In this episode of Never Too Early's Founder Therapy Series, Lauren Ipsen from Decibel sits down with Matt Peters, the former Chief Product Officer at Expel and now a tech entrepreneur. They discuss his journey to becoming a founder, including his early career experiences, the challenges of building his company Fixify, and the learnings from product development to managing investors. Matt shares invaluable insights on the importance of understanding customer needs, building a strong team, and maintaining emotional resilience in the startup world.
00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early
00:20 Meet Matt Peters: From CPO to Founder
01:03 The Founder Itch: Matt's Journey
01:48 Building a Product and a Company
02:26 Early Career and Key Learnings
03:36 The Aha Moments
05:07 The Decision to Found Fixify
10:30 Challenges and Pivots in Product Development
18:22 Go-to-Market Strategies and Customer Insights
20:24 Managing Stakeholders and Investor Relations
24:49 Building a Strong Founding Team
26:05 Effective Hiring Strategies
28:16 Onboarding and Early Success
31:33 Tracking Success and Setting Goals
38:13 Reflecting on Leadership and Emotional Resilience
42:07 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Transcript
LAUREN IPSEN: Welcome to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, and this is our Founder Therapy series. We'll be spending time with executives that have taken the leap recently to start their own venture-backed tech companies.
We'll cover early learnings, misconceptions, mistakes, and a whole lot more. Today I'm super excited to welcome my guest, Matt Peters. Matt was the chief product officer at Expel before embarking on his entrepreneurial journey a year and a half ago.
All right, Matt Peters, welcome to the show.
MATT PETERS: Thanks so much. Super jazzed to be here.
LAUREN IPSEN: Thank you for being here with me. How are you doing today?
MATT PETERS: Doing really well, doing really well. Always—always a ton to do, but we're coming into the new year strong. So I feel pretty good.
LAUREN IPSEN: Okay. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me. I super appreciate it. Matt is someone that is in the Decibel portfolio that I have had the great pleasure of spending a lot of time with. And I personally feel that there's so much that we've worked through together that can be really helpful for a lot of our listeners.
So I want to start from the beginning and ask you if you always had the founder itch, or if that was something that came about more recently in life.
MATT PETERS: So I would say I haven't always had the founder itch. One of the things that happened, though, pretty early on in my career is I started getting, like, more and more visibility into other parts of the business. So when I was at Mandiant, I got connected with some folks, and I got to watch sort of the Mandiant story. And we got acquired by FireEye, and I got to watch us for that transition, and then joined as employee number one at Expel.
One of the things there was the founders there were very, very intentional. I got to really learn a lot because they understood something that I think a lot of people might miss. I know that I would have screamed right past it, which is, like, you're a founder. You're not just building a product. Right?
You're not just building a team. You're building a product and a team and a company all at the same time. Like, there's just a whole bunch of degrees of freedom in that problem.
Once I really saw that, I was like, wow, I'm really interested. I got—I was sort of blessed by working with some people that I really respect and like, and so several of us then said, "Hey, we've learned a tremendous amount, you know, working together. We'd like to go try doing this ourselves and sort of see—you know, try our hand at it.” So that's how I got into being a founder.
LAUREN IPSEN: Talk to me about some of the different roles that you took on or areas that you leaned into that set you up really, really well for being a CEO.
MATT PETERS: I came out of college, and I went to work at a company that was doing sort of—think about it sort of like telephone switch networking optimization, right?
So, like, a lot of software I wrote is the kind of software you would never actually interact with. It's more like embedded systems, stuff like this. I then ended up at a company where I worked, and I'd like—I was one of the early engineers, so I built the product. But then as we were going out to market, because I had built a lot of software, I ended up being sort of one of the points of contact. So I worked a lot with the early companies that deployed the thing.
And so I got to, you know, go on site with them. I got to work with the SE s, that sort of thing. And that kind of gave me a perspective on like, okay, so there's a relationship between sort of features that you build and how hard the thing is to configure and whether or not you're selling to enterprise or you're selling to mid-market, because we had a different size of customers, and the product was really easy for some customers, really hard for others. And like, I got to really understand that.
And then at that same company, I got to work—as I was working on the architecture, I got to work with the marketing team a lot on sort of like, how are we talking about this? How are we positioning it? Like, where was it going? So I got to sort of see some of that play out as like, how did we take this set of features that I understood in one way. Like, I understood them like an engineer. And then the way that you talk about them externally, the way you talk about them to the market, is you actually talk about it from the customer's perspective. And that was kind of min d blowing. I'm gonna be honest with you.
When I saw that parallax—we're talking about the same thing, but we're using totally different words—it was really, really interesting. And so that was another kind of big a-ha. Wow. So there's this whole marketing thing that has to go well in order for this product to do what it needs to do.
And then when we launched the product, in that case, the product was not initially that successful. We were really struggling. The sales weren't picking up. And I took a look and we went out and we asked some of the sales engineers we were working with, and they were like, “Hey, the salespeople don't know how to sell this thing. They've been selling something else for years. They have no idea how to sell this thing.”
And so we're like, oh, okay. Well, let's do a whole bunch of enablement. And so we focused on a lot of that. Sales went up. And I was like, oh, okay. So there's a whole bunch more stuff we have to do.
