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[00:01:25] Andrew Michael: Hey, Jo. Welcome. 

[00:01:27] Jonathan Widawski: Hey, man, how are you?

[00:01:28] Andrew Michael: I'm very good. Thanks, actually like how they flows. Hey Jo, welcome to the show. For the listeners. Joe is the founder and CEO of Maze. The testing platform, empowering product to marketing teams to test, learn and act rapidly.

Prior to Maze, Joe was the UX lead at Bam.tech and prior to that, he founded a company called Pin.gg game dedicated messaging service to stay in touch with your gaming friends. So actually today I wanna start with my first question is what was the goal of Pin.gg and what happened to it? 

[00:01:54] Jonathan Widawski: That's a very good question.

So Pin.gg was actually the premise of me. It's funny enough. As you said before, Maze I was teaching UX and [00:02:00] research in different agencies in Paris. My role was teaching people how to design teaching people, how to do research and then teaching people how to sell these things. And so the fun story was this is when we really experienced the pain of what we are trying now trying to stop with Maze.

But that's not when ma got started ma got started in this previous. What we really wanted to do was so at the time didn't really exist and we saw the same problem that was trying to solve, which is you looked at the way that gamers were communicating and you looked at the way that games were scattered.

So there was no longer one platform who we are playing on Xbox team, wherever. How do you reconcile your gaming list? In one platform. And how do you reconcile communication in one platform? That's the premise of what we were trying to build. And so we started hacking our way into building a product over our weekends.

We, we, my founder and I know founder and at the time funny enough we stumbled upon something that we liked, we stumbled on. Okay. So we have this app. That allows you to connect with your friends. And that allows to start conversation. What we call the thing to get started playing. And so very early on, [00:03:00] we got backing from static, which is the biggest and largest program team in the world.

And so because of that backing, we had literally thousands of people in waiting list to try out our product. But the reality was at the time we didn't have a product yet. What we had was this very in depth envision prototype of what we wanted to. And so we thought. How do we get this prototype in front of the eyes of these thousands of people that are eager to priorit our product and see which flow are working, which features they want to prioritize, basically understanding what we needed to build.

And so at the time we looked for solution online to do that. And the reality for us was all the solutions. The, they were transposing, the process that was not and expensive, which is the face to face interview into a process. That's not getting extensive, but online, which is the video recording watch the same amount of hours of footage that we do in the face to face interview.

And so we hacked our way into building what would become really Maze in the future. So we downloaded the indigenous prototype. We started putting on of everything with this idea that if we were able to collect data at scale at the protyping phase, then we would actually be able [00:04:00] to understand massive volume of insights without having to those sessions send out the first test to 5,000 people got 2,500 in two hours.

So coming from a world five response in five weeks was basically of a new campaign. That was that. And that's how we got started building industry. That's how I was obsessed with me at the time and the reality to talk to, and your question about directly this called arrive three months after we started the platform.

And, it's very hard to compete against people that do things extremely well. So we were looking at them and we were like, this is such a strong vision. He's such a strong institution. He's such a strong under of the market. It was. Yeah. I'm happy. We gave up after a few a year, basically we looked at them, we looked at them very were like, this is let's 

[00:04:43] Andrew Michael: it's interesting.

Cause when I was looking at it's like that was one of the things I think this sounds very familiar, like this sounds like Discoured and thinking like why would you stop in that vision when obviously clearly today, like Discored exists as a beast in the.

[00:04:59] Jonathan Widawski: And this call became users [00:05:00] of ma as well. So we came full circle on this on this journey. There's a, yeah, there's a good storytelling behind it. 

[00:05:05] Andrew Michael: Yeah, that's super cool. So then you started out from there, like really realizing that's okay. There's something that we have here now in this, like we've built a really elaborate prototype.

We're not gonna be able to comp heats in this market because we've disclosures come along like. How did you move forward from there? What was the next steps in getting the business started? And cause at the moment you just had a prototype and you had your own analytics, like telling you what was 

[00:05:27] Jonathan Widawski: happening.

That's a very good question. Actually, I think it's something that they've never shared publicly. But when we started the previous company, we, it was a convention with, so with this promming company and the CEO of static at the time was a very experienced CEO, right? Multiple times, CEO, et cetera.

