A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:34:31 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
[00:34:31] S0: That's right. And it allowed others to see other people's questions. And it was definitely a catalyst. We would then package it up and ship it as a podcast, but you'd have folks showing up to the show, excited about what Oxide was building and just kind of growing group of support, some of which would never be customers because they were an individual, but like they'd be the first ones to jump in and hacker news comments when we'd be the first story on hacker news, you know, at a particular milestone. [00:35:00] S1: You're creating fans. I mean, the simplest way to put it. [00:35:03] S0: That's right. [00:35:04] S1: Were you also posting on Twitter or on LinkedIn or blogging, all these sort of things?
00:35:08 · Steve Tuck
[00:35:08] S0: Yeah, for sure. And making sure that we were showing up, talking about the journey of getting the company off the ground, what it took to fundraise, what it took to, to hit these milestones in the business from getting our first system passing compliance to the all-important first customer shipment, always have been extremely careful about customer information. And we are, you know, you see a lot of companies out there that like will leak stuff about their customers and, you know, on background and we just don't do that. And you'll see sort of these like articles written in publications and, and we're very, very private about customer information, but we have had the good fortune of working with some phenomenal customers. And, and as we got our first rack shift, being able to take a picture in our factory of that thing getting wrapped up and going in the crate, I mean, that went viral on Twitter. In fact, it was funny because like all the different parties came out. It was a picture of one of our double E's, Robert Keith, who's, he had the anti-static wrap. It's this pink wrap that you run around electronics and he's stepping over the, the, the crate door. A bunch of people came in like, oh my God, did he break his ankle? It looks like he's going to step on the corner. So like, you know, medical Twitter showed up. You had, you know, anti-static Twitter show up. They're like, is that going to create a static charge? It's like, no, it's anti-static. But it was fun to celebrate that with what we would learn was a much bigger supporting community than we knew. And with every commercial customer there in, there was someone in that company that learned of Oxide years ago that had begun championing it inside the building.
00:36:47 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:47] S1: What would be your number one piece of advice around building in public in terms of getting into cadence? Because what I see is a lot of founders that want to do this, very few founders do it consistently. Maybe they'll post here or there. They start a podcast at stocks. Like, how did you force yourself to keep putting things out regularly? And the only way this works is if you do it consistently over a good amount of time.
00:37:08 · Steve Tuck
[00:37:08] S0: I would say what worked for us is involving the team. Like, bring your team forward. You're going to have plenty of people that do not want to be front and center describing what they're working on and why. But you will find that, you know, folks are proud of their work and what they're doing is a super important part of the overall thing that you are building. And giving them a platform to highlight that a little bit. A, it gives you an excuse for the cadence. It kind of like forces the action. You know, you're sort of thinking about what team members to slot in as co-hosts or participating. Gives you kind of an idea of what the theme or the reason that you're having that episode could be. And then what's happening is, you know, your potential future customers are getting to know the people behind the product. And again, it builds that trust. It builds that sense of relationship. And I think, you know, it also lowers the burden of one person being responsible for the content every single week or every two weeks. But I think I would love to take credit for it. But, you know, Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal have borne the brunt of that religious kind of weekly show. And it does take, takes grit and there's never enough time in the day. But you're right on. Like, you have to get into that cadence and that consistency for it to show up. The only thing I would caution is there's a lot of podcasts out there that are created to try to get to people. Like, are created for the sake of having a podcast. And there's not a lot of great signal, like a lot of great interesting information out there. And that is where allowing the experts to come to the front and talk about what they're doing and why and where they came from and why they're passionate about, you know, signal integrity. You're going to be surprised by the folks that also similarly care about that stuff that become champions of the product.
00:39:03 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:03] S1: The second thing I want to talk to you about because it's so, like, different is you have about 150 people. My understanding is you're paying everyone the same salary. Tell me as much as you can about why you would do that, how that works, you know, the benefits, et cetera, because I, I mean, I have so many questions about it.
00:39:22 · Steve Tuck
[00:39:22] S0: Yeah, most people do. Let me talk about where it started. So we founded the company. Brian and I both had three kids and we were going to make sure that we did not start the company off where we were, like, already in financial distress. We couldn't pay our bills. So we wanted to make sure that at least we had a, like, a way to be financially stable, pay ourselves, like, a decent salary so that we could pay the bills. And then when we started hiring the first couple of engineers, like, we certainly are not going to pay them less. And they were coming in and they were going to have an opportunity to participate in our early equity in the company. And so we want to make sure that, like, we had a good competitive compensation structure early on and it made sense to kind of, to kind of keep things even as we went. Then it kind of became an interesting experiment because once you've hired a handful of folks and you kind of are incrementing in that wage to make sure it's competitive, as you hire more people, quickly things flipped to where we wanted to hold that as a constraint. What that resulted in is that when we were going to go hire, you know, roles that people typically think like, oh, you can go find someone in that role at a much lower cost, be it support or, like, finance support or other, we had to flip it around. And we're like, if we were going to pay this amount for a support person, like, what does that support person need to look like? That might be like an L3 senior support person that, you know, may have been the most valuable person in the company they're coming from. And that is going to be the only support people we hire. And it then kind of turned out that we would have these meetings with Fortune 50 entertainment companies that would have the same person that was at the whiteboard kind of architecting stuff pre-sales responding to their ticket six months later. And they're like, I've never experienced this before. Like, how did I get to this person already? And it's like, sorry, that's like the only people we have. And so across every role, you end up with this just like highest caliber of talent, but there's a much, much, much more powerful thing that came out of that. And, you know, what you're doing is you're saying every role in the company is equally important. And that just like breaks people's brains.