When I ended up at Mandiant, that was my first exposure into sort of the services and product worlds. So Mandiant was primarily a services organization. We had products as well. And it was my first time really getting to see what that—what that combination could do, right? And so it was—it was a fascinating thing.
And that then led to this sort of like, you know, a-ha, where I was like, the problems I'm really fascinated by are sort of these intricate, you know, people and technology and how they kind of come together, which is then what took me. I met the folks who founded Expel, and that's what took me to Expel, was building that out and getting that chance there, so.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. Okay. Talk to me about what you're working on, what you're building, and what ultimately got you to a place where you decided that this was the area that you wanted to take a bet on as a founder.
MATT PETERS: The thing that I got really interested in while I was at Expel was this notion of how do you end up making people effective in using technology, right? So we were solving at that point a security problem, right? We were actually—we were doing a managed security thing. We were helping monitor people's networks for attackers, and then we would swoop in and help save them.
And at the time, everybody was struggling to do that well, to do it with high quality, but, you know, at scale, because there was sort of a natural tension in that. It's hard to do something at scale and do it really, really well. And what we discovered was actually, if you solve a different problem—if you don't solve a security problem, if you don't show up with threat intel or an endpoint solution or any of that sort of stuff, but you throw—instead show up and say, what I need to do is I need to make a person very effective at making a decision quickly, because the decision is, is this alert an attacker or not?
And like, if you could make that decision in about 30 seconds or less, the rest of that problem is kind of gravy. And so when we had that a-ha, we were like, oh, wow, yeah. We're talking about decision support. This is a whole class of—people study this. It's an understood thing. So we started working on how do you make a software platform that makes people really, really effective.
And I kind of fell in love with that class of problem. That's the thing that really gets me up in the morning is like, how do you make people—be it your customers or your own service folks—how do you make them effective using technology?
So fast forward, we've been there for a number of years, and my cofounders and I are all sitting around. We're like, well, we'd love to try this on our own. And so we're starting to look around for a problem space where that exists, where there's a tension in the market between scale and quality, something like this.
And then the second piece is, we're really interested in, hey, if we could bring to bear this idea of, like, if you could optimize for the human moment, that's really the thing that we're interested in.
And so, one of my cofounders stumbled on this report by this company called HappySignals. And in that report, they did a survey of a whole bunch of end users about IT help desk, which is sort of adjacent to security monitoring, so it was one of the spaces that we had been exposed to. And the report said two things that got my attention.
The first one was, like, 50 % of people avoid going to their help desk, right? And I was like, wow, that's really—that's really interesting. If you have a problem and you're like, under no circumstances am I going to the people who are going to help me? Like, I refuse, right? That's super interesting.
And then the second thing—
LAUREN IPSEN: Guilty, honestly.
MATT PETERS: Well, yeah, no. And so anybody who's been, like, never mind, my mouse just doesn't work anymore. We're done. I'm moving on, right? And so, like—
LAUREN IPSEN: I'll figure it out.
MATT PETERS: Exactly. So the second thing was in this, and this was the part that really got me excited, was of the people who did go to their help desk and had a good experience, the majority of them said the reason they had a good experience was not because of how fast their problem was fixed or even that their problem was fixed. It was the attitude of the person that helped them, right?
And the thing that got me excited about that is, I think oftentimes in Silicon Valley—and I'm guilty of this, too. I'm a technologist—we think tech first. We think like robots. Let's automate it. Let's go. You know, that kind of thing.
LAUREN IPSEN: Right.
MATT PETERS: But what this was saying was, actually, the problem is a texture problem, right? The problem is, I want to feel a certain way when I interact with the help desk. I want the attitude of the person, right, to be a certain way. And so we said to ourselves, oh, that's fascinating. Can you scale that? Can you scale care? And like, that was so weird-sounding because we're like, scaling care. That—those two words, grammatically. I mean, what? And it's that kind of challenge, I think, is fascinating, where you take something and you're like, okay, yeah.
And so at exactly that moment, large language models had kind of burst on the scene. And so we were like, oh, seeing a technology that for the first time might be able to help do a thing like this. And the thing that got me really excited about that was like, that allowed us to kind of—we could use technology to keep people at the center, which is the thing that I think, again, optimizing people, optimizing for that human moment. That was the thing that we did.
And so it seemed like we had a problem statement, and we had a—we had a desire to solve that problem. And so we started talking to some people just sort of like, you know, by the by. And I will tell you, so advice for founders, if you are talking to somebody about the problem you're trying to solve and they lean into the camera and they say, “I've been thinking about this for years,” you might be onto something, right?
And that's what happened to us. We just kept having that happen. And we're like, okay, we might be on to something, right? And so that's sort of how we decided that it was—it was time to go.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love that. That's awesome. I—yeah, I personally am completely guilty of—like, I think I partially just assume that if things aren't working, that it's on me.
MATT PETERS: Because you're a bad person, and you should know how to do that, right?
LAUREN IPSEN: It's me.
MATT PETERS: And then there's that moment where, like, if you do go and get help, and the person's like, “Oh man, that must be super frustrating,” and you feel so seen in that moment.