When he invested, he did something with us that I I came of advise everyone to replicate. We, We started the company and he sat down with and said, What does failure look like in a year from now? What does, when do we say the company's not working? Because we can drag this on forever, right? So let's sit down, let's write three metrics that we think if we not have [00:06:00] succeeded on that we'll kill the company.

That's what happened really? Is that a year down the line, we looked our activation metric. We looked at the targeting and the retention rate and the three of them terrible on top of that, this obsession for Maze led me to tell Thomas my co-founder. I'll take my old job back as aux and I'll force customers to try out the solution that's how we actually got to build the product.

So it was the MPT of MVP. We, at the time generating the hit pass manually for the whole mess. But the reality was we were seeing the value. The first customer I got in the agency I was working out was a big French bank with a green logo that I'm not legally allowed to name. And so this big French bank, they didn't want to research for all the reasons that I mentioned before, which is.

It's long it's expensive. They didn't care about the fact that the point they wanted something more concrete and faster, right? Yeah. I told them we have this new platform. And if you allow you to go from the product we've already created to actually data and insights that we can use right now to make a better product.

They said, okay, we send out the test to 50 of their customers test got back [00:07:00] an hour later with 35 answers. My client looks at the results at the time. He goes to my boss and said, if this was available last year, We could literally have saved millions of the line development. And so for us, that really started shaping the value and the vision of the company, right?

Because all of a sudden, it's not about the tool and it's not even about research. It's about how can we rethink the product development process to include more data, to point where data wasn't available. And so we kept on integrating with customers. So very qualitatively collecting insights on what's working, what's not working.

And at some point we decided to take leap, and to actually release to the world we released on product end. We, and after a day, basically we had. Users from Airbnb and Amazon and eBay and Uber and the whole world. So we are very lucky in that. I think we found product marketing very early on with the product that we created, because I think the gap was so massive in the market.

That the time to market was really strong protyping and design was just exploding. And yeah, that led us to to find product marketing can do to actually stop. [00:08:00] 

[00:08:01] Andrew Michael: So what was like the original then was just really bringing to the, like a prototype and analytics in one Would you say that was like the key differentiator?

[00:08:09] Jonathan Widawski: Yeah, I would say that it's almost it's two things. So by doing that's a product innovation, right? That all of a sudden you can integrate your envision product inside the product. But this product innovation led to a positioning innovation that all of a sudden, we were not selling research to researchers.

We are selling research to the designers with. And so what research has struggled so much with for the past 20 years is how do we get more embedded into the product piece? And so by unlocking a product innovation. We basically made research happen everywhere within the right. All of every iteration.

reports function started being shared with CEO and VP level and product managers and marketers. So we started getting research exposure the same way that Figma made design exposed to the rest of the organization. That's what we really unlocked. So it's funny because what we did is exactly the opposite of what our device company to do, which is we didn't necessarily stop it from the vision down.

So we have these very [00:09:00] strong. 10 down the line. We started from a product lead that we had, and from this product that we had the vision kinda, bloomed basically. So I won't recommend that to anyone, but for us, that, 

[00:09:10] Andrew Michael: that will, it's a hard thing. I think we're talking about this before.

The show is well, like when you, especially as a founder, when you start out with one vision and then the market tells you something different to, to be able to give up on that sort of vision and move with the markets. Ultimately if you. Can't meet the market where they are today. There's no point in having the celebrity vision because it's never gonna exist.

Exactly. I see the pros and cons in both. 

[00:09:31] Jonathan Widawski: Yeah. I think exactly your vision has to live in reality. And also I think that's why CEOs need to connect often with their users in that it's a very different story that you tell your team, you tell yourself, you tell the investors and then that the world will actually, that's different. Oftentimes, especially as the company scale, you get disconnected to this end user that tells you. That's really cool. What you think, that's excellent. Maybe in 10 years down line, this will be what the future would look like. The reason that today, this is what I need.

So [00:10:00] getting the, getting back to reality is critical, I think, to your mission success. 

[00:10:03] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's the most important thing I think. And you mentioned speaking to your team, speaking to investors and things like this, like when you're doing one to one sales, know I'm talking about sales, cuz you're selling to your team members.

