Hi @lylemckeany! Love this question! Thank you! I've found that my writing goes in stages, depending on where I'm at in my life. - When I was a child, I loved writing poetry. And angry notes in my diary about my parents (sorry Mom and Dad). The writing was essential in helping me process emotions. - When I was working in consulting, I wrote bits of a few satirical graphic novels about the corporate world. I loved creating fantastic worlds out of the mundane. - During my time working in the alcohol industry (and after), I wrote multiple comedy screenplays and TV pilots. Though I loved my job, I wasn't fully satisfied. I used any extra energy I had outside of work (and my social life) to write. It was glorious and brought me so much joy. I do hope to get back to this type of writing again soon. - As a founder, it's challenging (at least it is for me) to devote large swaths of time to creative writing. Plus, I am pretty singularly focused on solving painful problems for customers and building a massive business. So my writing has shifted to blog posts, all the things I write for work (I love making documents!), and then - and this is key for me - journaling / self development work. I do a ton of writing about what's arising in my life and what my emotions are. It helps me work through issues, realize things about myself, learn/grow, be able to reflect. It comes out in a variety of ways - sometimes poems, sometimes regular journaling, sometimes stories. For me, writing means exploring the self. It's about processing experiences, observations and thoughts. Writing needs space and time, and I do believe that creativity can be forced (i.e. scheduled for a certain time). I believe that the more we write, the more we can process the things happening in our lives and grow as people. It's also a brilliant method for capturing one's state of mind in order to look back at it later.

@marie_prokopets Thanks for the thoughtful answer! Writing has done all those things for me too. I write what I call personal, vulnerable, and sometimes funny stories about the messiness of life. There's been a marked difference in my mental health since I've made creative writing a priority the past year. It's magic.

@lylemckeany That's beautiful! Thank you for sharing :) Writing really does have the power to heal / help us grow / bring happiness! I'm so glad to hear you've made it a priority in your life.

@marie_prokopets Totally agree with "the more we write, the more we can process the things happening in our lives" 👍 One Q about journaling: are there any routins around this? Something like weekly review when you re-read all notes of past week etc. Thanks!

@pavel_ivanovsky I don't have a routine as it relates to journaling, but if you figure one out I'd love to hear it! Typically I just journal as things come up. Though your question makes me wonder if I should set some scheduled journaling time :) Another method I've tried is from The Artist's Way: https://www.amazon.com/Artists-W... You do what's called Morning Pages where every morning when you wake up you write down 3 pages worth of journaling, in order to clear all the crap out of your brain so you can have more room for creativity.

Hi @hnshah! Surprising to see you here. 😹 What a question, too! "What's the #1 piece of advice that you wish that you could have given your younger self before you took your first job out of college?" My first job was actually after my graduate degree 2 years post college. I would have told myself then (and I'm sure you would argue that I could tell myself this same thing today) to be more sure of myself. Even though I didn't have the experience or the specific knowledge. Being sure of myself would have helped propel me forward faster. I would have asked for more money sooner, have been more confident and likely been promoted faster, have taken bigger risks and spoken up more. What would you tell your younger self right out of college? 🙃

@marie_prokopets thanks for indulging my question. I'd tell myself to learn how to ask other people to help you.

@5harath Hi Sharath! Thanks for having me :) "1. From a mental state, how did you take the pivot?" I was so very excited! We had found an opportunity that was even larger than the initial document search opportunity. And we were having so much interest from IT teams, so it was clear signal that people would buy our product. But then, enter in the doubt. I was worried - were we wrong? Would we regret focusing on document access control and stopping our work on document search? The doubt was quickly demolished by logic. We dove right in to understanding the rationale for changing directions, and why the new direction was way more appealing than the old. FOMO can pop up, but it's easy to get rid of, too. "2. What advice you give for founders who are still in PMF phase and also thinking about pivoting?" My advice to founders who are thinking about pivoting is to be absolutely sure about the pivot. Ask yourself all the questions - the hard ones included. Are you sure it's the right direction? Is your hunch backed by data and customer insights? Can you build the product you want to build? Will people buy it? Why are you dropping the other thing you were working on before? Why are you pivoting in the first place? Is it for the right reasons? Inquiry should help you get to the right answer - document what you learn and make sure you're being real and unbiased. And of course, make sure you've talked to customers and done your research.