LAUREN IPSEN: I'm like, “Oh, my god, thank you.”
MATT PETERS: So yeah, that's really all we want. Can you take all of this amazing technology, all of this ineffable large language model stuff, and can you channel it in that way so that somebody goes to work and feels seen?
And then Forrester did some research on this and basically said, look, what makes people happy at work is that they feel like they can make progress on important goals. Right? So the “they can make progress” thing, one of the number one things is the equipment I have works, right? So we figured, like, hey, we're working on an important thing.
So it all kind of lined up, and we were pretty jazzed about it.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love it so much. Something I've found personally with a lot of my first-time founders is that, you know, they have to pivot the product a couple times over before they ultimately find PMF. And so I'm curious if that's something that Fixify has gone through, if there's been lots of iterations of the product, or if what you see today is exactly as the initial plan was written up.
MATT PETERS: I would start with one thing that we went in eyes wide open on is that we didn't know a bunch of stuff. So actually, the way that we sort of positioned our initial plan was here's a bunch of stuff we don't know. And so our first task was go find them out, right? And we actually use a phrase internally. We're like, what we're actually building is a learning engine, right?
That is the company we're building, is over time, there's a whole bunch of stuff we're going to discover. And the success or failure of this organism is going to be whether or not we can effectively learn. So that's sort of like, foundational.
So, like, secondarily, have we pivoted? Well, when I think about a pivot, I tend to think about, like, immediate sort of total change in direction based on some, you know, feedback.
We haven't done that as much, but what we have is we discovered that so many of the things that we initially thought were wrong, that it's kind of comical. So to start with, a good example would be, we went out with this problem statement. Hey, we're going to be building this sort of help desk solution and platform for companies. And we originally had sort of identified a target market, sort of this size, this class of user, this class of companies or this geography, that kind of thing.
And what we did was we were like, look, that's our thesis. And we're going to go talk to 10 customers and sort of validate this thesis. And folks were nice enough to connect us with lots of people. We had a bunch of conversations. And at the end of it, we're like, oh. Oh, we have a problem because we're not hearing the same pingback that we heard when we initially talked to people about the idea, right?
And so what that told us was like, it's—the problem exists out there. We know it does. We also happen to know it because there's just a whole bunch of ancillary services that have gone up around this. But in that market, we weren't getting the pingback. So we had to have sort of a meeting.
We did some data analysis. We came back and said, okay, it's probably not this market. Let's see if we can go up and try to go up in size, right? I gotta be honest. I was sort of dead set against that. I was like, no, no, I think we just keep going. But like, as a team, we all sort of agreed, let's go try it.
And so we went and talked to another group of customers. And when we moved up in size, we started getting the pingback. And we're like, oh, okay. We just miscalculated the size pretty fundamentally.
So that was one of our first pivots. It was like earliest, earliest days, that was one of the things that we changed.
LAUREN IPSEN: So immediately kind of working through changing the ICP a little bit before going back to changing the product.
MATT PETERS: Yeah. And one of the things that we did as well, so we were talking to customers—I mean, we founded the company in September. We didn't have a product until, you know, Q2 of the following year. But we were talking to customers in September, right? So like, the early days, so we had time to sort of iterate through this thing, so it wasn't as emergent as it could have been. We didn't wait till we had the product to start, you know, talking to customers and selling it.
LAUREN IPSEN: So smart.
MATT PETERS: One of the things I heard someone say, and I think it was a really useful thing, is your go-to-market will always be behind. A hundred percent. You will always be behind where you want to be, and you just start earlier. Just start earlier, right?
So we started talking to customers and sort of seeing—you know, validating the thing, day one, until the ICP iteration. The other thing that we did was we constantly tested our understanding of the ICP. So we went out and we found like, hey, these are customers who said that they would be trial customers. Okay. Awesome. Let's do some biographies, that sort of stuff.
We've then gotten more diligent as we got real marketing people in. We actually went and did structured buyer persona interviews. So if people are—so the marketing people that I trust tend to use a framework around buyer personas done by Adele Revella and this sort of interview structure that you do.
And like, what you come away with is a real in-depth understanding of the problem that you're solving for who, and when do they have that problem and when to sell. So we've iterated constantly on that.
On the product side, we've also had a bunch of changes, learnings, things like this. So a good example of this is like, originally, we knew that we were going to connect up—our product connects up to your, you know, help desk environment. We pull in a bunch of tickets and we do a whole bunch of metrics and stuff. And this is purely and selfishly—initially, it was just for us, so we could know: How bad is this going to be? You know what I mean? Like, that was all it was.
But what we discovered when we started demoing to people in the early days, they were like, oh, these metrics are amazing. Can I have these? And we're like, the onboarding screen. And they were like, yeah, just that. And we're like, yeah, exactly. No, a hundred percent. Cause that's actually what we meant, right?
And so, I remember one of the conversations where we realized that you actually can hear in the conversation the doubt and shock in our voices going, “You mean the onboarding screen?” But we sat back, we listened, we asked the customer, why is it useful? What's it doing? You know, this kind of thing.
