Dani Grant - Jam.dev

Know where I get the inspiration from? No. No. No. No.

No. Wait. Take I'm

gonna do this. Compliment.

I'm gonna do this.

So in the earliest days of Jam, we weren't getting the product just right. We would just keep launching and launching, and we launched 7 different variations of this product that failed.

So much more authentic to be a part of that journey than it does being like, I like the brand or I don't like the brand.

There's something about seeing the people behind it that creates this trust. Each time we would ship something, it would solve one business problem but present another. And PMs were like, this is great. I would love to use this. Like, their engineers would be like, you want me to add what to staging?

Hi. Hi. It's you.

Kyle, I love how you're building this company. I love the, like, sharing the updates on Twitter. I love the podcast. I just, like it's just there's so much.

Do you know where I get the inspiration from?

No. No.

No. No. No. Wait.

Take I'm gonna do this. Compliment.

I'm gonna do this.

I just I just really like there's an energy in what you are building, and it's, like, it's so awesome.

Well, I think that's, we there must be kindred spirits. I wanna tell you a funny story. I, about 3 or 4 days ago, I was updating less my stack list profile, and I was going into LinkedIn, and I was just sort of checking stuff, and I was updating profiles. And I started updating my profile saying, like, building stack list and helping people, yada yada yada. And then, my CEO, CTO Martina, just put a LinkedIn article out about what it's like to be, a woman in tech, in leadership.

And so, you know, and then we we started brainstorming. We're like, you know what? We should just do a podcast and start to talk about things like this. So she's actually interviewing the CEO of smarty.ai later this week, and we're gonna we're gonna do that. And so what happened was I said, alright.

We gotta get this thing going. We're gonna call it I got it. Building stack list.

No. It seems it's so cool.

I no. No. No. And then what's funny is I think, so we started building Jam's stack list, and I started doing all the Jam research. And then I went to the podcast, and I go, oh, it's the same thing.

I love it.

It's it's been in my head. Like, it basically like, the jam stuff didn't get in my head, and so I'm also like, I got a great idea, and then it ends up being the same thing that you've got.

That is so cool. I really like it. I'm so excited to listen. Do you know what do you know what ours is inspired by? Ours is

also inspired by someone else.

Who? Do you remember literally 10 years ago, 2014. Do you remember

Gimlet Media? Oh, yeah. Oh, that first episode was just like it was the best. I remember remember he had the recorder, and he basically goes home, and he's talking to his wife. His wife's like, what are you gonna do?

Yeah. I get just and it was so raw from, like, the first second that somebody had an idea, and I just that's I love that.

It is my favorite podcast ever created, that first season of of start up. And, and so when we first were like, let's do the building jam podcast, that I mean, like, what he did was incredible, but we were like, can we bring people in the same way that he did? Just yeah. So Yeah. Integration.

Amazing. Well, we're we're taking a page from from your book, and we're we're doing that. And I think it's I think it's interesting because I also early on got some advice about, like, sort of not not having the the advertising or the marketing or the or the brand be sort of me and just having it stand on its own or whatever it is. And then as as more and more I see, like, I would say you and the and the Jam team, and also Tyler from Beehive is just a great example too. Right?

Like, everything comes from and you're you just and you see all the wheels in motion, like, every day and what's happening. And I almost feel like it's it is so much better, not just the transparency in building in public, but really also you're part of a story, and it's not just like I either like the brand or I don't. You know what I mean? Like, Whirlpool or Intel or whatever. You just have these brands, and they are what they are, and they've tried to sort of build this thing that is so different when you get, like, an apple.

And you just knew Steve Jobs' you know what I mean? His thing, and you get in there, and then what what you and the team are building with Jam and Beehive. And, like, you know all the ins and outs, and you're all and you're part of that story, and you feel like you're sort of part of that community, and it feels so much more authentic to be a part of that journey than it does being like, I like the brand or I don't like the brand.

When, early on at Jam, we were making, like, the very first engineering decisions of, like, what tools and platforms to use. I asked our, like, very small team then, should we go with Netlify or Vercel? And at the time, they're like, let's go with Vercel. And I asked why? Like, why do you like Vercel more?

And their answer was very surprising. They said, I don't know, but I follow some of the engineers that work there on Twitter. Yeah. There's something about seeing the people behind it that creates this trust because it sort of messages like they are proud of their work. They're not hiding behind it.

And because they they are put like, because they are showing their face with it, like, I can trust that they're giving this their all. Something like that.

Totally. What is I actually says oh, yeah. Guillermo. I saw him give us a talk at the o o o summit in New York, and it was so good. And it just felt like one of those where he whereas he was building it, he's basically putting it out for developers.

And, like, what do you think? And let's get in it and, like, just do it. And I think that probably built from that core of, like, let's all kinda get in here and do it together, which just sort of permeates out with everybody that you interact with. And so I do have to say, you and the team have got the best. Your your cult I'll listen to if I can phrase this right.