Hey @smalter! Thanks for describing the cycle you go through - sounds exciting and also a bit maddening 🙃. And I can totally relate! Our path went like this… dogo (pitch deck software) ---> Draftsend (PDFs with audio) ----> FYI (document search) ----> Nira (document access control for IT). For the first two of those ideas our excitement fell off a cliff as soon as we launched. I attribute the drop in excitement for us to a lack of understanding of the customer. With those first two products, my co-founder and I did minimal customer research. We really didn’t deeply understand their problems and existing solutions to the problems. We were shooting in the dark a bit. And so once we launched, there was nothing solid supporting the products. We could have made them work with a bunch of effort and time, but the foundation of customer needs was missing, which meant the products were doomed. FYI and Nira were totally different. We lived and breathed the customer. This focus on the customer automatically bakes in learning, and also begets constant improvement of the product. We did all the research you can think of. Surveys (NPS, product/market fit, feature value analysis, pricing), customer research calls, sales discovery calls, user tests, user research calls, analyzing usage and funnels, competitor research. Because FYI and Nira started with the customer, our excitement never waned. We did, however, end up pivoting away from the document search product. That’s because we found a much bigger opportunity to pursue, and were pulled there by the customer (IT teams). And thanks for the excitement about Nira :) We’re excited too! And I can’t wait to see what you’ve been building too.

@marie_prokopets huh! that's really interesting because i saw a high level of customer obsession and research with dogo and draftsend, at least compared to what i would normally do 😛

@smalter Definitely not that much for dogo and Draftsend :) We just did a bit of UX research, and had a few conversations with users and potential customers but they were pretty biased.

@smalter @marie_prokopets Thanks for sharing the journey of learning. From the perspective of Activity Theory, Pivot means the Transformation of Object.

@smalter @marie_prokopets this is so excited to read, It actually normalice the different stage of struggling but how we need to keep going and focus on the customer until finding the right path.

Hi @siddhesh_lokare1! What does a pivot do to your mindset? Our pivot made us 1) more resilient to change and 2) even more conscious of true customer pain and business needs. In the midst of a pivot, you'll also need to take an unbiased look at the current situation of your business and make decisions based on that. It's a great practice to do anything, not just when pivoting. How can a marketer use comedy as a weapon to convert more leads? Comedy and creativity go hand in hand. And, marketing is of course tied to creativity. So, I’d say that comedy and marketing are meant for each other. Having a strong sense of humor helps you be more creative as a marketer. Also, you have an appreciation for the creative process. Comedy is all about expressing yourself, observing things and communicating what you observe, and also knowing your audience. All of these qualities are present in good Marketing. In particular, knowing your audience and speaking to them in the best way possible is a skill to hone as a marketer.

@melissajoykong Hey Melissa! I love that you've identified the social pressure to have one "thing", and that you see yourself as a "multi-passionate person". Knowing you and your interests, I would absolutely call you a multi-passionate person, and I think that's beautiful. It's so wonderful that we as humans have the skills to be good at many things at once, to shift our careers and lives, to learn new things, and even start over in our 50s or 60s with new skills. I think oftentimes we can create lots of stories about why something we're doing is wrong or bad or will be negatively perceived. I've had my fair share of stories. "If I tell people about my raunchy comedy scripts, they won't think I'm professional" "If anyone finds out I'm into crystals they'll judge me" "How can I be bad ass at business and also woo woo spiritual?" "I need to dress uber professionally for anyone to take me seriously, even if I hate what I have to wear." These are literally just stories and not based in reality. It's your brain trying to keep you safe. You can either ignore the stories, or rewrite them. For example, I am a multi-passionate person and people love me for it. Or, I've got a lot of passions and I'm even more of a gift to the world thanks to them. You are awesome no matter what you do Melissa! And the fact that you can do so many things and have so many interests makes you even more amazing, because it's the truest manifestation of who you are. My advice to you and anyone else who has or hasn't figured out their "one thing" is just to be yourself. Unapologetically yourself. That's what will make you happiest and makes the world a better place!