And then we realized, oh man, this is actually a whole feature set, a whole problem, a sub-problem in this space that we just totally blew by. We had no idea it existed. So we got to go back and say like, okay, one, it's in our path. We have to solve it before we get to our follow-up product problem. And then how do we think about solving that? So that was like an a-ha.
And so that sort of helped to drive it. And then there were a lot of things around sort of how the onboarding of the product worked, how we got people in and that sort of thing, that we've had to revisit as we've gotten more people in.
So one of the things that we did there was, we're like, this is very much the part where we're going to build the airplane while we're flying it. So you've got to have a lot of people with a lot of time to look at this over and over again and be like, okay, what happened? All right, fix it. What happened? And now fix it. That kind of thing.
So there have been a lot of sort of mini-pivots in the onboarding portion of the thing as well. So those are a couple of examples. But like, in all of them, the thing that I think helped us was we had a tremendous amount of sort of just a high trust between the founders and the team, where somebody could show up and be like, that thing you worked on did not work, right? Or that idea you had was wrong. And nobody was going to be like, but that was my idea.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
MATT PETERS: We were wrong about the ICP. And as much as I was like, intellectually invested in, well, this is my pontification about what size of customer we have, that's not going to sell anything, so—
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. You just kind of have to take your ego out of it and say, like, this is what it is, and this is what's getting the right responses, and that’s okay that it's different than what we initially anticipated.
I think it can be really challenging for very, very deeply technical CEOs to really think about the fact that the product doesn't have to be perfect, and the customer can dictate, more so than your dream, what the product ultimately looks like. And I think that's something that I am constantly working through with a lot of our founders is, okay, what you've built is incredible, but is this actually where the gap in the market is? Is this actually what people are going to want to buy?
MATT PETERS: Yeah.
LAUREN IPSEN: Or is it just something that's really, really cool and useful and a nice to have, but not really where the gap is, right? So the go-to-market side of things can really dictate how to come back and build the best product for the customer.
And it can be very, very different than what you initially anticipate it being, which is why I wanted to kind of touch on on some of this with you, because I think early adopters, early design partners, and just open communication amongst the team and really kind of being self-aware and looking at what you've built and saying like, “This is working; this isn't” is the best way to get out of the gates really quickly.
Okay. Let's talk a little bit about pipeline, specifically on the go-to-market side of things. So how has that process been for you, as someone that's more of a deeply technical founder? What have the biggest learnings been and challenges that you faced in closing your first couple big deals?
MATT PETERS: My background’s in cybersecurity. It's not in IT, right? So, I've been adjacent to IT for a long, long time, so I can kind of squint and tilt my head and be like, okay, yeah, I kind of get it. But what that meant was in—when we started Expel, we rolled it, and we built—the initial version of the product we built, we built for ourselves.
We were like, look, we've been practitioners. We know how this works. We're building a thing that's going to work for us. And it happened to work for a bunch of customers because we had done this work before. In Fixify, we weren't able to do that. So we had to come in with a lot more sort of ears wide open. In the moment, I think that was a real advantage.
One of the things I would recommend, this is a book that got recommended to me and it—I would buy it again every day if I needed to, right—is this book called The Mom Test. It’s by a guy named Rob Fitzpatrick. And what it does is it—like, I am very excited about technology, and I think my ideas are brilliant. And so my temptation when I go talk to customers about it is to tell them about my idea and be like, “This is what I'm building. Isn't it cool?”
And the lesson learned out of that book and the thing that we applied early days in Fixify is like, that is the wrong approach to that conversation if you really want to learn what the market needs. And so Fitzpatrick goes through a really good—and it's a super short book. It’s just a really easy read. And I'm sitting there reading ,and I'm flipping through. I'm like, oh my God, I have messed this up so many times in the past. Oh wow.
And then I was like, okay, we're just going to try it. We're going to run the conversation exactly like he says to do. And we learned so much out of that next conversation, because what you do is you don't—you don't say, this is my idea. You spend a lot of time going, what's your problem, right? And the ability then to translate that into, okay, let me have 10 or 12 of those conversations, and now I really understand what's going on, is super duper useful.
LAUREN IPSEN: Talk to me a little bit about some learnings around managing stakeholders, working with investors more generally, what they expect to hear versus what you maybe thought they wanted to hear, and just kind of work through some of the learnings in the past year and a half that you've had working with the investment side of the house.
MATT PETERS: One of the things that was super useful about the investors we were working with is we were able to say, they bring expertise that we do not have. And it's really important to understand, your investors are probably not product developers, right? They're not—probably not engineers. They probably don't have data science backgrounds.
They might have been operators at one point, but like, honestly, I wouldn't leverage that too much in this early days context, right? But what they do know is they've seen about 50 million people start companies, right? They've also— they understand a lot about finances and how burn rates work and how comparatives work and that sort of stuff.
So early days, one of the things that we did—and like, this is how we did it at previous companies, and it's I think it's a really good process—is to sit down, and it's gonna be boring. But we made a budget. Right? And the reason is because what we don't want to be is one of those startups that figures out they're out of money when they're out of money. Right?
