makes decision making much much easier. You're obviously still at the very early stage of being a founder, but what do you think are some sort of misunderstanding or misperceptions about growing a business that you now kind of have seen the other side of now that you're on your journey? I think the biggest one is I had thought that the overlap between being a product manager and a founder were really big and that you know just because I had worked on managing a whole bunch of products at Canva at one point. I was leading the Canva print team. So I was looking at that as a business unit and I was like, okay, maybe it's actually kind of the same, right? You just you go and you do it by yourself and in a tattoo side. That turned out to not be true. Being a founder has there's a whole kind of segment of that Venn diagram that are things that you'd never had to think about as a product manager or a product leader inside of a business. Things like tax and hiring and the operational side that goes into it, that the reporting and invest the relationships, fun raising, there's this whole other side to office management, you know, running out and getting things for the office, finding a lease that there are all these things that I hadn't truly appreciated. or put in this other bucket, but they are really a core core part of building a business, because you need to attract great people, you need to retain people, and you need to make the job engaging and a fun experience for the team at the same time as well. So I think it's all those other components that in a large company, he just had massive departments that took care of. You had a person for each task that might come up, and as a founder, all of those tasks ultimately land with you. That's good insight. What is one piece of advice you would give to someone who is thinking about starting their own business, but just doesn't know how to begin? Yeah, I think talking to, and it's so easy these days to reach out on LinkedIn to your, or wherever your target segment is. My brain always goes to B2B, but I think you would be surprised with how open people are to chatting about their problem space, and you can learn so much from simply reaching out, and there's some good reading here. There's a book called The Mum Test for how to ask questions and ensure that you're not leading people on to give you the answer that you want to hear, or something called Happy Ears, what you want to hear. So there are techniques there that you can build and learn. But I would say you would be surprised to see how open-willing people are to share their problems in their unique spaces, and where they are a subject matter expert, and don't hesitate to make that the first step before getting started. I think it's easy to think of all of the different things that you need to do to be a founder. I need to quit my job, I need to find people, I need to maybe get some funds, I need to save up first, but one for in front of the other and one step at a time. If you start with, I just want to understand different problem spaces, you'd be surprised by just how much energy that gives you and how much easier the next step becomes once you immerse yourself in a problem space like that. Perfect. Oh my, that's about all we have time for today. So final question, where can people go to follow your journey and check out Adora? Awesome, well, yeah, you can check out Adora, Adora. So we're building a visual source of truth as you've had me talk about for SaaS companies, e-commerce companies, anyone with a digital experience that they really care about improving. So check us out there. I'm also on LinkedIn and post on their quite regularly as well. So feel free to give me a follow or send me a connection request. Perfect. We will put those in the show notes that anybody interested. Oh, Ma, thank you so much for pulling about the curtain on Life as a founder. I really appreciate you being here. Amazing. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, and thanks to everyone listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]