Transcript
Trisha Ballakur: I'm going to just speak a little bit about my journey, which might be boring. The ways to make it more exciting is think about it in terms of your takeaways. What you guys can go back to your office, to your own startups, to your own sketchbooks and think, ok, I remember Trisha said this. These were some of the takeaways. These were some of the hurdles that she had. Just have that as a mental model for yourself as you go through the day and through this talk. I'd like to just highlight three things in that vein, which we should think about. One is going to be prioritizing the user. Whoever you might be building for, that should be the front of your focus. Whether it's in a project or in a startup, I'll give you some practical tips on that.
Then evolving as a builder is the second. I think during my time, I was transitioning from working in computer science at internships like Adobe or NASDAQ. Then when I got thrust a bit into learning how to be my own boss and also teaching others, it was really critical to understand that, yes, I can lean on the other people who are smarter than me, maybe more capable, maybe more skilled because of where they're at. That's perfectly fine. We need that for growth. Then third is bringing efficiency to anything regarding the business side, which I think as engineers it can be tough at first or something that we don't necessarily love to do to think in terms of marketing, or sales, or these sorts of more business-related problems. They can actually be really fun and key. Not only that, they drive revenue, which everybody loves.
Where it Started: Pointz
My journey started at Pointz, which is a safer bike and scooter mapping app that helps out folks who are scared to bike. We've now expanded that to biking and walking, taking transit. I'm from Boston, so taking the T is critical, but knowing how to hop on a blue bike is also really important to that journey. Pointz actually started when I was about 20 years old in Brown University at the Nelson Center. The Nelson Center was a place where you were learning in the day-to-day at school and in classes how to code. I did operating systems, so that was me sitting in, if anybody here is from Brown, the Sunlab, which is like a dungeon, for about 12 hours a day and hoping that things would happen from my great OS I was building. It turns out that that was awesome from a computer scientist perspective and from learning how to create and fulfill a project that needed to be created. In terms of how do I apply this to actually creating a solution that I can just go and test and get out into the world, it wasn't so helpful.
What was really helpful was learning from the Nelson Center how to ask questions in terms of, is this something that people need and is this something that people are going to give me feedback on that I can quickly iterate? We'll get to that. Just a quick primer on what Pointz is, because this is going to come up a lot throughout the talk and I want you guys to have some background. The Nelson Center, again, taught me how to ask questions. The first question that it taught me to ask was, how big could your market end up being and why would anybody really care about what you're building? Really, what was most helpful was going and talking to people and asking them that exact question. I think at the start, me and my co-founder went on about 50 different phone calls, 15-minute phone calls. I think at the time it took 30 or 45 minutes because we would just ramble on. Eventually it became more efficient.
What we found is that the number one reason that people feel unsafe biking is because they're scared. It's fear. If we could cure that, we could then maybe decrease that number of interested but concerned people who would hop on a bike if they felt comfortable to allowing there to be a more bigger potential for folks to use alternative forms of transportation. That was our goal.
Here's a visual of Pointz. Pointz is the mobile app that you see on the left-hand side. It has an A to B routing. You can throw in your start and your end just like in Google Maps. The key here is you can actually be able to see how safe or low stress your bike path would be. First off, how many people here ride bikes or try to bike for pleasure or transportation, anything, it could be exercise? We have some people who like biking, or maybe not. When I started at Pointz, I really hated biking and I never had hopped on a bike for like 15 years, 16 years. I was like, why would anybody force themselves to get on this vehicle, which is hard? I have to maintain it, all these things. I basically built this app so I can teach myself also how to ride a bike, because I wouldn't do it unless I was going on really safe off-road paths.
That's exactly the type of person who loves this app we found through that question-and-answer process, which I'll get to in a bit. Last thing for you guys to note is this comparison, because I'll reference it later. You can see the green is really vibrant in the Pointz upper bar. If you work at Google Maps here, just a reminder that you can improve your routing. Google really doesn't do a great job. It sends folks on highways a lot of times. That's what we've heard again and again from customer interviews when we were talking to people. That's what we capitalized on. That's what we created for Pointz, which reliably takes people on safer routes.