So what we want, we want to say, okay, we need to build a thing, right? And we need to build it. It's got to be about this big. It's got about this much complexity to it. It's about this many people for about this long. So like, that's all—those are numbers you can hide behind your thumb. There's a little bit of a sort of operational rigor in doing it.
But like, you know, we don't have to shave a cat with a laser from space. We can do it with a certain granularity. Right? And so—and what we did was we backed from there into, like, what do the finances for this thing look like? There was a tremendous amount of back-and-forth with our investors about that kind of thing.
We're like, okay, does this make sense? Given what you've seen in other companies, does that burn rate make sense? Do these costs make sense? Tell me about recruiter’s fees, you know, this sort of stuff. So we were able to really understand what was going to happen with some of these things.
Because the thing you—the thing that we could do is we could over-rotate, be like, I know how to write software. Let's just go write some software. But in reality, the things that are going to kill me are the things I don't know, right? And so then that's what I'm reaching out to my investors.
The second thing that we did early days was we just made sure, hey, we're keeping the investors in the loop on what's going on, right? So we're sending a newsletter. We've got a thing that we send to the investors. We were sending a product update newsletter once a month like clockwork so that they would know.
And then after a while, once we had enough other things going on, it wasn't just building product, we also send an internal sort of like, this is the state of the business newsletter. And we send that once a month as well, because that enables the investors to sort of be in touch—they understand what's going on, right?
And then the last thing that I do is as a CEO is I have a one-on-one with each one of my investors once a month to make sure that we have a chance to sort of kick things around and that sort of thing. But we also have a shared Slack channel with all of them in there, and we ping them and we're like, hey, has anybody seen this? You know, this kind of thing.
And the thing that we do or the thing that we try to leverage with our investors is they may not particularly have expertise in a thing, but what they have is visibility to hundreds and hundreds of companies. So they themselves can look at something and go, well, that doesn't smell right, because I've never seen anybody do it that way before. So you can have that conversation. But they can also be like, I already know somebody who solves that problem, right?
And the thing about starting a company is most of the problems are gonna run into, someone else has solved it before. So unless you're really thinking you're gonna discover fire, just go borrow somebody else's solution and try it, you know, that's what we've experienced.
LAUREN IPSEN: Often what I've found with folks that are seasoned executives and have a lot of experience, they feel almost like they are supposed to know everything about how to start a company and feel like they can't just raise their hand and be like, I actually don't know how to forecast the next 10 executive hires compensation, or I actually am not sure really where to start on equity bands or whatever it might be.
MATT PETERS: I will say, it is a bit—I am not a person who loves admitting I don't know stuff. It's just a general weakness of mine. But I will tell you one of the things that has been super helpful is just to be able to show up and be like, okay, tell me how to think about this. And I've got—one of the investors I work with is great with financial modeling and things, that I always call them up and be like, okay, tell me how I should think about this kind of thing. Right? Like, how should I, how should I—
And those are the kinds of things where like, you know, I can read a bunch of blog posts and I'm sure I can find 27 listicles on Substack which have, these are the top 10 things to do with your financial model, or I can talk to somebody who literally does this thing all day, every day, right? So it's a thing. And so, yeah, that's been—it's been a path that’s been super helpful for us.
LAUREN IPSEN: Okay, let's talk a little bit about hiring. How did you approach building your founding team, and talk to me about some of the skill sets and qualities that you typically look for when you're vetting candidates.
MATT PETERS: I'll start with the last question and back into the first question. So the last question, how do we understand what roles we're going to need to hire? So that, again, in this boring sort of green eye shade sort of accountant formula for me, starts actually with the budget. As we're thinking about the things that we need to accomplish, we're going to back into what the teams look like and the headcount and stuff like this.
Here's the thing that I've watched people do a number of times as they've started companies is like, no one thinks about the support roles that they're going to need to have. So like, I'm going to hire 22 engineers. Okay. Are they going to have managers? Because if you're going to manage them all, you're going to have a hell of a time, right? So it's like, okay. So, the average manager loading ratio. And this is, again, where you could go to your investors and be like, what do you think? I haven't built teams before. So I'm like, okay, I know what the loading ratio would be.
So we figure out, okay, this is what the teams kind of roughly look like. This is what they're kind of shaped like. And this is roughly the order we want to hire them in. So for Fixify, we had an operations team. We decided, hey, we want to build that out in Ireland for a series of reasons. And so we need to then also understand, okay, we're hiring another geo. So we have to have a whole bunch of things set up for that.
So when we think about sourcing, one of the things I think about is if you're building a new team—in particular, if you're building a new remote team, you—the experience, the successful experience I've had is you build a senior first, right?
So you go get the more seasoned senior heads first, because what that'll do is that'll help you kind of put sort of the tent posts in the ground of like, hey, if I'm hiring—if I hire 12 junior engineers out of the gate, my software is going to be super janky. And the first principal I hire is going to come and be like, what have you been doing? Because you hire the principals first, right?
So what we've done, we had pretty good networks. We've been working for a long, long time. We had a number of people who wanted to come over with us., that sort of thing, so we were very blessed with a team sort of from jump. We ended up having about nine or 10 people, you know, like day two of the company. So that was actually really, really pretty cool.
