Anyway, to get to the point, we had built something internally

[nishat@264]

Got it. Cool. How did you come up with the idea to create ChartMogul? About five years ago, you thought, “Here’s a better way to do one of those two things.” How did that come about?

Nick:

Yes, that’s right. I started out building a product and some engineering. But I’m not a very good engineer, so I worked mostly on product at a startup in the UK. That’s when I became a customer of Zendesk, the support ticketing system. After Zendesk’s Series A, they reached out to me and I ended up joining their UK team and setting up the beginning of their UK operations. I then moved to Asia, where I opened offices in Tokyo and Manila, Philippines, to build out sales and support for the product. Then I worked in Europe and Asia for Zendesk. I spent five years at Zendesk in sales.

Nick:

While I was there, you know, you're taiyuan cell phone number list evaluated. If you're in a sales role or sales management role, you're evaluated on how much MRR you bring in, in a given month or quarter. We built dashboards to show internally, like custom things, to show how you're doing. So it's a real addiction. The user experience of those dashboards wasn't very good. We were using off-the-shelf products. We were using a SaaS product, but it wasn't really designed for subscription businesses.

Nick:

It was just about doing some analysis of how that data was being used. But the user experience wasn't really very SaaS, in a way. I think the whole idea of ​​SaaS is to create beautifully designed, beautifully simple user experiences, and that's what we were trying to do at Zendesk. I think that's what most SaaS founders I know are trying to do. Try to take something that's typically pretty bad, in terms of user experience, in legacy enterprise software - which has a bad reputation for not being particularly well designed or user-friendly in terms of its look and feel - and then take that and make it simpler and more user-friendly and bring it online.

Nick:

And because of the numbers that were in there, it was a little addictive to keep checking them. But the user experience wasn't very good and it wasn't very rewarding. For example, when I was in charge of Asia, it would have been nice to be able to see, "Okay, what are the best performing markets? For example, "What's the average revenue per customer in Singapore versus Hong Kong?" or something like that. But it was hard to play with the data and slice it, so every time you wanted to do something, you had to send an email and ask the data team to create your new report. And then you have to follow up two weeks later when the report isn't done, or something like that, very typical, very traditional, that happens in companies.