@omerperchik thanks for the question! Hiten and I loved building the document search app, and would have continued working on it, except a better idea presented itself. We stumbled upon the idea for Nira (our new brand) when we were talking to one of our document search app customers. He was literally freaking out because people who shouldn't have had access to his company documents still did have access. Our tool showed him that, even though it wasn't what we built the tool for. In some cases, the people who were able to get into his documents had maintained access to company documents for years, even though they no longer worked with the company. We created some mock up designs for a new product that would solve the access issues, and shared them with some IT folks. That's when we realized that we were really on to something. Every IT team we talked to had the issue we wanted to solve. We were completely pulled to pivot. The toughest choice was deciding if we should build the IT tool in addition to document search, or focus entirely on the IT tool. So we took a bit of time to think about whether we should drop the document search tool. Here were a few things that helped us decide to focus entirely on the IT tool. - Committees ruled the buying process: In trying to sell our product to companies, we quickly learned that there was no one buyer or single owner for document search tools. Instead, there were committees. The committees, unfortunately, struggled to get consensus and make decisions. We met with committee after committee and saw enterprise search initiatives die again and again. - Too many apps: The need to build integrations for different collaboration apps was huge because every company used a different set of apps. Google Workspace, Office 365, Box, Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, Miro, Notion, Coda, Figma, and more. This meant we had to integrate with app after app. We ended up building 24 integrations before we paused the effort. - Inadequate APIs: We learned that early and new APIs, while exciting, are a drag. Some products took years to add APIs, and once they were ready we quickly realized their functionality was inadequate for what we needed to build. Plus, even the APIs of more established apps were missing information we needed to populate our interface. It became a never-ending mountain of work and even then it would lead to an inconsistent experience for our customers. - Adoption issues: Our goal was to have widespread adoption of our tool across an organization. It’s usually called “wall-to-wall” adoption. But oftentimes departments use specific tools in isolation from the rest of the company. Even though a company might use G Suite, the legal and finance teams might refuse to use it and instead collaborate on Office 365. How could we expect our search tool to get full company adoption if the collaboration apps can’t in the first place? - Locked down auth: Our strategy was to get adoption from the bottom up within companies. A groundswell of employee app usage would mean that we’d be able to sell in at the company level easier. Except many companies lock down the ability for employees to authenticate with apps without permission. Some even lock down the ability to download apps or install chrome extensions. We realized we wouldn’t be able to scale the business and get wall-to-wall adoption without a top-down sales motion.

@omerperchik @marie_prokopets Hi Marie, Typically (at least in my view) companies store documents internally and delegate employee access via Active Directory group membership/account. So your solution is for companies that store documents outside their networks correct?

@omerperchik @john_mirochnik you can check out our website here to learn more about how we solve the problem for IT teams: https://nira.com/. this is a problem that companies of all sizes have with their cloud-based document apps. as you can imagine we've built our product based on a ton of customer research, the method you mentioned where access to documents is clean and based on Active Directory groups isn't one that we've heard used by companies. in reality, document access is extremely messy and there's a ton of risk that companies are managing.

@marie_prokopets you mention that you and Hiten " loved building the document search app, and would have continued working on it, except a better idea presented itself." >> I'm curious what advice would you give someone entering the document search space? Is it a dead-end? It seems that the problem is real (I've seen it first hand!) and there aren't really good solutions out there (except for usefyi of course).

@dmarquez we believe that document search is still a massive opportunity. what we discovered is that in order to create the best possible experience possible for customers, it would take a level of engineering and product effort that - at the time - we were not willing to invest once we found the opportunity with Nira. The advice I would give to someone who is trying to build in the document search space is to really narrow down what apps they integrate with, deeply understand what the user and buyer personas are, and make sure the APIs they need to work with can enable the functionality for their target customers.

@jaskiran_kaur Hi Jaskiran! At different points of my career, I've had different motivations. At my worst (and in my youth), my motivation was to prove people who doubted me wrong. I hit significant milestones numerous times using this approach. But it didn't fill me up and it wasn't an extremely positive motivating force. At my best - and that's where I've been at for probably a decade now - I am motivated by learning. Even mistakes and roadblocks can help motivate me, because I inevitably learn as I move through them. Things can be challenging when you're building a product and a business from the ground up. You will have doubts. You will have moments when you question what you're doing. You will have moments of extreme joy and excitement. The best way to continue forward is to have a curious mindset and continue to learn through it all. I am personally also highly motivated by forward motion. Finishing a big new feature. Getting to a milestone. And especially in solving customer problems. Plus exercising my creativity drives me forward too. And of course, I'm also motivated by sharing what I've learned. Like in this AMA :) I'm happy to help others learn from my wins, mistakes and misadventures.