But then when we built out Ireland and I'm saying, okay, look, we're going to need to find somebody who's a lead for this organization, sort of a site lead, the first land, of that kind of thing. We hired a recruiting firm that we used—again, we went to our investors and we went to our network to say, okay, who's recruited in Ireland? What firms do they use? What are good, right? You know, that kind of thing.
So we did that. The other thing that we did was we made sure that people understood there are some people in the company whose basically full-time job is going to be hiring. Right? And that's not like—you have HR people. But if you're a leader at a startup, if you're a leader at an early-stage startup, just a huge chunk of your time is going to be building the team to start with. And that's not—those aren't ancillary duties, right? It's not the thing you do in between. It's like, no, we got to focus on this sort of thing.
We then did a lot of process around how we hire. So this is the other pieces, is like, so I'm competing with amazing companies, right? So I’ve—when we first went to Ireland, we didn't even have a website, right? So we would reach out to people. We're like—we're a company you've never heard of before. We swear to God, we're not like the mafia or anything. This is not a scam. Would you like to come work for us, right?
And so, part of doing that well is we had to have a process that was pretty buttoned up. We have a way that we approach this. We write job descriptions in a very particular way. We write job ads in a particular way. We do interviews in a very particular way. And we made sure that people had a good candidate experience. So at the end, they were like, “Those people are legit. I'm totally doing this.” You know, that kind of thing. So that was another piece that we had to kind of build out.
And then understand that we weren't going to hire everybody all at once. And so as we were doing it, we've got to make sure that we've hired the person. Now we can ramp them. So we actually have a plan. We did this with every new hire has a Notion doc, and they walk in—we use Notion internally. They walk in and the document’s like, “Hi, welcome. We're super jazzed. You're here. Here is the first day. We set up meetings for you to meet people that you need to talk to on your teams. Here are the things in the first 90 days we think you want to get done. Here are some to-do lists.” That's so they—
LAUREN IPSEN: So good.
MATT PETERS: You're not walking in your first day and going like, I guess I work here.
LAUREN IPSEN: Am I productive? Well, I think that's so important because that can be why a lot of folks feel maybe unstable in an early-stage company or unsure if they're making good progress. And so I think it's so important that leadership and the founding team is so, so clear in the early days on not only exactly what they need, what they're hiring for, but also what hitting it out of the park looks like.
MATT PETERS: I had a manager years ago who’d tell me, like, there's no one out there who's trying to do a bad job. Nobody. Like, there’s literally, nobody. No one goes to work going, “I'm really going to screw it up today,” right? And particularly if you're going to work at a startup, you're talking about people who are like, I want to make an impact.
Oh, the number one reason people go to work at a startup is like, I want to see the impact of my work. I want to work in a small environment so I can really have an impact. And so setting people up and being like, okay, these are the things you need to do, so that—because you've all worked at those companies where you hire five people and they're combat ineffective for nine months because they're just wandering around trying to find the break room, you know, kind of thing.
So if we short circuit that, it helps tremendously. And then the other thing, we, discovered this actually a couple of jobs ago, is if you set it up so somebody gets a quick win the first day. So actually, Expel, for a long time, we had an engineering team, someone's checking in production code their first day. It's going to be something dumb, but like, they're doing it, right? And it was like that class of thinking.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love that.
MATT PETERS: They go like, okay, I had a win. I'm part of this team.
LAUREN IPSEN: I got a point on the board. I'm—you know, I don't have a target on my back. I'm good for a second.
MATT PETERS: And then the second thing is—and we actually got this from—I got this from another leader, and it was super interesting advice, which was, he actually sits down with new hires and says, hey, let me tell you that there's going to be feedback in this process. There's gonna be times that things go wrong, and I'm going to show up and be like, “Hey, this isn't going well.” Something like this. Okay? That doesn't mean your job's in jeopardy.
Let me tell you exactly what it's going to sound like if your job's in jeopardy, right? Let me tell you exactly what that moment will be like, and it will come looking like this. And if it doesn't look like this, then that's not what's going on. Right? So you can call and not be in trouble -
LAUREN IPSEN: And you’re okay.
MATT PETERS: Yeah. And it was like, huh So we've done sort of variations of that, and it's—I think for new hires, it's helped a bunch to be like, okay, this is what good sounds like. This is what not so good sounds like. It's not like—and to your point, I don't have a target on my back kind of a thing, because you're entering a high chaos environment. So a little bit of stability is usually pretty welcome.
The last thing that we've done, and I did this with—when I hired my sales lead. I've done this for several new hires that I've hired specifically, is like, every day for the first two weeks at five o'clock, I'll see you on a Zoom for a couple minutes. I don't have an agenda.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love that.
MATT PETERS: We're not—I'm not going to grill you about stuff you've learned. I'm just like, got any questions for me? How's it going? Like, what'd you do today? Oh, that's cool. Yeah. How'd that meeting go?
LAUREN IPSEN: Talk to me about how you track success in the early days and how you quantify whether a day in the office was a productive one.