Your culture just, like, permeates and seeps through social and all the interactions and even the product had launched, like, everything, it just, like, it just, like, laughs out from all of it. And I don't know too many other. No. But I I don't know too many other companies that I've interacted with or that I've I've followed like that that, like, it's just palpable, and which is amazing. So kudos on that.

That's so kind of you to say. Thank you so much.

So hi. I it's such an interesting journey with with how we we started using Jam early on when we were I've done QA before in in other project and program manager who who has sort of had to take on QA as part of the process, and so I've used a bunch of different tools. And I I when when I started using Jam, I immediately like, I sent out this, like, at channel and development. I'm like, I found a thing. I found a thing.

You all you you you guys are gonna love what I found. You're gonna love me for what I found. And so I started doing it, and now everybody's everybody's into Jam. And and I've I've also been I think I told you once I was on the call with another company who was trying to sell me or onboard me to something, and their site didn't work. And I jammed it live for them, and they were like, can you just send me a screenshot?

I was like, mm-mm. A screenshot is not gonna cut it. For your dev team, I'll show you what'll cut it. And I did a jam while I was like and then I sent him the link, and I almost sent it like, see what your dev team thinks about that. So so, it's amazing.

I wanna hear about the early, like well, before, like, before we get into into the jam stuff, like, where what what started you on this this path? Like, the early, I don't know, back to Cloudflare days, or I love that you were part of 1 1 dotone.one. That's fun. I wanna hear the early stories.

There's a there's a 1 dotone.one.one fun fact, which is that the night before the the launch, the I think it was Passover. The team went over to one of the engineers' houses for Passover, and, we stayed out very late, and the launch would be 6 AM the next day. But it what what a 6 AM launch means that engineers has to be online before it's actually deploy, like, everything live. And what we decided at 2 AM was it would be safer to just deploy everything now. And, like, that way, there's no risk in the morning if anyone oversleeps, like, whatever.

Yep.

And by the time we woke up for our 6 AM launch, it was already on the top of Hacker News. Someone found it because people Mhmm. People use 1 dotone.one.one.one.one.like, test if their router is working. Like Totally. And so someone had just found it.

It already launched without us. And, it was actually a really big deal because, when you work with reporters, you make promises about embargos and who's gonna have the first scoop. And

Right.

We broke those promises, and it was a bad thing, but that was a, fun fact from the launch. There's another fun fact about 1.1 to 1.1, which is we were super excited to build this. We started building it, and and then the core engineer leading the project, their their work visa expired.

Oh.

So the project was on pause, and we didn't like, however long it would take. And we and we want to launch it on April 1st because it's floor 1.

Right. Totally.

And so we there was only one day that we could possibly launch it, and we were getting closer and closer to April and 3 weeks before. Like Oh. He gets his work visa and works so hard. Somehow, some Herculean effort is able to launch this thing in time, and it was anyway, that that one product, was such a moment.

Oh my goodness. That's amazing. I I love those, like, right down to the right down to the wire and and and everything comes up. Your your hacker news, like, find sounds a lot like, Robinhood had a very similar, right, where it was sort of like they put up a launch splash page, and they're like, you know, we're gonna put this thing up or whatever, and then Hacker News caught it. And as legend goes, they, like, wake up and there's, like, you know, 50,000 sign ups on the on the wait list and all those sort of things.

This sort of, like, wait, what? Those sort of surprise moments. That's great. It's like Internet lore.

So Jam has 1 too. It wasn't quite as successful as Robinhood's. So in the earliest days of Jam, oh my gosh. It was it was a grind. We knew we needed to solve this problem of, like, PM engineer collaboration, but we we weren't getting the product just right.

So we were like we just keep launching and launching, and we launched 7 different variations of this product that failed. And so the and the 8th version, we just decided, let's be a lot more deliberate, a lot more quiet, a lot slow like, slower. We all like, we first we didn't ship it to any users until it was, like, perfect for us internally. And then, like, we only brought in 5 users, and then we're like, if these 5 don't retain, it's not good enough. Like Right.

We ended to 10 and then, like, 20, but, like, we kept it so small. And then, like, and then we saw retention was good, so we we, like, quietly removed the join the wait list button and replaced it with a sign up button, and then, like, we're, like, whatever. We went to sleep, and the next day, there were 200 users in France.

That's that is awesome. That's so great.

What had happened was there's this, like, French YouTube show where the premise is it's like a pitch it's like Shark Tank, but they don't pitch their own startups. They pitch someone else's startup.

Oh, nice.

Had coincidentally, that episode pitched Jam

Oh my gosh.

Going to the website and they signed up.

That's amazing. That's so much fun. Wasn't didn't I I was, yeah, I was going back in the history of Product Hunt, the early jam as a website editor. Right? Like, what was the what was what was the first, like, prototype early, early jam as a or where did that start from with, like, I think we're gonna try x, and it's, like, getting early prototypes done.

Wait. Let me let me show you. Like Oh, yeah. If you're comfortable with, like, a 30 second wait let me pull up the old version.

Oh, do it. I love that. I I I have one of my first wireframes too, which I need to, like, I need to, like, put in a frame or something. I love those.