Hi @vartikamanasvi, I really really love these questions, thank you for asking them! Q: How do you find focus in this world that is noisy and chaotic? I think of the world as having lots of channels that I can tune to, and I then choose the channels I want to focus on. For example, one channel I avoid indulging in too much is social media. I never have the Facebook app installed on my phone. I also delete Instagram every time I notice myself spending too much time on it. And I don't put Twitter on my phone either! Any social media apps go into a folder on my phone called "Say aloud before opening" so I remind myself to be present to the fact that I'm going on them by literally calling it out, out loud. I also know what channels I want to focus on, like my business, coming from my heart, being happy, productive, laughing, relaxing and filling myself up (like with nature), and my friends and family. When my life deviates from the things I want to focus on, I do a lot of reflection and look to figure out why and what I can do to get back on course. It's not easy work at all, but it's absolutely worth it. Q: I'm curious how do you think about your life's work and purpose? As a general rule, I believe that the more I work on myself, the better person I will be for all the people I encounter in the world. Even when things are tough, I hold on to this belief, and the knowledge that I will come out of tough situations as a better person who can make a bigger/better positive impact on the world around me. I do this through a lot of self development - things like journaling, identifying patterns I want to change, thinking about how I can evolve/grow, being present to how I am in each moment. Years ago a dear friend taught me about the concept of being a gift to the world - the aim is to be the best gift to the world that you possibly can be. This enabled me to be happy, go after achievements, learn, and live life how I wanted to. All because it would result in a positive impact for those around me. This is how I look at my life's work and purpose. So one simple question to ask yourself is, how can I be the biggest gift to the world? On a more practical level, I allow myself to have goals and desires, but also allow for my path to be shaped by chance (and perhaps a bit of destiny, too). I've had a bit of a meandering career (undergrad in business, MA in english literature, consulting, corporate strategy/innovation, comedy writing, startup founder). In some cases I failed to do the thing I wanted to do, which led me to change paths. And in others I chose a different path when something new was presented to me. What helps is to release attachment to the outcome, and to allow what arises to arise. I also think it's OK to not have a clear answer about one's life purpose and work. It's OK to figure it out as you go. The journey is full of learning and growth - and (in my opinion) that's really what matters the most.

@sindhushivaprasad Hi Sindhu! What lessons have I learnt about shaping company culture and handling team collaboration, especially in a remote company? Shaping company culture at the earliest stages is reliant on knowing what's important to you as a founder. For my co-founder and I, customer obsession is incredibly important, and we make sure to bring people onto the team who share a similar mindset. Early on in the life of our company, I had wanted to rush and create company values since I was used to always having them from my pre-startup days, thinking that they would help instill the culture. But in reality we had to learn what our company values were (you can see where we landed at https://nira.com/careers/). Also a key learning is that you should make sure to hire folks that align with the types of people you want in your company. For example, being detail oriented is super important to us, so we do our best to make sure someone is detail oriented during the interview process. I think that all of these points are valid for companies, whether remote or not. Specific to remote, having a daily updates channel where everyone shares what they are working on is helpful in adding transparency. And making sure that things get repeated - during meetings, over Slack, in documents. Communication can be a big challenge for remote teams, so being as clear as possible helps. You can find more tips on overcoming communication challenges here: https://nira.com/remote-work-tip... On the topic of burnout, I personally think that if you're in the flow and happy, it's OK to work a bunch and be creative. Sometimes I just can't help myself, and find that I'm working late nights, not sleeping much, and having tons of fun! This used to happen to me with creative writing too, and not just with work. As long as you know yourself, and when to stop, I think this can be totally fine. For me personally, I can't do that for more than 3-4 days or else I start to get too tired. So I learned that I need a day after work binges to get some extra sleep. There can also be an unhealthy side to this. When you're not happily working and in the flow, but instead grinding through tasks and wishing you were getting rest. I've struggled a bit with this in the past, especially when I was a consultant and working insane hours, weekends and holidays. At the time, focusing on what I was learning and getting out of the job was good enough for me. But eventually I did end up leaving to do something I was more passionate about. One way we manage this in a remote setting is, we let people set their own hours. We have some folks who prefer to have time during their days to do personal life stuff, and then they like to crank out their work later in the day and evening. We also watch for signs of burnout and do our best to help people through it. On my end, I've been working to do a better job of disconnecting when I'm not working so that I can really fill myself up with my personal life - which is much easier said than done. And thank you for the congratulations about our rebrand/new product and launch of Nira! I really appreciate it!