MATT PETERS: Well, I think to start with, in terms of how we think about targets and goals and things like this, so I'll tell you, I have sort of a mental model in my head that's sort of like, if you ever seen one of those maps where they have like multiple layers on the map. So if you do hiking or whatever, AllTrails, that sort of thing.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yes.
MATT PETERS: Okay, let's look at the topography, and then let's look at the rainfall, and let's look at the temperature, and that sort of stuff. So I think about the plan that way, right? So there is a plan that is the financial plan. It is like, it is the—this is the when we need to raise money. This is when we're gonna be out of money, that sort of stuff, based on our budget.
There is then a product plan that should be somehow in service to some of these financial goals. There is a hiring plan. This sort of thing. So you can think about those as different layers on the same map. So if we think about it that way, one of the things that we do early days, right, is we're going to sit down and say, hey, look, the point of this thing—so for Fixify, we're like, look, we want to build a help desk that leaves end users feeling a particular way.
And so that's going to mean we need a platform, and we need a team to run the platform. We need to sell this thing. We think we're going to go to customers about this big, all of these sort of thumbnail assumptions turn into a financial plan. And then we go out and say, okay, we're going to need a certain amount of money to get us to our next goal, right? And so our next goal is going to need to look about like this.
What are we going to need to show up with to say, and I can either raise my next round, or I can go cash flow positive, whatever, that kind of thing. And so that's my first milestone, is like, those kinds of high-level metrics. And I'm going to work backward, and okay, how many customers are ready for that? Cool. How many people would I need to hire for that? You know, all of that sort of stuff.
And then from there, thinking about the product goals that will undergird that. And say, okay, so in order to support the 10 customers I need, or the 50 customers I need, whatever—whatever it is in your thing. You know, in our case, it was like, hey, I need 10 customers. I'm going to go ahead and say, all right, fair enough. I need the following features. And since we're going to be signing them on here, hey, we at least better be able to onboard them.
And this is where it gets kind of scary for people. If you're used to, like, I've got a product already, is sometimes you're like, we're going to build the onboarding feature because that's the thing we need right now. And I need it right now.
LAUREN IPSEN: And then sometimes you're selling futures. And you’re just—
MATT PETERS: Exactly. One of the things I would say is if you're—we were blessed and we continue to be blessed with early customers who were like, I understand that I'm buying a thing that is still being built, right? And I am signing on to help you build it.
And that has been some of the most amazing relationships because these—we were very transparent with people. What are we working on? What are we doing? That sort of stuff. And they get to do product feedback and that sort of stuff. So they know the track’s being laid down a little bit ahead of the thing.
In terms of getting everyone organized around those goals, because now I've got this sort of—I've got these financial targets. I've got sort of what we're going to do there. I have sales targets. I have product milestones. I have internal company milestones. And it's really easy for that to just turn into white noise in the background of I got to find some code, or whatever.
So what we do is we actually use a framework that we borrowed from our last job. It's called strategy on a page. So basically what we do is we have a single page, like our entire strategy can fit on one page, and there's three columns and sort of, there's an overarching priority. This is the one thing everyone should leave—if we were talking about this, it's the one thing everyone should just have off the top of their head.
And then there's three goals. And the goals, very simply, are get customers, keep customers, build a company that doesn't suck. All right. Well, I need to build a marketing program that generates this number of leads. I need to, you know, have this number of programs. I need to have a PMM function that does X, Y, and Z, all that sort of stuff. So that's what goes in there.
Keep customers. I need to have these people on board. I need to do a certain amount of work for them. I need to have a customer success function doing X, Y, and Z. So that's what goes in there.
And then build a customer—company that doesn't suck is like, hey, we need to have a recruiting and training program. We need to have these new hire documents wired up. We need to have people combat effective within 30 days, that kind of thing.
And so that sort of—we then get the whole company together every six months. And sometimes we do it—every three months, we sort of check in on it. But every six months, we go, okay, okay, these are the new—this is the new objective, like the new high-level objective. It only goes out six months, right? And these are the things we're going to do to get there. Everybody got it? Right?
And then, you know, break. So that's how we kind of do strategy, like that.
LAUREN IPSEN: Strategy on a page is one that I haven't heard, but I think it's a great way to think about it. And it's a way to simplify all of the chaos that's happening around you, and just try and make it as concise and effective as possible for the group, which I think is great.
MATT PETERS: So one of the things that we've got to do is, I'm hiring a team of people. So at Fixify right now, we have a team of about 35, 36 people, and every one of them needs to be combat effective. Every one of them needs to be pulling on the oars. And they cannot check in with me or with my cofounders or with their boss every day. They just have to have a sense of what we're working towards.
So one of the things that I found is useful is to—when we're talking about these goals, is to sit down and talk to people about, let me tell you what it's going to feel like to work here in six months, okay? We're going to have about this many employees, which means we're adding new team members about every—two every week, right? We are going to have the following number of projects ongoing. We're going to have this number of customers, which will be—mean we'll be adding new customers about this often, that sort of stuff.
And if you pick the right details, what it enables is like, oh, okay, we're adding two customers a month, or whatever it is, two customers a week. Customer success is like, my current process isn't gonna scale. Huh. All right. I didn't have to tell 'em that. They thought about it and were like, yeah, we're never gonna make it. We’d better work on that. So it helps. I can be very high-level at the top level.