Career Evolution
Whatever you do, don't drop out of school. These are three stages that I lived through and wanted to share some tips from. The first is when I was a founding engineer, I was a sophomore, and my mom actually told me this great quote, "Don't drop out of school, don't be stupid". That's something that really stuck with me. That's something that the Nelson Center really emphasizes. I had always idolized, like, if I'm going to be a founder, if I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I want to drop out of school because that's what everybody does and that's how you know that you've made it. The reality is, that's not true at all. You should get a degree because it serves you in the case that you're one of the 9 out of 10 companies that don't actually make it, which it's totally ok. Just keep on going and try again. That's one really great learning that I learned. Also, learning how to work with open-source code was a huge eye opener for me. I'll talk a little bit more about Valhalla, that particular project.
It's an open-source routing engine. I think at the start, as somebody who is just graduating from college or had maybe, in your cases, worked at one company where they did things a very certain way, if anybody's experiencing that, it's really easy to not look out into other solutions and not try and talk to other people who are doing things more scrappily. That was absolutely the number one thing which helped me to push myself out of this founding engineer role and being able to just keep on moving and keep on growing. The next phase of life was, in my junior year to senior year, I decided to become a co-founder and CTO role. Exactly what this shows is, I had to find how to create excellence on an unbeaten path, because that's really what it is when you're creating something from scratch and nobody else really was there or understood exactly how to do it.
That's why I think the founder community, which some of us were talking about, is so critical because being connected to Techstars, being connected to not only the Nelson Center, but just a bunch of other founders and mentors, was really what helped me to grow and understand that I could pull different types of software engineers, different types of contractors from Upwork, from Fiverr, to support the type of work that we were doing, because it was not something that was conducive to just me building and trying to spend all my time on. Then, the third phase happened a couple years later, which is after a co-founder left, I decided to take on the role of CEO. I think at this time in my life, which was about a year and a half ago, it felt right to let the technical day-to-day be passed on to somebody else who ended up being my head of engineering. I'd love to just highlight some of those key reasons a little bit later on when you might know that that might be the right time to do so.
You can also see here we have different partnerships which we landed on, and that also was born out of just switchable leadership and an extension of me understanding that, it might be worth it for us to try out B2B, or to go back and try out selling to delivery services, or selling our product in new ways. I'd like to say that that maybe was something I could have accomplished from my software engineering mindset, which we didn't have before.
Key Takeaways - Prioritize the User
Let's start with the first takeaway, prioritizing the user. Again, finding product market fit, which is PMF, is literally the key to success. Maybe Apple iPhones, that product might have been the first, but I feel like I haven't encountered really any company where if they didn't have PMF, they weren't growing, they weren't selling, and they weren't being successful. For anyone who is maybe thinking of building something from scratch, is thinking of creating a project within their own company and wants to accelerate that, similar to what Nicole was sharing, and she actually said this perfectly, go and follow this process of talking to customers. That's what we had to do to figure out that safety was the number one issue that affected Pointz riders. I have up here Rahul Vohra of Superhuman. I don't know how many people here use that particular tool? It's awesome. Everyone who uses it usually really likes it, and there's a reason. The number one takeaway after this is actually go and start listening and reading to Lenny's Podcast, because he has everything you need to know very concretely about how to get into this PMF search mindset.
Rahul was a founder who had started another company, and it went great, it got acquired, I think by LinkedIn. He was thinking that he had cracked the code. However, I think that company was a very different type of B2B SaaS company, and here he was going into Superhuman and imagining that he could do B2C, sell to consumers, and know exactly how to do that in a matter of minutes. What ended up happening was, him and his team were building out a great MVP, a great number of iterations, and people loved it, who he knew. Then when he took it to people who he didn't know, outside of the beta, he was finding that people were not asking for these sorts of features, they were getting frustrated, they were throwing it away. He was like, I thought I was building something that people wanted, because I looked at my beta, and I looked at the different types of market trends, and I thought that was that. In reality, what he decided to do was to go ahead and ask one very specific question. This question is, how would you feel if you no longer could use his product?
