From my brief glimpse as an intern in 2015, I can confirm a lot of this. Really, it was once I joined Amazon that I grew to appreciate Duo's culture and the speed it moved at (and Amazon isn't even that slow). Zack, when they brought you in, what were the big things you focused on first?
Great to hear from you! Very appreciative of all the interns who worked at Duo over the years. Duo was a good company but there were still lots of things to fix. When you join an early stage startup every rock you look under has snakes. You have to focus on which things to fix when. So there were some things (like an overly complex Salesforce.com implementation) that I didn't worry about. The key things that required immediate attention was to focus on our "platform" launch. There were lots of good ideas, but there wasn't a coherent product plan or validation from customers. So that was a big priority. Also, we needed to uplevel sales. We had quite a few good people, but also some "order takers" who weren't serving our customers very well. I brought in some new people to help with Product, Sales, Marketing and things really started to cook.
Could you add a few more details by what you mean by overly complex salesforce implementation? Curious since I'm situated right now within AWS' sales and marketing organization, and wondering if the issues we're having also affected other somewhat smaller co's.
Let's just say that if your CRM is implemented by a PhD it might not reflect what is required for day-to-day usage. More generally, in an early startup, people can implement lots of systems to support some future large-scale operation that may or may not unfold as expected. The most important thing in the early days is to find repeatable product/market fit and in that respect, Duo was excellent.
From my brief glimpse as an intern in 2015, I can confirm a lot of this. Really, it was once I joined Amazon that I grew to appreciate Duo's culture and the speed it moved at (and Amazon isn't even that slow). Zack, when they brought you in, what were the big things you focused on first?
Great to hear from you! Very appreciative of all the interns who worked at Duo over the years. Duo was a good company but there were still lots of things to fix. When you join an early stage startup every rock you look under has snakes. You have to focus on which things to fix when. So there were some things (like an overly complex Salesforce.com implementation) that I didn't worry about. The key things that required immediate attention was to focus on our "platform" launch. There were lots of good ideas, but there wasn't a coherent product plan or validation from customers. So that was a big priority. Also, we needed to uplevel sales. We had quite a few good people, but also some "order takers" who weren't serving our customers very well. I brought in some new people to help with Product, Sales, Marketing and things really started to cook.
Could you add a few more details by what you mean by overly complex salesforce implementation? Curious since I'm situated right now within AWS' sales and marketing organization, and wondering if the issues we're having also affected other somewhat smaller co's.
Let's just say that if your CRM is implemented by a PhD it might not reflect what is required for day-to-day usage. More generally, in an early startup, people can implement lots of systems to support some future large-scale operation that may or may not unfold as expected. The most important thing in the early days is to find repeatable product/market fit and in that respect, Duo was excellent.