15 – Tuomas Artman Linear, Sync Engines, Rethought Startup MVP

Tuomas Artman
We knew they were growing, they would raise a seed round, then eventually a series A, then there were like 50 people, series B. So we said, I think we can build out the functionality of the teachers that our initial customers need as they grow. And it’s sort of a wrap. We were able to have a few customers that started very early with us that now are pretty huge companies. And they’ve been sticking around with us for the entire duration. And we’ve been just building more stuff for them. And that enabled us to just grow into larger customers starting to go into sort of series a companies and growth companies and now sort of eyeing not not yet the enterprise i’ll take take Some time more but established companies and ipo companies and that was sort of our strategy to build something of the highest quality but just reduce the scope in the beginning so much Because we were able to identify those target customers that didn’t need much.
Johan Schickling
I think that’s fantastic advice and a great strategy how to go about picking the right narrow initial scope is not to primarily think about like, oh, which features should we build first, But really starting out from like okay we are set on that we want to have that rethought mvp we want to aim really high in terms of the quality otherwise like why do we even get started in The competitive landscape so that is that is a fixed assumption but

Tuomas Artman
That enabled us to just grow into larger customers starting to go into sort of series a companies and growth companies and now sort of eyeing not not yet the enterprise i’ll take take Some time more but established companies and ipo companies and that was sort of our strategy to build something of the highest quality but just reduce the scope in the beginning so much Because we were able to identify those target customers that didn’t need much.
Johan Schickling
I think that’s fantastic advice and a great strategy how to go about picking the right narrow initial scope is not to primarily think about like, oh, which features should we build first, But really starting out from like okay we are set on that we want to have that rethought mvp we want to aim really high in terms of the quality otherwise like why do we even get started in The competitive landscape so that is that is a fixed assumption but then instead of thinking about which feature do we start first is like who as a customer segment do we start with? And that then implies the kind of features that are most important to start out with. And I think that also aligns hopefully nicely with the way how you can also charge for the product and build not just like a product that people use but also pay for and

Tuomas Artman
Like we wanted these overly qualified people, which were super hard to find. So we grew slowly. And in the end, like we became profitable very quickly. I think two years in, we were profitable, not because we wanted to, or because we needed to, or because that was the grandmaster plan. No, it was just effectively luck because we did these things it grew so slowly and then the sort of revenue just overtook our expenses and then like the downturn came and now everybody Was sort of wanting to be the linear like wanting to do the same thing everybody’s looking at like where can we get profitable we don’t want to raise another round or ineffectively do A down round in that scenario. So everybody started looking at building things in a similar fashion. So I think there’s a lot of luck involved, but also sort of our passion and our backgrounds sort of directed us to build out this company this way. And we’re still on that route. Like we still go down the same way like we don’t want to go through hyper growth and we will never yeah we will never hyper grow like i’ve seen that at either carrie saw that an airbnb or at Coinbase i don’t think anybody of us really enjoyed that experience it was nice to see once but we don’t want to go through that again like we want the product team that is excited to building Something great and not just sort of a pop in the big wheel of working on some more infrastructure piece that maybe gets open sourced one day. We want to make sure that new people who build linear are sort of the

Tuomas Artman
Our values are literally based on, on what we’ve done in the past and what we want to continue doing. And yeah, there’s a small, small set. Like the first one is trust. Like we, we’ve always trusted our engineers. We’ve made sure that we hire people that can work on their own, that can sort of bring something into the company. And we want to be open in our doings and we are open in our doings. And secondly, we’ve always built sort of the customer in mind with hiring or building our functionality by asking customers what they need. So customer focus is one of the things that we’ve been doing, which is now a value of ours. Not building things in isolation and making sure that we build something for our customers and that we build something that people value and people need. It gets more important as you grow higher and you start working for functionality that you wouldn’t necessarily use yourself for PMs or CEOs and CTOs at larger companies. The third thing that sort of came out of how we built the tool, like we were sort of opinionated about what we want to do. We didn’t want to have that, like it wasn’t really a great value to have to be opinionated. That sort of sounds a bit negative. But what we’ve turned it into is like we built purpose-built tools. Like we built for a specific purpose, for a specific target customer in mind. We want to build software for software companies. And if you stick with that, then we can build an excellent user experience and excellent functionality. If you start diverging and building everything for everybody, then you’re sort of diluting the of the core of your application. And it usually becomes less usable or less great. Then the fourth one being quality. I’ve always wanted to build a high quality product and put so much effort into making sure that everything is great and working and works fast and all the small details are taken care Of. And if you do all of these things well, then you inspire people. And that’s sort of the last thing that we wanted to do. We wanted to be a company that helps companies be better at building software. And we think that inspiration is part of it. Inspire people with quality product that you’ve built for them and make them want to build an equally great experience from what i can tell from the outside that all rings true and sounds
Johan Schickling
Very

Tuomas Artman
Conference on that. It’s probably available on YouTube as well. If you want to check it out and put it into the, I don’t know, notes for this, this, this podcast, but yeah, in short, like the initial idea of, of Sync Engine was not to make it developer Friendly. That sort of happened as an afterthought. And that was in my mind, maybe the more, more important aspect in, in the end, like we wanted to be fast and support offline mode and enable application to be quick, and that is important. But what we found out, what we liked even more was that engineers would be able to just ship features much, much faster without having to think about a vast area of functionality that Usually takes quite a bit of time, which is sort of error handling or networking, waiting for things to come back, supporting two different code paths for like when you make your local Changes versus when somebody else makes those edits for you.

Tuomas Artman
On that. It’s probably available on YouTube as well. If you want to check it out and put it into the, I don’t know, notes for this, this, this podcast, but yeah, in short, like the initial idea of, of Sync Engine was not to make it developer Friendly. That sort of happened as an afterthought. And that was in my mind, maybe the more, more important aspect in, in the end, like we wanted to be fast and support offline mode and enable application to be quick, and that is important. But what we found out, what we

Tuomas Artman
Now you need to figure out what to do with this product model object. And when you realize that, you’re like, yeah, I effectively need to input now a sync engine in order to make that happen. There needs to be a queue of sorts, and it becomes very, very complex. It’s funny.
Johan Schickling
It’s like, it’s a sort of a boiling frog situation where you start out with like your blissfully ignorant, happy path of just like doing a fetch call to your backend and like you get your Data back and you test this on localhost with like your one client over there and your locally running server over there. And like everything just works and like you ship the feature like