In Pointz' case, we asked this to our users, how would you feel if you no longer could use Pointz, and it just disappeared? This showed him three key words. The first is, I really couldn't care less, and you can go and have a great time doing your company. I would call that group the not disappointed at all. Then there was a second group, who would be like, it's ok. If Superhuman was here or not, I would be ok, but I do like it. Then there's the third group, so these guys would be very disappointed, they would be potentially crying, they would be sad, if Superhuman one day just shut off its server or whatever. This was critical for Rahul, mostly because he could now concretely see, these are the types of personas of people who would be very disappointed, and whatever I've built, it already satisfies them, in theory, so who are these people?
Then he went and investigated, did some sleuthing on their types of roles, what they did, what they liked, and that was his starting ground to then ask them the following questions. He asked them the next question, which was, what type of people do you think would really benefit from Superhuman? What's the main benefit you receive, and how do we improve it? These questions are pretty critical, because they helped him decide how he would prioritize his backlog in a way that serves people of this particular persona. If he felt like that was his ICP or ideal customer persona, great. He had a path forward of how to build for them, he was asking them. I believe he used a word cloud, which, that's fun and pretty and visual, so feel free to do that too. At the same time, it's not just building things that people who already like your app or your solution would be really interested in seeing come to life.
It's also the other group that's somewhat disappointed, because they're right now on the fence, and he asked them, what would you actually like to see that's not there? There was a resounding vote of, we want to see a mobile app because we don't like your website. He built the mobile app in a matter of a week or two weeks. After that, I'm pretty sure the very disappointed shot up by 10 more percent, up to 35%, up to 40%, and he kept on repeating and repeating and resentencing, and this, I believe, is the path to creating something that achieves product market fit. This discovery process really helps us to stop building what we want to build and start building what the customer wants. I was speaking with some of the attendees, and they were sharing that in their various startups or in their larger companies, a lot of times, they may not have autonomy over what they were building, because somebody higher up was sharing, this is what the customer might want, or this is what we're finding from the survey.
I would challenge anybody who has an environment like that to just stop and go do their own customer discovery in a Superhuman way, and I think that that's going to help prioritize and really drive through how you can get to PMF. The stat is if you're at 55% of people saying, I would be very disappointed without Pointz or without Superhuman, that's when you're at product market fit, and you want to try and sustain that. I think the stat was like, Slack is at a 50%, or a 55% or a 60%, so you can imagine, even some amazing tools, which we all love, 45% or 50% of users can do without or somewhat without. Last one in this section is, see, solve, scale, so that again comes out of the Nelson Center. My professor, Danny Warshay, who's also head of it, wrote that, again, this process of building for a customer via PMF discovery, it's called bottom-up customer discovery or bottom-up building.
I think a lot of times, traditionally, companies/people think that, ok, to build a startup, you need to identify a huge market, and you need to just build whatever competitors are building. That does not work. You have to actually go and talk to people and do this method and find PMF, and that's how you build a company. I'm a huge advocate of that, so I'm really happy to have a platform to say that, so here we are.
Evolve as a Builder
Second, evolving as a builder. What does that even mean? That's a fun buzzword. I know everybody here in the Bay is claiming that they're builders, especially a lot of the founders, but what that means to me is pretty much understanding that I went from the March 2021 version of Pointz, which was quite literally a math box map, a line. Then you can see the source and the destination are in the same location, so who knows what's going on with that? All the way to something that actually looked approachable. The reality was, I didn't do that myself. There were no AI coders or UI agents at the time, and I don't think that they could have really done a great job creating something that we could put out into production, even if it was there. It was by identifying that, ok, I haven't had tangible experience building mobile app UIs. I really am a backend person through and through, and that's where my contribution is going to be useful in the next six months.
Actually, Ben and I were talking about how every six months your job as a CTO or as a founder changes, and this wasn't exactly an example of that. I was able to then decide to hire some contractors. I'll speak a little bit about one of my head of engineering, my most trusted teammate and employee. He and some other interns at Brown and some other folks who we hired ended up helping us to get to a point where then we decided, let's add all the Pointz ratings to the map. Let's add safety. Let's add crowdsourcing. Let's make it look nice. At that point, I think I could really tangibly contribute in a way that was fast enough to see differences, but at the early stage, if that's something that you're experiencing, you might be the best engineer in the world, but is it worth your time to really go and sit down and build this without anybody else who's better than you or who's faster than you, who is more skilled joining you for cheap?