So what we actually do when we do the SOAP, is we actually do a—there is a narrative section which is like, let me tell you how it's gonna feel, right? And there's a, here's your strategy on a page, which is just very, very high level, these must be trues. And then, hey, everybody, your job is to help us make this happen. You now have enough context to be like, I know from the SOAP that you guys are looking for this. And that isn't going to get it there.
LAUREN IPSEN: This is how you react to how it's going to feel.
MATT PETERS: Exactly. And, and if you’ve—we've been blessed, right? If we've hired well, our folks will show up and they'll be like, hey, so I notice in the SOAP, it says this. I'm just telling you right now, you guys have totally missed this thing over here, which is going to be impacting. And we’re like, oh, that's amazing. Thank you so much. Like, that's incredible. Right?
So we get everybody's turning. Everybody's brains are going. And now we're all sort of solving a problem together because we know where we want to end up.
LAUREN IPSEN: Reflecting on your journey, I think I would love to hear one thing that someone has told you, maybe before you started as a CEO, that you've carried with you and that has helped you as a leader.
MATT PETERS: Okay. So I will tell you the thing that I heard, and I heard it in two different forms, but they rhymed enough that I have stitched them together in my head, and I think about pretty much daily, is that I asked a lot of people when I was first thinking about this and first thinking about becoming a CEO, I would go to founding CEOs and be like, okay, what shocked you about being a CEO? And what shocked you about being and a founder, right?
And one person told me this thing, which is like, basically, as a founder, every day is going to either be your best day or your worst day. There's just not a hell of a lot of in-between days. There's not a lot of days where you’re like, well, man, right? And there's so many existential moments. There's so many times where you’re like, the road ahead is unclear, and this is incredibly stressful. And oh, my God, why did I leave my safe job? And like, this—you know, like, that kind of thing.
And there's so many days where you're like—you have that good customer call and you're like, we are on the right track. We are gonna kill it, you know?
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
MATT PETERS: I’ve found us go through, and I've seen myself do this. And so one of the things that I've ended up doing is by knowing every day is going to be the best day and the worst day, I end up in this moment where I'm just like, hey. Yes, the customer call went amazing. I'm going to tamp that down. Enthusiasm is good. I'm just going to tamp it down a little bit because, you know, we're going to lose focus.
And if it went real bad—‘cause every now and then you get on one of those customer calls, and you're like, well, that guy didn't want what we're selling, and he was real mean about it, you know? That kind of thing. So when you have one of those, it's like, man—
LAUREN IPSEN: It just kind of levels everything out.
MATT PETERS: And you just kind of bring it—you bring it in as a thing. So one of the things that my—I asked my—the CEO I used to work for. I was like, okay, so I'm going to go be a CEO. What advice would you give me? And he said a very, very similar thing.
He's like, figure out a way to get the leveling internally, right? Because people aren't going to show up as a founder to see you—people are going to show up and go, “You're doing a great job.” They're just not. That’s just not a thing. So you've got to figure out a way for yourself to be like, I feel good and I feel satisfied, and I feel like I've done the necessary, which is one of the reasons why I think so many people in Silicon Valley have an exercise regimen, and they have—they do a whole bunch of other sorts of things, is to try to do this. We've got—there's a regulation thing.
LAUREN IPSEN: Creating structure.
MATT PETERS: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I'm a technical person. And I was blown away by how many people, when I was like, okay, what's tough or what was surprising, almost universally, they were like, let me tell you about the emotional angles of this job.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah, no, that's—I mean, that is quite literally why I called this Founder Therapy series, because there's just so much that goes into it. And yes, there's going to be so many great days and so many incredible highs and moments where you feel like you've just got it in the bag. And then some—it's a long journey. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. What does great look like at the end of the day? How do I feel like I'm doing the best work I possibly can? It's—everyone just wants to feel impactful, right?
MATT PETERS: As a person who—I have kids and I coach a kid's sport and this sort of stuff, I end up finding myself telling people pretty often, like, don't compare your insides to other people's outsides. It's really easy to go on any podcast, blog, blog site, anything like this, and just read about the amazing stuff they're up to at startup X, Y, and Z.
And if you hear someone interviewed, they're like, oh, well, it's been an unbroken chain of successes, starting with the moment that I unlocked my inner genius, or whatever. And I listen to that, and I'm like, oh, okay, I guess, because it doesn't feel like that to me, right? And then I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. But that's—I mean, that's sort of the survivorship bias, and that's the story they're telling, and that's cool.
But like—and I realized, that's their outside, right. Inside, every one of these companies has like, ah, we screwed up these three things, this and this and this, that kind of stuff. And so just knowing that everyone is on that journey and everyone is kind of writing that is super helpful for me.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. All right. Well, I just want to thank you again for joining me. You are awesome. I always love any excuse to be able to hang out with you. So thank you so much for hopping on and sharing some wisdom with our listeners. I so appreciate you, Matt.
MATT PETERS: Thank you so much for having me. It was a great time.
LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. And thank you all for listening to Never Too Early. More to come soon.
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