The advice I now give every founder is, like, take take and save tons of screenshots and photos from, like, even your earliest things because of it to people realize how special they are. But now to be able to look back, like, I wish we had more screenshots. I wish we had more photos.

Totally. Yeah. Amazing.

The first this is, this is live on my laptop, the first version of Jam. We basically were like, well, what if it was, like, Google Doc style comments for your website? And so we added, like, this, like, emoji react bar or you could be

Oh, nice.

We didn't have a logo yet. I don't know what this was. It was not called Jam at the time. At the time, the JavaScript you installed, we called it Kahoot dotjs because you're working on cahoots with each other. Now That's great.

First version on my laptop, and then, Erdifa tried it out. He was launching 1.1.1 for families. Yep. So he, we're on Zoom. It's, like, early pandemic.

And he and it we didn't even have the accounts yet, so he's using my username and avatar. He's hard to get in. But this is the first vision.

Oh, that's amazing. They're so nice to have those, like and and be able to go right back to those moments. I I knew I wanted to get something done, and I had this idea. I had it's funny. I had sort of the big grand vision first, and then but then I just sort of hyper jumped right into the smallest little piece that could get built.

And so I found a developer on Upwork, and I said, this is what I want. And he's like, well, you gotta send me some wireframes or something. So I'm like, okay. So I basically over here, like, I I made a card, and I'm like, there's, like, copy URL and, like, delete and, like, you a button. And you can see this button is, like, I think copy and paste it from, Bootstrap or something.

And I've got, like, visit. You could visit it, and maybe there's some tags, and you can definitely tell this is copied from somewhere else. And then there's a title. And then now you have lots of these, and you add some notes up top, and that's a stack. I'm like and he was like, okay.

Great. And he started actually working off of these. Exactly. And then I started doing basically the database flow down here where it was like the difference between the stack ID and they have cards as children. And and and then I think it was like a week, and he sent me a prototype.

And and as soon as I saw it, I got one of those, like, you know, hair on arms and neck, you know, hair stands up on, and you're just like, oh, wait, I can see. I can see how this, like, starts to what's funny though, is it's so it it always felt like a glitch in the matrix to me because it's just links, but we just don't think and operate that way on things. And so, you know, but now it has grown into iOS and Android and Chrome and Firefox and Edge and Safari, and we're close on PC and Mac. Like so, yeah, that was six and a half months ago.

Woah. That's crazy.

I know. So yeah. So so much fun. I love those early those early things. So what was the iteration between, like, when you started with the commenting on the websites and that it sort of was it what were the cycles between sort of iterating through the the different ideas before you sort of landed on on doing QA?

The each each time we would ship something, it would solve one business problem, but present another. So the first version was JavaScript you had to install on your website, and PMs were like, this is great. I would love to use this, but then we would like, their engineers would be like, you want me to add what to staging?

Yeah. Totally.

And then we would, like, hop on a call with them, and then we we would do the security review, and they would send us, like, an Excel with, like, you know, 5 pages of each one has, like, a 100 rows of, like, questions to answer. And we're like, this is not the go to market we wanted. So then we were like, okay. So people like the idea of this, but they don't wanna install anything. What if it all happens in a web app?

Like, we iframe your website, and then you can sort of leave comments on top. Mhmm. What we found is, people used it a ton, but only for, like, 3 months and nothing. I know what

you're saying.

It's only good for landing pages because real product has such in-depth state that you can't really open it inside this I like, it would be a bother to go open it again. And so when do companies build new landing pages? Like, once or twice a year.

Yep.

And so the usage would be very heavy, but then we would lose our users. And we're like, gosh. Like, that's not a business either.

Yeah. Totally.

So then we thought, what would be so useful that you would come into this, like, edit like, into this website where we've iframed your website and use it every day? And we thought, well, what if we allowed you to just make the changes yourself? So if you're a designer, you're a PM, or you're a marketer, and you just wanna make a copy change or a color change or an asset change, what if this was the editor to do so? And so that's how we did the website editing. It was pre AI, and, unfortunately, like, the level of accuracy in the pull request, like, it wouldn't use whatever component library you were like, it was just very basic.

Wasn't it good enough for prod? And so we we then pivoted away from that too, but that's sort of how that was, like, how we were winding down the road of how to solve this problem.

Now where did it start from the early from from the first iteration? Like, who was the team, and was there was it bootstrapped, or was there funding? Or what was, like, the 1st month or or negative, you know, 1 month? Like, what did that look like?

We were very, very lucky, and we raised right out of the gate. So Oh, wow. Before there was anything, before we had incorporated. And, we were very, very lucky to do so, and and it was life changing in that because our I think that if we had not done that, I don't think Jam would exist today.

Oh, wow.

That is you know, when we started, we we had a rocky start. It took us a long time to figure out product market fit, and I think that, it would have been very hard to invest in us as we were just iterating, churning out new versions of Jam. Will this work? Will this work? And nothing was working.

Right.