You're selling to investors and stuff. It's easy to get excited when people get excited by that. But the only thing that really matters is when customers get excited and they pull out their checkbooks or they pull out their credit cards and they pay you money because like getting investment is not validation that you've built anything or have anything there.

It's really about the market and the customer at the end of the day. Going a little bit forward now as well. Maze, obviously you've grown quite a lot from where you are today. We break up for a second worth to cut this one. And cause it just cut out for a second there. I'm gonna start again.

So fast forwarding a bit now, obviously Maze has grown quite a bit today. You mentioned and 30 people now in the company challenges are quite a bit different today. What's one challenges. You're a. 

[00:10:51] Jonathan Widawski: Huh. So I would say there's multiple challenges that, that come with to scale where we are right now.

So we are fully remote. So for us, communication has been, scaling [00:11:00] communication as we scale has been has been a big challenge. You go from. Having everyone doing pretty much everything. So I think the way I look at company building is you start as the CEO, you, the chief, every single.

So you are embedded in every team and your team is really 10 people. And then the committee starts scaling and you start to get your whole funnel, starting from how do we acquire users to, how do we create great product to, how do we activate those users to how do cetera, and for each of those lines in your spreadsheet, you basically have.

One person that owns five lines, right? And then as the company continu, measuring it's, every line of these spreadsheets is owned by a team, it's owned by a pod that actually just works on delivering this specific improvement to this line. And so how do you communicate clearly where the company said to all of these teams?

So they work together is, has been quite a challenge. I think the second thing is. We're graduating. I think that I mentioned that also before the COVID, there's kind today on company building that I really like, which is the democratization for X, for Y, for us at [00:12:00] me, we're trying to Ize research for companies of all sizes, all industries, and for everyone within those organizations.

That's how we really think about the mission. And so works great. When you're not talking to the enterprise customers, this works great bottom up, right? The less mature organization, the small organization, really, they are brought into your vision because the reality is that didn't have the much really to do better anyway, right?

Research is going to be spread out. Data is going to be spread out. So for us, one of the challenge now is thinking about how do we unlock more and more value and with the enterprise customers that we have, and with the type of customer that we want as well. 

[00:12:35] Andrew Michael: I think that's quite a big shift in the company as well, especially when correct me wrong, but like MAs is predominantly product led up until now.

Self-serve you mentioned actually before the call that you've just brought on sales this is a big shift. Like how are you managing that shift to co like how are things changing within the org? 

[00:12:54] Jonathan Widawski: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As you said, historically, we are producted and sales assisted. So our motion is really about product leads, [00:13:00] everything.

The growth is entirely led by product. We have very similar loops to a type form of a monkey where the product by design is spread out because the test has to be shared. And then the, of those users will become users of our platform. layering on the sales assisted is always very tricky and doing it right as well is tricky, right?

Understanding when is the right time to actually put in more cells that will have more nurturing capacity inside the oven? So we hired sales two quarters ago. Now they build out the sales team. And so now it's a game of. Be getting better at nurturing, getting better at understanding our ICP, getting better understanding which value can really extract from prise customers.

But on top of that, I would say that it's also a very big cultural shift that needs to happen. And so for example a month and a half ago, I wrote. A letter that I called going enterprise. And it's just a letter that I wrote to the company explaining, like, why are we doing the things that we're doing?

We're not going to be self-led, that's never going to be the case, but we're going to serve more and more the enterprise customers. And for that, the need and the maturity that the product will have to be we'll have to grow. And we'll have to support the, so [00:14:00] I think Yeah, it's important that people understand that . Going enterprise is luxury in itself, right? That you get the chance to sell to price. Customers is something that not all companies will have the chance on doing so.

Yeah, 

[00:14:11] Andrew Michael: absolutely. It's not easy as well. Like I think again, similarly for us at every, we almost, the inverse now is like, when we first launched a product, we had a lot of in like attraction from more enterprise and larger orgs, but really we don't have the luxury as a small startup to support them even yet with all the requirements with there.

We're almost doing like the inverse of like, how can we make the product more product led? What can we do to serve earlier stage in smaller businesses? And I definitely think the stage you're at now is like it's part of growing up. I think when you start to become a successful SaaS

business and you start to realize, and I think this is one of the misconceptions I don't like about this product led growth.