@marie_prokopets Thanks for sharing, Marie! It's really interesting that you tried to shape culture from your values, rather than forcefully build it in a rush. I think most people fail to understand that culture is a sum of habits. Trying to build habits using your values and then turning that into company culture (as you did, from what I understand) is a slower but much more sustainable approach. Asking teammates what their preferred working hours are is also something I'm fully on board with. We do that at Pause (https://getpause.com) — some of us (ahem, me) like to keep strict hours because work-life balance runs out the window otherwise. To add to your valid points about burnout, I also believe that it's an individual problem, sure enough, but it can be dealt with through systems that cater to individuals. It's why we built burnout alerts into our time-off management tool, and use them in tandem with other emotional wellbeing signals — we're able to shift the focus from recovering from burnout to preventing it from the start. It'll be a wonderful day for the world when we're all able to get into the flow at our own pace without running too fast or too slow! Thanks once again for your detailed insights 🙌

Hi @oyeakhil - Best of luck on your pivot! Here's how to confirm if you should pivot. - Tons and tons of research: Is the new problem you want to solve a painful problem? Everything from surveys (NPS, feature value analysis, pricing), to customer research calls, and sales discovery calls. Plus loads of user testing (5 second tests and regular user tests), user research calls, and robust competitor research. Quantify this research as much as possible (by doing counts) so that it's not biased. - Customer interest: Make sure that it's clear that people want your product. Do you have people agreeing to POCs? Are they ready to sign paperwork? Are you sure that what you're going to build will get purchased? - Technical Chops: Does your team have what's required to build the product you want to build? - What are you giving up: Are you sure the thing you're giving up on is worth giving up? Is this absolutely a better direction? - Team interest: Is your team interested in the new direction? Is it something you want to build? - Market: Is the market big and growing? Is there space for you? Are you creating a new market (if yes, do you have the chops to do that?)?

@pradipcloud Hi Pradip! On the customer learning and execution side we really didn't have any obstacles. We were lucky to get large customers early and to learn from them and keep iterating the product. The biggest obstacles we hit was making a quick decision to put all of our focus on Nira, instead of working on the document search app. Initially, we wanted to build everything. Which included new features for the search app, plus the entirely new business. Hiten and I got pushed by one of our investors about that decision, which helped kick off our thinking seriously about choosing one direction over another. We were super super super convicted about the document access product. So the question was, was it worth pursuing the search app anymore? The answer was a big no, after we reflected more about the category and what it would take for us to keep building a product in it. We still think we build a really powerful product, but the choice between building a product for IT vs the search product was quite easy for us to make! As for SOC 2 (and now ISO for us too) experiences, I cannot wait to share more soon :)

@sharfunnisa_quadri I attribute my success across lots of different industries/jobs primarily to the many, many years I've had to do all of those things 😂. I've personally always optimized for learning, and doing so as quickly as I could. And when a certain planned path didn't materialize, I quickly switched to something else. This includes things like going from my MA in English Literature to a corporate writing job to consulting, as well as pivoting from dogo to Draftsend to FYI to Nira. So it's a combination of not being too attached to a particular outcome, and pursuing as many learning opportunities as quickly as possible. The idea is to learn and shift as quickly as possible. From a customer context, you should always be improving whatever it is that you've built to solve customer problems in the best way possible.

@scott_hanford Hi Scott! There are 3 different types of pivots: - Product Pivot - You learn that one part of your product is way stickier than the rest, and your customers care a lot more about it. - Customer Pivot - You learn that there is a new segment of customers willing to pay more for your product than your current customers. - Problem Pivot - As you talk to your customers and do research, you discover they have way bigger problems than the ones you’re trying to solve. The way you end up thinking about the pivot and the frameworks you use depend on the type of pivot it is. Ours was a Problem Pivot - there was simply a way more painful problem for us to solve, and for a very specific customer (IT). I'm pasting a bit from my response to Sanchit Korgaonkar here to explain how we validated the need to pivot and what our decision matrix was: - Customer Need - Is there a customer problem and need? The problem was there and super painful. We had folks lined up to use our product, and had interest from large customers and hyper-growth companies. It was very clear, and the more we dug in, the more conviction we had to pivot. - Technical Chops - Did we have what it would take to build this product? And do it really well? The answer was absolutely yes! We had learned all about working with APIs from the search app (we integrated with 24 collaboration apps). And we had a ton of knowledge that we'd learned over the years that we could use on the document access control product. We basically had years of experience, knowledge and tech that fit perfectly with the new direction. - Our Interest - We as a team had to be interested in the new direction. Or else, why build it? We were already in the document space, so it was an easy switch. We also love solving customer problems, so in that sense it was so so easy to shift our focus, since the customer problem was clear. And very painful for customers!