And so fast forward today, a 150,000 users, but in the beginning, that was not obvious. And so we were very, very lucky to raise out of the gate. And, actually, now the, advice that, I tell founders is if you can, raise before there is anything. Because it is counterintuitive, but it is easier to raise when you have nothing than when you Because when you have nothing, it's all potential, and they're making a bet in you. When thing, even if it's very early, now it's you're looking at that, and you can see is it working or is it not?

And does it wow you or does it not? And the bar is so high to get something that has results and would wow you, and so it's, it's just a lot harder.

How would you say for early founders, especially first time founders, though, that, like, if there's nothing I feel like maybe it's just also this environment. It's a little harder to be like, I have an idea and a deck, and I promise that I can do this. And people go, totally. I would love for you to try and see if you can do this. Like, what would you say, you know, a little bit in in in this environment, but, like, of of sort of how to go about the either the story or the process of doing that pre pre product.

Yes. So story and process. I would say this is hard to pull off, but if you're going to try, here's how I would do it. The first is we, as people, are so bad at selling ourselves because it's uncomfortable, and we're too familiar with, like, we're too familiar with all our flaws. But if you ask your best friends or your your closest colleagues, how would they market you to a, like, pre seed VC, they actually probably have a really good pitch for you.

So Yeah. As an example, like, imagine someone just starting out. They might not know how to market themselves, but their friend might, like, if their friend were to pitch them to a VC, they might be like, this person works on the fastest growing team at this company. They, they have years of industry experience. They personally were looking for a product like this.

They are the expert in the market that cares the most about this. If someone's gonna make this company happen, it's them.

Right.

Versus, like, that person might just be like, I'm x whatever company. Right? Like, it's just like

Yeah. Totally.

And so asking your friends. And then on on the process side, a lot of I used to be a VC, and I I would read every single cold email because you actually don't get that many. Most people just don't reach out. Mhmm. I think the mistake that most people make in cold email is they try to sell you in the first email.

Right. Instead of thinking sell, like, the fundraise, but rather compel a meeting, you would write a different email. So, like, a a pitch would be like, we're doing this. We have this traction. Here's the deck.

Do you wanna call?

Don't you want in on this? It's like, yes. No.

But a compelling outreach might be like Twitter DM or a short email, like, 3 sentences. That's like, I was just listening to you on this podcast. We think about this the exact same way. I'm actually, like, about to quit my job to start this company. Let me know if I can show you my plans and hear your thoughts.

Yeah. That's great. I like that.

Right? Like, it's still a far reach, but a better shot than Totally.

And also less pressure if your if your whole mindset is to to be in just networking mode and getting used to to meeting people and sort of saying, you know, let let me know how I can help. And, like, you're and you're and it's less about, I really wanna tell you this thing, and I wanna see if you're into regular check. And if you're but you're if you're just in reach out mode, then you also don't have to have all the answers, and you don't have to be sort of right. It's just about being you, and seeing if you can seeing if you can connect with other like minded people. And then when you're ready to sort of start raising, you also have more and more of a of a kind of, group to to touch base with, which is that's so great.

I love that. Cool. So so you raised, and then were the early investors okay with the 4 years of of or 3 years of pivots? Were you like, we've got a new thing. Here's what it is.

Okay. I got it. I got it. Like, was that how was that?

In our in our 18 months of trying to figure out what this product should be. Okay. So I think so we got very, very lucky. And in that, we raised from what I would describe as patient capital.

Mhmm.

I've seen other friends start startups in our exact same position, be, like, 18 months in, still figuring things out, and their investors give up on them, and they tell them, hey. You should just return the capital or you should pivot and do something else.

Oh, wow.

But our investors were very patient with us. And they said and they said, it's you're iterating. Let's, like, keep iterating. Let's see what's there. And and if they had not encouraged us to keep going or if they had actually, like, told us to give up, Jam would would not exist.

But it's Right. This Jam. Like, let me show you something I was looking at today. Okay. I'm looking at, a, a post that Lenny wrote on Lenny's newsletter about product market fit.

And in it, he has this really awesome chart, with on one side, you see all these logos of successful SaaS companies that you, you know, know and love. And then the x axis is how many years it took them to get to product market fit. And it's like my favorite companies are here. Like, Notion took 3 years to first field product. Airtable took 4 years.

It's like, you know, to build a really valuable business, it just takes a lot of shots on goal. It's really, really hard to invent something from scratch. It's never been invented. And just Yeah. Going to take a long time.

And and VCs who have been around a while know that, and they get it. But VCs that are newer to the game might not, and they might be Right. Easy money because they, like, just started being VCs in 2021. And so if you have a choice and you can raise from VCs that you think are more patient, it could extend it could give you a shot that otherwise you wouldn't be able to make.

I love seeing Figma at the 5 year mark.

Isn't it just incredible? So the Figma story is amazing. When they originally started, it I I I heard it was a drone company, originally.

And so and Slack was an in browser game. They it was an in browser game company that they had started, and, basically, you would you would sort of play with other people sort of like a a massive online multiplayer. And it was about 7 giants and their dreams, you know, whatever. And and there was a grand, you know, a grand launch, and it had fanfare, but then it didn't really work, and it kinda like and and then to be able to pivot, what was happening was internally for the development of that game. They were using an old school like IRC chat to be able to talk back and forth.