Like term that's been popularized in LinkedIn because people think it's just like exclusive. And if you product lead, like you just do product and that's it. But really like when you get to certain size and scale, if you really wanna take advantage of that size and scale, [00:15:00] and to build a business to meaningful, you're gonna need to lay on sales, but it's like figuring out what you're doing now is like figuring out the right way to do that.

And 

[00:15:06] Jonathan Widawski: Exactly. And it's also understanding that. A sales have a noting function. So the sales layering is not outbound and cold calling, right? It's really about how do we create a better journey for our customers that have a better needs and larger needs and more needs. And also, as you said, I think that a lot of companies have been taken as example.

So you have the classic example of Atlassian that never had a sales rep for 10 years, and you have the examples of plaque. And the reality is that. A lot of them have actually came back to what they said earlier on. Slack is losing to teams just because they haven't played enterprise early enough.

And so there's a lot of companies that now retracts from what they've actually said in the past. And it makes sense, the product label is being created right now, product like growth is a five year old film. So it's, we, nothing is viable. Basically. Nothing is gospel at this point. 

[00:15:50] Andrew Michael: For sure.

And I like those examples, you mentioned as well, like Atlasian and slack, and they'll eventually come around to realizing that if you wanna sell into these large enterprises there's a need for [00:16:00] sales and exactly. 

[00:16:01] Jonathan Widawski: Exactly. 

[00:16:02] Andrew Michael: So again, like going with this model, then product led and in my mind, just thinking to some similar businesses I think churn attention nature of the show today can be challenging for a business like yours itself.

Has there been anything interesting in the way that you've come across the challenge at Maze and or would you say is unique about your approach? 

[00:16:22] Jonathan Widawski: Yeah. Has always been a key question on how do we even, how do we compute churn? What is the right.

I hate talking about churn as, the end, all fit type of there's no solution to churn, right? Churn is just something that's going bound to happen within your product. I think for us it's been about understanding what is the natural usage that people would get out of our product. And how does that change across different sides of condition, different industries that we get better understanding the churn.

More importantly, at understanding which we really wanted to improve and which we didn't really want. Yeah. And so for us internally, what's interesting is that we have these symptoms that [00:17:00] we use all the time, which is. We win when testing and research is seen as a cultural shift within the organization.

And we lose when testing and research is seen as an adult activity. What that really translates to is that there's two users that we see at Mac, right? There's a usage that purely transactional that's. I use Maze as one of testing platform when I need to actually run a test for those smaller companies or the companies that don't have the level of actually.

Key example, when we actually changed the culture within the organization, which is we're looking to make research something happening at every point in time in the product development process. And so we could look at all of this blended, which is what we used to do for a long time. And we're like, how do we solve problem?

How do we solve for this number? We don't know how to impact then when you start actually. Separating these two channels. You start looking at actually the real picture you want to improve. The one that, that for the people that actually the successful people use product and the other one, you are going to have a much, much harder fight.

You're going to fight against the natural [00:18:00] frequency of these, of your product for customers. Don't have the, and getting people to much. Gets more than product usage, right? It's more than creating great templates. It's literally evangelization maturity within the org. It's a lot of work. So for us simply about splitting these two entities and looking at how we can improve churn for the entity that we wanted to actually so for was really the game changer.

And we had the conversation with Andrey the CEO at Miro about this, and they have something very interesting to say about this as well, which is at Miro, the way they look at challenge is that. For them success is collaboration, right? So they have paying customers that are team of individuals, right?

People that just want to brainstorm with interview product, even though this revenue is technically SaaS. If you're not three people using the platform, Miro, doesn't consider this revenue SaaS revenue, mostly recurring revenue, they consider it NDR. And so for us, it's almost this shift as well.

It's how do we think about this revenue? Does an individual using Maze from a company below a hundred people. Is this actual MRR [00:19:00] or is this going to chance of that? The, that, so I think that it's. Perception shift. And this perception shift allow you to rethink where you want to make your investment solving for.

[00:19:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I like that actually. And it's something we've discussed something similar in the past with, Emeric, I about splitting your turn into what's controllable versus what's uncontrollable. This is a little bit of a step further and I think you mentioned previously, like type form, I think similar our culture.

