How do we maintain momentum through downturns?
Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Joel Robbie is co-founder and CEO of Nod: a connected task space that works with professional services — business, lawyers, accountants, financial planners — who need to connect a bunch of different documents in their workflow to deliver advice for a client. Nod is a no-code document automation environment which allows these users to seamlessly connect data down a chain of tasks, eliminating manual entry and rekeying. It is, suffice it to say, the arrival of the future as far as the way documents get done.
Catch the full episode in the player below, or on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… pretty much wherever you like to listen.
Stay Open To Iteration
The team started Nod as a marketplace business in 2012, with an eye to building a marketplace that connected experts who knew a lot about money — a financial planner, for instance, or an accountant — with someone who had a question about money.
Initially, they started out with that hypothesis — which did not pan out because of just some first principles/technical barriers in the industry. Instead of giving up, Nod followed the rabbit hole of business needs that they discovered along that journey and are now a B2B SaaS which automates documents (and does a whole bunch of other things) as a connected task space.
…And Pivot Again
Nod was originally AI-driven — which was selling strongly up-front, but churning when clients came up against friction within the process. They realized they had to change — again.
“When we were selling the AI driven platform, it was selling like hotcakes,” Joel remembers. “We were growing actually quite quickly, but we were seeing lots of poor product metrics churn out the back of those sales. End user adoption was not where we needed to be for the majority of those customers. It was an incredibly hard time for the company to pivot because we had raised a bunch of money. We had quite a big team at this point, because we had scaled up to support the number of customers we had and to keep selling.
It took three months to rebuild the platform from the ground up. Nod threw out all the code, apart from the basic login function. They had a hypothesis that to connect data and do no-code automation in the way we wanted to, they had to control the editing experience. Luckily, they were right.
“We had a good, sticky cohort of five to seven customers who loved that initial experience,” Joel explains. “They were used to not having that level of control. They were used to having a consultant come in, type up a bunch of VBA code to automate a Word document, which they can’t control and they can’t improve. But we gave them that control, and that was exciting for the right kind of cohort of people. That got out there.”
But then the real work started.
“We had to do a year of integrating with existing systems, improving the editing experience, improving the way data flowed, and improving little interactions. It took us a good year to get from that initial five customers to where we are now, which is 30 or 31. It has been a long and grindy product journey.”
Talk It Out
Joel insists that the key to nailing that tough set of pivots was “being really clear about communicating around what went wrong and communicating around where [Nod] went wrong in [their] product hypothesis, what hypothesis was proven or disproven and why it was disproven.”
“It was about being really clear in our communication around how we got certain things right, but other things wrong, from a first-principle perspective,” Joel notes. “How do you keep a team moving? Momentum. It is really important in my view to have the clear conversations around the business that you need to have, around reducing staff numbers of certain areas to give yourself enough runway to get out the other side and then be really clear about the fact that the problem is a big one. That momentum, even though the business momentum stopped, the product momentum never did.”