And so they're, like, basically backing up and thinking, well, what should we sort of pivot to? And they think about this this old IRC chat and what it doesn't do, but if it did do this, then it could so it's almost like the tool that they were using to build this other game that did not happen, they pivoted into a multibillion dollar company, like, you know, years in, which is amazing. I love that I love that chart, though. That's great. I'm gonna I'm gonna share that in the notes because it's really nice to also see you know, I think, you know, I I feel that initial early pressure of and I know these are all learnings, but, like, sending out the first one or two investor emails and feeling like the next one just has to, like, blow everybody's socks off.

Like, You know what I mean? Like, you just feel like, oh my gosh. I gotta I gotta show that we just tripled our users in, like, a month or whatever. And and I think just in the past week or so, I've I've I've come to a lot more realization of being and feeling more comfortable of just I stopped, we we started doing paid ads, and we were getting people signed up, but, you know, I don't I don't know how good how good this sort of, fit was for the for the initial users that were signing up and were sort of trying, but I just turned ads off. And we're just gonna pivot for a little while, like, and, like, try a different segment and try something specific and but it's nice to be able to sort of, I don't know, have feel comfortable in in exploring that without feeling like I've gotta prove x to to so and so by, you know, x day.

So I know that will change quite a bit in the future. But

That process is just so inherently uncomfortable as a human because the reason why humans have existed for so long is because our brains are wired to do things that get us closer to the goal. And when things are not getting us closer to the goal, then we, you know, do something else. Right? And so it is it is the but to get to product market fit, you have to do the exact opposite. You have to just keep trying despite seeing no results, and you have Right.

So long it's crazy.

Yeah.

And it will it hurts your brain. It it and there's no way it can't because the human response is to feel pain when you are trying to do something and not succeeding so that you pivot your strategy. Like, that is a survival mechanism. And so no matter what, even if things are going well at this phase where it's just, like, early, like, pre PMF, it is just uncomfortable, like, physically and emotionally.

I and I almost think that a lot of companies, you know, get get so complacent because they lose that early ability to back all the way up and go, is this working? Are we being left behind or whatever? And and making sure that it's only about those little incremental updates on a regular basis. And so then you have someone come up out of nowhere. And we see this with AI and other things like that.

The companies that have been supposedly doing it for years, but nobody really knew about it. And then all of a sudden, you get, like, an open AI or somebody come up and just, like, eat everybody's lunch is because everyone was fairly complacent in in in sort of taking the safe route versus, I think, probably losing a lot of that early startup mentality of continuing to sort of back up. Go all the way down the mountain to then take a different route and climb all the way back up again. No. That's a good point.

And and getting used to the uncomfortability of it, is And it sounds like also you all you your team kind of got used to that process. Right? And I bet that's been good.

Yes. And, we we have such an amazing team. And one of the things that I love about the personalities on the team is that people are drama free. So when things were not working, we just talked about, oh, what's our hypothesis? And there was no assigning blame.

No one was like, well, I had this idea. Like, it was just it was just very basically, we could spend our energy and effort thinking about outside the company, not inside the company. And I I know that's important at every stage of company, but especially in those early days where nothing is going to be working for 2 years, it's just so important, like, if you can hire a drama free team.

How did you hire a drama free team?

Okay. The we did not hire right away. Rather, the we worked with contractors for a really long time. And, I thought at the time this is unusual, but I've learned since this is not that unusual. Like, Calendly was built by a team of contractors in Ukraine.

I love Calendly. I use it every single day.

I do.

Great company. Like, great SaaS business, built by contractors. So we we did the same thing. We didn't yet have on day 1 people who we were ready to, like, bring on board first hires, and so we built with a contracting firm in Poland until we found the people who we were like, this is these are our these are our first hires. This is our team.

Yeah. I I actually think a lot of that's changing, and I think now it even feels weird to talk to somebody on the phone or on Zoom a couple of times and then be like, I would like to permanently bring you on my team forever, and I have no idea how you handle stress or other people or whether you're the next person at work. But, like, it's just from this sort of, like, polished view of a couple of times. Well, that's a funny joke, and that's so oh, that's so interesting. And now I would I would like you to sign on forever.

I've I've done the same thing. I've, everybody's been contract, and I think it it almost takes those first couple of months and and a couple of hard periods of getting over something to sort of see how people see how people react, or who brings also ideas to the table, or or who sort of, you know, gets into a hard spot and and really just sort of shies away from it and doesn't you know what I mean? And and sort of seeing some of that stuff before you, before you commit. And I think we're actually gonna get more and more into a place where more people are gonna be just contracting to move from company to company to learn different things versus, yeah, whatever the I the opposite of please come work for our company forever is the assumption. And then it's more just sort of like, you know, you you you try and learn from a number of different companies in 1 to 2 years since.

So I love that. I love working with people at a time.

One one thing that, is I think, super cool is that 2 of our earliest contractors back from back in those days are now at Jam. Oh, yes. So one one was from the Polish, development agency. He's now building Jam's AI, like, as we well, I guess now it's late for him, but, like, a few hours ago, he was building Jam's AI as we speak. And then the other one oh, it is I love this.