There's different usage patterns and there's different teams of the levels of maturity that are always gonna be like great fit customers versus those that aren't. And I think, especially in the case of something like Maze, you do have a lot of this like project use cases where it's I'm working on a project I'm gonna come off and it's once off and similar to like type forms.

Like I'm gonna launch a survey, I get my results. And then it's a one and done sort of thing, like you said, with mirror as well and. Blending that in with your total user base and churn can really look frightening. I think at the end of the day where it's more probably something to do with pricing and packaging and figuring out, okay, like how can we serve this audience?

It's coming [00:20:00] on a project basis? Like once often thing and how can then we make sure that we are extracting the value really needs to be from the, like our ideal customer profile, who we are really building. Exactly. Yeah, 

[00:20:09] Jonathan Widawski: exactly. And on top of that, I just want to add as well that. Also because your product led and just like a Typeform, just like a Haja the reality as well is that you have less control of who gets to use your platform.

So it's also that you'll get the blending, you'll get the schizophrenic company because on one end, you'll try to push function to go down on the other end, your product, that loop with track a really wide range of type of users and customers, which include people that will be this type of, that would be on.

So you cannot on the one end, try to push for your product, motion to go. And other, try to go for your blend to go down. It doesn't make sense. 

[00:20:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah, exactly. You need to understand the different segments, because that was also something I mentioned like, ER, with, ER, we discussed from a war pulse was how they bucketed their churn was really looking at what are the reasons for churn and if it was like going out of business or I have no project or.

My closed. I think like those are outside of their control. So they wouldn't even [00:21:00] consider that as like loss. That's nothing that we could improve. And then they would focus on what were the reasons that they could actually improve. So it was like it's too buggy. It's too X, Y, Z. And then having that as a pulse, they could see, did they reduce like the two buggy section this month that they reduced and then they would actually make it can impacted to.

Like trying to solve for something that was never within their reach to be able to I'm not gonna help you from going out of business sort of thing. Which also found very interesting. So , that's super interesting. Hopefully the tool does do that for you, but and you end up figuring that out, but it's, I guess we not pulling magic ones yet.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Very interesting from that perspective, like how did you go about figuring this out and like understanding what the chunks were going to be like who the use cases were, what was the methodology you took there to get there? 

[00:21:44] Jonathan Widawski: Yeah. Yeah. So a, we got a lot of help. So at Mae we have a very strong advisory board of people have been there.

Art multiple times. One of them is ENA, who was the SVP grow at survey monkey. And then the, and it's a lot of reframing how you think about [00:22:00] things much more than, a specific process. So it's basically what we do very regularly is that we review our model. So what is our acquisition model?

What is our model, our retention model. And for all of these model, we think about, do we have the right engine or is it just like in fuel or how should we think about engine that we.

Look at activation model. And I think that's how we started figuring out, right? Because at the time we were looking at this retention modeled, we were looking at this and said, how can we improve this X percent number that was trying improve? And so the way that we went very holistically with was.

Let's try to see who is the churn within the organization? How are they behaving? Which companies do they come from? Which industry? So let's try to get a better understanding. What does churn really mean within the org and then from here, which churn you can actually impact, right? Where do you want to impact?

Because strategically what you could say is. We want to attract less of these high China customer or strategically. You can say, I want to expand the ones that are actually performing and succeeding with the platform. And that's two very [00:23:00] different strategic directions that you can take. For us, we obviously made the choice of going for expanding the ones that are successful with the platform.

[00:23:09] Andrew Michael: I think that's where you, but you're gonna get the most success. And if you. End up focusing on the audience that is successful. You can help bring others along to that successful states as well along the way. Because if you're trying to build to save users that aren't great fit to begin with. Like you end up building a whole bunch of crap that maybe your ideal customer profiles not really looking for, trying to serve an audience is not who you're meant to be serving, but it's tough.

To figure this all out. Cool. I see we're almost running out of time, so I wanna make sure I save some time for a couple of questions. Ask every guest, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. Now you join a new company. Channel attention is not doing good at this company. You, the CEO comes to you and says, Hey, Joe, you got 90 days to figure this out.