That's just something that you have to weigh. For me, it really made a difference, especially since I was right out of college. It might be a different case in your scenario, but definitely don't be afraid to delegate a lot more than I think we do, like working at a larger company or working from school. This is Shahil. He's one of my closest employees and somebody who I've built Pointz with from pretty much second year all the way through to fifth year at Pointz. I call him a 10Xer, which, of course, a lot of you know what that means. That means he really takes the job of about 10 different software engineers and makes my life 100 times easier.
To find him, I didn't really look around my neighborhood and interview all these people around me, are you willing to work so hard? Are you willing to be skilled? Are you willing to help me cut my time with build? It was instead that I went to these sites, like contractor sites. I went to word-of-mouth, referrals, and I was able to pinpoint that maybe there is an advantage to, again, going back to evolving as a builder, thinking outside of who's easiest to work with right now if there might be some more opportunities elsewhere. For example, Shahil lives in India, and there might have been adjustments that we've had to make for different times of day, working, and maybe making certain time zones fit, but being open to contractors or teammates from, let's say, Morocco. We've worked with folks from South America, people from New Zealand, people from Pakistan, people from Canada. It's not that far away, but you get the idea.
Being open to inviting people to your team who you may not traditionally know, nor do you understand maybe the skills that they would have because they might not be trained in the same way that went to an Ivy League, did all these things. It's so great to invite those folks to your team because they could really make or break your entire company. I'm a huge fan of Upwork and contractors and having folks as 1099 contractors instead of employees. Next is Valhalla. This is the open-source routing engine that we used. Great project. It was started by someone named Kevin Kreiser and his team at MapQuest, if you remember that from the early days. Kevin and team created Valhalla so that they could put out a really great and solid routing engine. It's in C++. It's fast. It's easy to configure.
I add this here because I think if I have gone to Pointz, and I don't have a visual right now for Pointz, but maybe you saw some of the lines are green, some of the lines are orange. They have different weights on every single road. Those we started out by coding from scratch, trying to create our own type of like A star. It was just a mess. Being able to pull this in and see, ok, bicycle costing, I can make the edits here. This is what I think it should do. I have somebody who can help me because he wrote the whole thing. He is just a lot more experienced in this particular field, even though he might not know exactly my use case, that was critical. Definitely make friends with people who own some of these repos. Make friends with some of these people who have the experience that you don't have, and just soak up as much of it as you can, because that's going to accelerate the pace with which you can build.
Again, emphasis, you don't need to know everything to get started and to build something significant that you can also charge money for. I just brought up Claude Code, you can substitute with whoever you like, using Cursor, Copilot. I don't know how good that is right now, but maybe it's improved. Regardless, I think that nowadays, I like to think of using the AI tech, like Claude Code as the way that originally I used or I was able to pull in different contractors who maybe I didn't really trust or have too much experience with the types of things they were good at. Testing out small projects with them, testing out small projects with Claude Code, asking it questions when you do code review, and making sure that whatever it's spitting out is actually, of course, making sense. Not just that, not relying on it as substituting your role as the lead of tech, but instead seeing it as just another team member.
I think a lot of us already know how to do this or have been doing it, but in my opinion, the more I can think about it in that way, the less lazy I become to actually just assuming that it can do everything and it's some genius teammate, because oftentimes it's not.
Bring Efficiency to Business Development
Last point I wanted to highlight is just bringing both efficiency, but also common sense and impact to anything related to the business. I think that this was super critical as someone who was transitioning to the CEO role to wrap my head around, because I think a lot of times, and this was something that I also talked about with some of my co-founders, some of my VCs, there's oftentimes an ability for people to put you in a box of, you are someone who knows code, and as a result, you can only do technical things, and that's all you can do. That's just not how it works. We're in startups. We're in early stage, smaller companies that I personally think before Series B, you can just know and learn about every single thing under the sun and be good at all of those things. It doesn't matter if your training was in tech. Go train and go do 100 sales pitches and go and sell, and then you become good at sales, and do the same with marketing. It's not a big deal, in my opinion, to transition from one expertise area to another.