So, in the earliest, earliest days, it was me and Urduffa in the code base. And, pretty soon, I was creating more problems in the code base than I was contributing. And one day, Urduffa had a conversation with me that was like, I don't know how to tell you this, but you you can't

No more pull requests. Please don't submit anymore.

And I was like, that's perfectly fine, but who's gonna make the product pretty? Because I would mostly go in and make CSS changes, so I wanted it to look a certain way.

Right.

And so I was like, okay. Let me find a contractor who will make the CSS changes for me. And I went on Dribbble, which is like a design portfolio website, and I searched for the word CSS. I was like a designer that knows about CSS. And I found this guy, Petter, based in Belgrade.

And 4 years later, he is now the 1st engineer on Jam's growth team. And, like anyway, so the the contractors that you bring in stay with the company and, you know, like, they leave their DNA. You know?

Totally. Actually, the first episode of of this podcast, I interviewed Tay who created, who founded gun. Io. And gun is great, by the way, of essentially their team's amazing call and say, like, I need a full stack developer, but I need somebody pretty senior. And the first interview I had was Martina, who is now our CTO.

And, and so after after Martina came on, the second interview I had was Max, and Max came Max was grade 2. And then I was on Tejas podcast, and during that podcast, he was like, you should totally have a podcast. And so I started it, and then he was the first one on this podcast. So, like, it's such an interesting, But from a Martina perspective, she's amazing. And I'll tell you what's interesting is that she came on and basically was able to take this early.

We're gonna pivot all the time, and we're gonna do stuff that I'm gonna try and make order out of chaos, but also does it with such, like, grace and and just calm demeanor and just sort of like, no. Hold on a second. Let me think think this is the way we're gonna do it. And I even had over the next couple of months with working with her, which, you know, which is how I we sort of made the decision was over the next couple of months with her working with her, I had 3 to 4 people randomly out of the blue just ping me on Slack, and they're like, I just wanna say, it's so good working with Martina. Like, it's so

you know

what I mean?

That's amazing.

But those are one of the then you sort of say, hey. I would like you to come on the team, and let's work together. But I think that's I think it's such a smart way to do it is and now that between, you know, all the contra and Upwork and Fiverr and I think working through a number of different, iterations, especially really early on and and not sort of committing to a team full out, you know, makes so much sense because then you can really, really get a sense of, of who they are when they're working with the team. That's amazing. I love that.

What, where's Jam headed? Like, what where is what's the what's the 3 what's the 3 year version from now? Is is AI debugging everything on your site and and and and writing up the Jira tickets.

The other day, I was on a call with one of our, customers, and and we were talking about how it's going using Jam, all things. But what she was building was just incredible. Like, at her job, she and her team build software that helps people do drug discovery faster so they can save lives sooner. And I was like Oh, wow. I was like, Jam Jam exists to make software development a little speedier so that you can ship those, like, futuristic features that have such an impact on your customers, like, sooner.

Like, what are we here for? It's, like, accelerate the future. Right? Yeah. And just talking to her, like, I I was like, I feel I feel so I I feel so blown away that we can play even a little part in in her team's innovations going out the door sooner.

And so we want to do so much more of that. Like, we exist to help our customers do more for their customers and and to do it in less time. And there are lots of places where we can help. So, right now, all the all half a 1000000 bugs caught with Jam every month are web based, but what about mobile teams? What about teams building native apps for desktop?

Mhmm. We just expanded to a brand new product. So, previously, before last Tuesday, Jam was mostly used by, like, product and QA teams. It's internal bug reporting. But, actually, who reports bugs the most?

It's end users and customers. And so we we just shipped Jam for customer support, helping end customers report Jam. And so we just wanna cover the certain area of bugs. We wanna make sure no one's spending time, like, wasted just following up on bug details that it's like, fix that fast and get back to building because that's actually what's important.

I love the intercom, like, app. It's so good that to be able to because I've been in that place so many times where you're trying to build something for someone and they say, hey. X y z doesn't work. And immediately in your mind, you're like, okay. What version of Chrome are you on?

And are you on a Mac? Are you on a PC? What's your screen size? Like, you all these things sort of go through your head that you wanna get out. And instead of having to do that word sound of, like, questions, You're literally like, can you I'm gonna send you something.

And if you can just sort of recreate that, it's gonna give me all the info I need. It's it's so amazing again to to collapse that, like, being able to close something out for, for a customer sooner is amazing.

Oh my gosh. It's so it's it makes me so happy to hear that. Thank you. And I'm and I'm really excited about this launch. So it, we launched it last Tuesday.

There's already a team. They've got, I mean, 100 they've got hundreds of bugs reported through this. Like, their full team of 30 support agents is, like, using this product, and, I'm I'm just I'm just super excited because for a customer, it's frustrating too to go back and forth to support. So you feel like no one believes you. Like

Totally. I could I could see a little bit of of how, I guess, on mobile or others being able to have jam packages installed, right, that have the ability to kind of, like, listen and hear and and then kind of report back, you know, and then obviously with with integrating with AI could be so so great. It's it's amazing. I could I could see the, like, jam ecosystem coming together of how it, you know, squat just squashing bugs like crazy.