You really need to turn things around or we screwed. You're in charge. The key is here that you're not allowed to say, okay, I'm gonna go. And. Speak to customers, figure out what their pain points is, or set up a Maze and try and understand and get some insights back fast. [00:24:00] You're just gonna run with a tactic blindly that you've seen work in the past and use that and hope that it works.

This company that you've just joined. What would you do? 

[00:24:10] Jonathan Widawski: Oh my God, this a, this sounds absolutely terrible. So I'm not allowed to talk to users. I'm not allowed to have any form of conversation. You have access to data, any form of data, just, 

[00:24:20] Andrew Michael: it's just taking a tactic that you've seen work well to reduce churn fast.

My God, 

[00:24:24] Jonathan Widawski: this is the opposite from what I recommend to everyone. When I do oh my God, I would probably stop and I'm not even allowed to stop understanding. Am I supposed to do. I think I would try to understand first how the pricing is set so that because churn is a function of the two things of a customer that we're getting that targeting lost, and B the expansion motion, try to actually get people to, to, to a better expansion pass.

The second thing is the onboarding, right? I would think that probably lot of the problem that we see on the retention side comes from people getting not properly involved, which is the case for 90% of the companies that we see. So working on the onboarding journey [00:25:00] to get people to actually activate better and get to the aha movement better.

I would say these two things a, getting more people to activate and B getting more people to expand, meaning creating a more coherent pricing journey and more coherent expansion journey would get to a better retention. But again, not advising that this sounds absolutely terrible. Yeah. 

[00:25:16] Andrew Michael: Yeah. For sure.

It's, it is a trick question in the sense that it's hard to do anything such a short period. Most of the time, it's normally things like Dunning focusing on Dunning account stuff, but your point are on onboarding. I think this is where the biggest impact really comes. And like you said, like 90% of companies, the issue is really about getting people to activate.

And it's that first initial experience that's so critical to get righted. Yeah. What's one thing that, you know, today about churn tension that you wish you knew when you got started with your.

[00:25:47] Jonathan Widawski: They wish in when you get started in your career. I think that we talk so much about it, that we don't really understand that it's such a metric and it's the last boss of the game, right? The reality of it is if you're to impact and retention, you're willing to fail. What [00:26:00] you really want to impact is the rest of the journey and churn retention is kind the function of all of this, right?

And so it gives a lot of anxiety. I talk to a lot of very early stage founders that are like, oh my God, my retention is terrible. And my net retention is terrible. And I don't know how to handle this. And the reality is that a, you don't necessarily have the volume to really know what's working.

What's not working. And B focus on the things that you can actually impact. It's take the wise advice that they give you of Don't think about when you have 10,000 customers think about how you get 10 customers this week, right? It's focus on the things where you can actually have an impact.

So I think that's what I would've wanted to know, because at the time this is a very anxiety driven conversation. 

[00:26:33] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I like that. And definitely it is it's a mix of so many different parts. That's like the whole premise of the show, really. It's like trying to illustrate that, like from your positioning to your marketing, to sales, to product, like all throughout the customer's life cycle journey, there's this impact.

And this metric that we talk about churn is really just the last result. It's like a result of all the bad missteps that have happened along that journey. So focusing earlier on and fixing that is really gonna help with the end results [00:27:00] and yeah. Very cool, Joe. So is any final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with, is anything they should be aware of?

You wanna point them to today? 

[00:27:06] Jonathan Widawski: Do you mean in terms of resource or just 

[00:27:08] Andrew Michael: in general, anything life work churn? I'll leave it up into you. 

[00:27:12] Jonathan Widawski: Not much. If you a research team obviously, or a product team in general, come and check out mates, we'd love to see there. Apart from that, I've been starting succession as a show, anything credible.

So if you haven't watch that, reaching that. But yeah, I think that's pretty much it on my. 

[00:27:25] Andrew Michael: Nice. All right. So definitely check out Mays. We'll make sure to drop notes in the show and if you're not watching succession already, maybe check that out. I might text from the show. Cool, Joe. I really appreciate the time today.

It's been fantastic catching up with you and wish your best of luck now going into the new year. Thank 

[00:27:41] Jonathan Widawski: you mate, friends. Good to you again and thanks everyone. And following well, cheers.

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