Hi @joel_hansen1! I'll be honest... I don’t keep an eye on any specific brands or communities. The work I do at Nira takes up a ton of my time and energy. And I have a co-founder in Hiten who keeps up with more things than most people I know, so he usually directs me to what I should look at. I like to stay super focused on our customers and internal company needs. New ideas come from our customer research, and we're able to keep track of trends that way too since often we hear about competitors from our customers.

@reddy2go I love this question, thanks so much for asking it! Comedy can be a bridge between people in any organization, regardless of size or type. Comedy isn't something to purposely bring in to an organization, though. It shouldn't be forced. If you are funny, let it out at work. If you don't gravitate to comedy, then there's no need to find awkward jokes to tell. The idea is to be your authentic self, at work and in all areas of your life. I firmly believe that people should be themselves at work, or else they'll slowly become dissatisfied, leave for another job, and generally experience less happiness than they should. This was a struggle I had for years. I so wanted to be my authentic self at work. But for some reason I felt that if I let my weirdness out - my eccentricities, way of dressing outside of work, and humor - I would be shunned, skipped over for promotions, and looked down upon. This was of course as far from the truth as one could possibly get. Once I let my true self out at work, I excelled even more. This included my sense of humor (which I let out within reason, since it can be a bit raunchy), my love of writing, and dressing more like myself. The more I was myself, the closer grew to the people I worked with - in part because of our shared sense of humor. As for comedy in the remote work world, there are plenty of filters to add to your Zoom meetings that can help with that :)

Hi @inboundy! Here’s what I look at when it comes to M&A and investment. I may have missed a few things, so feel free to ask followups :) Market - How large is the market today? How large can it be in the future? - What characteristics does the market have? - What about margins / financials? - What kind of complexities does the market have? (for example, lots of regulations, supply chain issues, high costs, etc.) - Are there tons of competitors? - Are there no competitors? Why? - What are the barriers to entry? - What are the market risks? What is the likelihood of those risks hurting the company? - Can the company overcome negative market dynamics? Why/how? Team - How kickass is this team? - Are they flexible? - How quickly do they learn? - What competencies does the team have? - What deficiencies does the team have? Can they overcome them? - How mature is the team? How well do they take feedback and evolve based on it? - Have they done this before? - Are they thoughtful? - Do they move quickly? - Do they handle setbacks gracefully/bounce back quickly? - What are their values? - For an acquisition, will the founders be involved? In what capacity can they help? Are they a valuable asset for the brand? Product and customer - What makes this product special? - Who is the customer? What are their attributes? - Who is the buyer? What are their attributes? - Does the buyer/customer have budget for this product? - What do customers think about the product? - What is the customer pain this product is solving? - Is the product hard to build? Growth potential - Why will this product become huge? - What is going to propel company growth? - Is the brand well known? - What can be done to grow the product even more? If the deal is an acquisition, there are also a bunch of considerations around why the team/brand/product is a good addition, like cost savings, upsells for customers, the addition of technical expertise, etc. All of this said, acquisitions and investments are often more emotional and less fact based. A competitor might be ominously looming, ready to snatch up customers, and so a company makes a less than rational decision to acquire it or another similar business. A brand has a cool factor that an executive really wants, so they make the deal go through. Someone wants a piece of technology, so they overpay to get it. As much as people try and try to objectively quantify, numbers can help tell the story that someone wants to project.

Hi @chiew_soon_aik Totally understand your surprise, we were very bullish on the opportunity we were pursuing and we didn't have to walk away from it, we chose to. Said another way, we could have kept going with document search and built that business and been happy. But we found a much more appealing opportunity in document access control. In terms of what we would do differently to ensure a higher success rate, we wouldn't do anything differently. We wouldn't be where we are today without things being exactly as they were. Businesses evolve and it all happens based on learning, so in my opinion the pivot was a normal part of growing and building a startup. I also answered a similar question to yours here: https://www.producthunt.com/disc... Also stay tuned for more insightful and transparent updates soon :)

Hi @designerbaniya So glad to hear that you followed along in our emails! Check out my response to Scott Hanford about the frameworks we used to determine if we should pivot. In terms of how folks responded, I've covered how our team responded in my response to Jonathan Ng. The customers for the document access control product were totally different from our document search customers, and we kept the document search app working for folks, so there wasn't anything to handle there. We of course made sure that the new problem we were going after (helping teams protect company documents) was painful and worth pursuing. We did this through a lot of customer research and by actually acquiring early customers with hundreds and thousands of employees. Our investors took the news incredibly well, because we had the customer research and adoption to back it. As long as you start with the customer problem and need (and in as unbiased a way as possible), you'll be able to take people on the journey with you.