It's super exciting to build. It's also, it requires the company and the engineering team to sort of, like, kind of grow up a bit. So up until now, all of our code base is written around the idea that Jam is a browser extension. But in order to expand to new products, we have to unfurl that from our code base, and we need to structure ourselves differently where there's, like, core business logic over here with a layer of wrappers over here with, like, with a layer of applications for each platform. And so it means structuring the team differently.

It means structuring the code base differently. And so, it's interesting on multiple levels even beyond the product itself. Like, it's it's fun to do.

Yeah. That's amazing. How do you everybody's remote. Is that right? Or is there is there an office in

Everybody's remote. Is remote, but I will tell you that I missed the office. And while I wouldn't give up anything to work with this specific team, the one thing I wish that was different was that we're all together.

I think it could be funny that tomorrow you should go into Slack and do an at channel that says I am now mandating a a back to office. And you're like, starting today, everyone will be in the office, and you're like super, super duh. And and then I could just see everybody in the DMs being like, where do I go? Where do I show up? Like, what do I like?

That is what

that's amazing. I'm so fascinated by all the by all the the return to office in this way. And I I I almost feel like it's legacy management that doesn't really have a good sense of how to sort of connect with people, you know, across the globe in different ways. But I've thought about that too that I don't wanna I don't think we wanna expand into a place where we're buying offices for offices' sake that you've got all these, like, leases and overhead in multiple cities and all those sort of things. But I do think that having sort of innovation and culture centers in the right way where you've got places that people can come on a on a monthly or quarterly or whenever they want to to be able to sort of connect around some things, but, I don't think that we will ever have, like, I don't know, my office desk with a picture frame with a you know what I mean?

That I like I I I go there on a regular basis. It's still interesting to be able to have such a global team, and I think we're in 6 time zones, 5 time zones, but, and to still be able to have culture like that. How do you how do you keep culture up in in a remote team that's that's all over the world?

I used to think culture would mean things like virtual happy hours. Like but really building the company, culture is the way that we do everything. And so work doing the work reinforces how we do the work here at Jam. And, like, part of the team culture is look. The team is just super positive.

Like, when we have a Slack channel called what's cooking where we share in progress work. It's like for the moment where it's like, this finally works, and you just show someone. And you click in there, and the comments are always just like, oh my god. Like, you know, people have this excitement. And that's part of the culture.

But every single time someone shares their work and every single time someone comments positively, it reinforces it. And so if you kinda zoom out what what is culture, it's it's it's just a self reinforcing cycle. Like, how do we talk to each other, work with each other, respect each other, all the things, in the company? How are you thinking about it for Stacklist?

I think we we do a lot of jokes. Yeah. There are a lot of there are a lot of a lot of jokes passed around. I think it's I think it's how you interact to your point around it's the it's the little in between times. Do we start a meeting and say, okay, guys.

You know, we're we're 2 minutes past the hour. We we should get this meeting going, or are we sort of, like, you know, the first five minutes that everyone sort of chatting about this thing that was going around x. You know what I mean? This post, have you seen this thing, or what did you watch last night? Or and and then also signing off as always everyone always sort of has 5 or 10 minutes of catch up.

You know? Like, how are the kids? What did you do last weekend? And and it's almost having a bit of that that normal water cooler conversation, but nothing is rushed in that sort of, like, formal meeting. And we do a lot of quick huddles and just, like, catching up and what you're working on, and what do you wanna work on, and, you know, and and it's so interesting sending audio messages and video messages, in Slack, sometimes a lot more than just text.

So there's a number of us that'll do that, that'll just send, like, an audio or even just do a Zoom video and just say, like, hey. I saw what you're saying. That sounds great. Here's what I'm working on. Just wanted to tell you that.

If you wanna catch up later, like, cool. And just having more of that. And I think, for me, it's trying to remove all of that kind of I've been in, I don't know, big consultant, big, you know, that the sort of formality of the of the the suit and the white pressure and and all those sort of things about how things should run. And I think I don't know. I just I I I think we try and create a culture where you're you just enjoy.

There's no I know a lot of people have the, like, you know, no jerks or or we don't tolerate this sort of thing. I think it's about also creating the energy that that every interaction you have, you just like you know, you almost wanna stay on longer talking about stuff and catching up, and you just sort of create and permeate that energy through everything. And, yeah, it's so interesting how organic it is, and yet it's it's thoughtful in in the ways that we try and, like, interact with each other every day. Even though Croatia, Serbia, Philippines, Germany, New York, Colorado, Georgia. Like, everybody's everywhere, and yet it we feel so close and tied to each other every day.

So

It sounds like, you're building, like, the human company. Like, we are humans building stack list is sort of like what I'm hearing from you, where it's, we talk, like, we talk about our lives at the last 5 minutes of the meeting. We don't just chat in Slack, but, like, we'll bring our voice to, like, show there's a human behind here excited about what you're doing. Like, it just like, every all the examples you were sharing, I was like, oh, it's just so human.