That's something where I think being able to understand how to use tools, like this is a great podcast. Highlighting Brown University and money is really hard, but these are great. Highlighting Claire Vo, she's a product manager, who is really leaning into a lot of AI tools, but highlighting being able to use some of those tools and pull them into your Jira planning, into helping you plan out your sales funnel, and thinking about how you can use it as a way for outreach or for automating, maybe. For example, I had to go and reach out to 1,000 bike shops in New England, and I listened to something that she said, and I was able to really quickly make that a lot faster for myself. Being able to use those tools and knowhow of building with maybe the AI tools or with other scripts, that's something that nobody else who is non-technical is going to know how to do, or they're going to probably ask you to help them with.
Definitely go ahead and take advantage of that as you progress to maybe a more business side or to sales, marketing, biz dev, because I think that's the superpower that we have. Another point I want to highlight is creating test cases. We're all engineers. We all know how to create test cases. Some of us hate them. Some of us love them because they help us to identify new aspects to the problem that we didn't realize. In marketing, and in discovering a new business model, which was like a crisis mode for me at the time when I slipped into the CEO role, it was, ok, we are not working with B2C. How do we possibly find any other pathway with B2B? B2B meaning selling business to business. This was critical, like being able to say, we're going to go and put ourselves in every single sports shop in Boston area, Marathon Sports, Patagonia, whatever, and then we're going to go and talk to every single city.
Then we're going to go talk to every single urban design firm, talk to every single university in every single school district in the U.S., and go and execute on it. That was what I told myself in my brain. Then being able to shrink that down into sizable chunks really helped to then have confidence. For example, we decided to go to Marathon Sports, which has a bunch of branches in the Boston area. We put out local gift cards to bakeries, to favorite restaurants and discounts, and asked people to sign up for the app, or asked them to sign up if they had collaboration ideas with us, and then they could take a gift card, or they could take a freebie. That didn't work well, because again, it was the wrong group. We were trying to incentivize people to join the Pointz community when all they really cared about was fitness and overall running or more adventure-related types of workouts or fitness that really wasn't part of that original ICP of the safer bike rider, who's a commuter. That was a no-go.
Then we spoke to the DOTs, but a lot of them are very slow. I don't know how many people here have worked with government. A lot of these players too, especially at urban design firms, feed off of working on partnerships or getting grant money from government. Being aware of that was something I had no idea about. I had to also go and, for example, test out something else, which was talking to them and then being like, do you guys want money from me in order to create a sale? They were like, yes, because we can't fund any of this. Being able to understand and wrap my head around, ok, grants, this is how grants work, and this is how we can apply to all these grants, and we can then go back and sell it to them, sell our product to them because they have some amount of money, but they need more from grants.
That was also part of this creating test cases, iterating fast, and being able to understand quickly what was working. What ended up working really well is the urban design firm, LandDesign, out of Charlotte, North Carolina, some of the cities, we work with Charlotte DOT, and some of the universities and schools we also work with, and also delivery companies. This is a really cute dog. The reason I added this pup here is because I was once told by actually my investors that if a dog is dying, shoot it. I was not aware what that meant at age 20. Now I'm aware what that means. What that means is if a company is going downhill, investors are not incentivized to go and support you. They might do so to save face, but a lot of times what happens is they'll rock the boat so that either you're going to die or you're not. You need to be aware of that as a founder. There's a lot of these sorts of things that just by being in this lifestyle for the last five years I've learned to navigate, especially with communications, people perceiving, skill sets based on different things.
Then, of course, this sort of underlying knowledge that once you're in the industry you really understand. I just wanted to have a takeaway, which is, definitely pinpoint what you know and what you don't know, and go talk to people who already know it. Either by joining founder communities, either by going and experimenting yourself and understanding what the situation is like. If you ever have any questions on this as you create companies, or if you don't as you learn about it more, just let me know. I can share everything that I know from my experiences too.
Conclusion
I just wanted to share again that being able to use your superpowers, and I like to say that of being a builder, is going to help you to transition, if you wanted to, to more of those C-suite roles that maybe don't have direct technical knowhow required. The way to best utilize those is to bring in your abilities to go and create scripts or go and be more efficient in ways that other people can't. Same with being able to bring in folks from maybe your team or across the world who are going to add that extra ounce of quickness to whatever you're building so you can prove a concept and also mostly get validation from the people who you're trying to sell to or you're trying to integrate in with certain software.
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