And I think that's that's that goes to the principles of Stacklist, the idea that everything in stackless that we're building towards is curated for it's for humans by humans, and the curation the curation is where we you know, Google Gemini or or OpenAI chat gpt is not gonna be able to curate my life for me. There's something about that, like, that time that you try that case for the first time and, like, and you go, oh, I gotta write that down because I'm gonna send that to a friend or I wanna text it to something. Like, there's there's there's and then when you get to a party and you're telling about, like, oh my gosh. I went to this movie or I saw this show, and I wanna share it with you, that that's it's basically trying to remove all the barriers and all the, like, silo data that are in our lives that we don't even realize and just be able to cut that out and be able to go like, oh my gosh. I got a thing.

I wanna send it to you. And you're like, sounds great. And now I can experience it, and and it's all it's all about those human moments. So, yeah, that's an interesting it's an interesting POV that essentially building a human company that tries to make it easier to share human moments.

Right. And that's and I love I mean, as soon as you said it, it was like, of course. Like, that's the differentiator. Like, no SEO and no AI is going to tell you what's so lovable about something as a human, but, but a stat by, like yeah. By humans for humans is like yeah.

I mean

So totally. Yeah. Gemini can't tell or perplexity can't tell me why that French place down the, yeah, the street is so delicious. Because there's something different when you try the mussels, you know, at a place and you're like, oh my gosh. I just wanted to is it acceptable to turn the bowl up and just, like, drink all the juice in the bottom of the mussels?

Like, there's that moment that nothing's ever gonna be able to do that, but what you can do is, like, save that and then add some notes. Like, they don't mind if you drink all the muscle juice or whatever. Like and that context is what we normally send through text. Right? Where you text it and you're like, oh my gosh.

Ask for Tom. He owns the place. He's totally gonna hook you up. And that is the sort of piece of it, which is not a bookmarking app, and it's not a a list of links. It's, it's a mechanism to be able to sort of share that context of what it feels like to experience that thing.

It's the, it's the joy of life app.

Mhmm.

It reminds me do you ever listen to this American life? Yeah. They did a segment with an author who wrote every single day something that gave him joy. And he reads he reads, like, an excerpt from it on This American Life. It's lovely if you ever, like, want to just walk around and, like, feel happy to yourself.

I mean, it's such a good listen. Right? One of the joys that he wrote and and read in that segment became part of something that we do at Jam, which is one of the joy that that that he shares on this episode of This American Life was, he had this little, like, baby tomato plant, and he was carrying it home. He was, like, flying home. And he's going through the airport, and he's, like, putting the little tomato plant, like, through TSA and, and, you know, he the seat next to him in the air in the airplane was empty, so he put it on the seat.

And, like, the flight attendant would come and, like, check on how his, like, little baby tomato plant is doing. And he's like, there's something about being, like, a grown man carrying this, like, tiny little plant and, like, taking care of it that, like, it makes everyone around you smile. It's, like, so joyful. And I I love that episode. I think that's like, it's just delightful.

And, and it inspired for us, our latest jam swag, which is we're now handing out, bug eating plants. And because the joy of flying home from the Goodallica conference, carrying your bug eating plant, you can't just, like, stuff it in your bag. You gotta you gotta carry it. And, like, that's a wonderful moment to give to someone anyway. The

I love it. And I think those are the things that make those are the things that make you want to sort of be a part of something and that that tie you back to sort of the joy of being a kid and, like, discovering and building. And it's not just the sort of, like I don't know. You get the the feeling of traditional business of, like, are your reports done? Did you get them in on time?

Did you format your email correctly or whatever? And it's more just sort of, like, everybody connecting and sharing those moments while building something at the same time and having fun doing it. So it's I love that. Well, thank you so much. This was amazing, and you.

I always love talking to you and and watching what you're building, and we will always be rooting the Jam team. And speaking of, we're building out a stackless profile with all the thing. Did you see it?

Ivana, you can send me in Slack. I think it's awesome.

Yeah. And we're actually I think, I think Prince is gonna send it back to Ivana tomorrow, and then what we're doing is also we've got a little form, that if the team can fill out, like, I don't know, collect some of the favorite playlist and books from the team, is to basically fill out, like, to flesh out some other stacks to put because one of the things that I love about this is, like, we're actually encouraging when people build out stack list that I don't know. Whatever the opposite of an a normal link in bio, which is, like, just the facts, like, here are my websites. That's sort of like, well, I don't know. What's the team into?

Like, here's what so and so listens to when they jam out to work, or, like, here's what so and so's reading right now or whatever, which sort of makes it more 360 of the curation of this, of this team versus, again, like, yes, I can list out links for you and, you know, who's who's gonna be excited about just seeing a list of links. So,

Love it.

Yeah. So I'll be excited to we should have that done this week, which is fun.

I'm so excited for Jim's 1st stack list.

Yes. Amazing. Well, thank you again. And Thank you. I appreciate it.

This is amazing.

This is so fun.