I'm Ching Goh, co founder and CEO of Piktochart and Piktostory. AMA! šŸ™‹šŸ»ā€ā™€ļø

Super excited about this Ai. I have 2 questions:

  1. What is " * No-Mondaysā€™ blues policy" :slight_smile:
  2. On the vulnerable letters - did you see a difference in how it was received in different cultural contexts. Asians are anyways more self-critical and tentative so I am assuming it works well there. But what about US and Europe? I especially like the idea because it plays well with the different psychological tests that have shown if you mention 3 negative things, the other person struggles harder to find negatives and overall lands up with a more positive impression :slight_smile:
    Thanks for sharing your time!
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Hey Ai,

Thanks for doing this, AMA!

Kudos on being bootstrapped all along, scaling a great B2B2C business at that! Iā€™d love to learn what are some of the things that have surprised you about the necessity of scaling capital-efficient acquisition (everything?) in a self-funded business?

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Hey Ai,

Thanks for taking the time!

Itā€™s certainly better today but for the longest time there have been valley-based startups and then the ones outside the valley; perceived as a secondary category almost. What have been some of the challenges youā€™ve faced in this regard, building out of Asia? And what has helped?

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Hey Ai,

I had another one in mind.

Thereā€™s this famous Twillio quote, ā€œacquire developers like consumers, enable them to spend like enterprises.ā€ That is turning bottom-up adoption into major enterprise success. Given Piktochartā€™s similar product-led, SMB-focussed premise, how have you thought about scaling for the enterprise over the years?

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Hey Ai,

This just came to mind. Piktochart is quite horizontal as a product, serving teams as varied as healthcare, HR, finance, and marketing. During his session @dokuniev had summed up the challenges of Typeformā€™s similar, broad nature, ā€œā€¦so we have a harder time convincing people to activate down verticals where a competitor might have the use case more focused and wrapped up.ā€

Curious to hear, how your thinking has evolved when it comes to approaching verticals?

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Hey Ai,

Thanks for doing this!

Whatā€™s your exit plan for Piktochart as a bootstrapped company? I love what youā€™re doing and have always been inspiring new SaaS founders in Malaysia. :slight_smile:

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Hey @Krish , thanks for your question! Weā€™ve recently checked out Chargebee :slight_smile: As Iā€™m interviewing, I usually care about 2 things.

  1. Getting to know the person and assessing a fit
  2. Presenting the challenges that we have to assess if thereā€™s a fit.

Iā€™m not sure about everyone else, but Iā€™ve usually had about 90 mins of an interview where I spend about 30 minutes talking about the challenges that we are going through and trying to see how the person would respond. I kind of preferred to turn it into a discussion, so this document serves as a pre-read. This stage is really important, because we know that a person who would be a great fit at one organization doesnā€™t necessarily fit well somewhere else. I find that by going through this process, we reduce (not eliminate) the possibility of a wrong hire.

In the document, I go through:

  • History and where are we going
  • Current company make up, SWOT
  • Team structure and the personā€™s responsibilities
  • The unique challenges in this role and who would be an excellent fit

From what I was told, the right candidates that value transparency really appreciate this ā€œoddā€ process. They automatically know whatā€™s it like working together with me, my thought process and what I value and do not value. It takes me some time to craft a good ā€œletterā€ but I have found this to be totally worth it!

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We have a standard onboarding process now. The bulk of the onboarding takes place over the first 2 weeks. The goals are two-fold. First, to ensure that people have the ability to connect with other team members (weā€™re remote, so thatā€™s even more important!). Secondly, for them to understand the areas that weā€™re working on so they can get up to speed as quickly as possible.

  1. Customer support - where the person would have to go through some typical questions/challenges that the user has. They would also be asked to create a visual out of mock data so they get to experience the product in their shoes. I love that our CS team is the one leading this!
  2. Product - either the Product managers or the Head of Product will have to walk the team member through the why, vision and roadmaps.
  3. Data - going through some dashboards and key metrics that are important for a person to orient themselves around.
  4. HR and finance
  5. Depending on their teams, they may also go through onboarding in Marketing, Sales, Product Design or Engineering.
  6. 1:1s with relevant team members are also prioritized during this time.

Lastly, we have ā€˜Everyone on Supportā€™ which is an initiative to get people to spend 0.5 day per quarter on the Customer Support helpdesk. This is not just for onboarding but everyone gets this opportunity on a quarterly or bi-quarterly basis, as we want them to intimately know and understand customer problems.

Happy to learn about how you all run onboarding too!

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Hi @rajaraman,

Thatā€™s a really good question! Iā€™ll be plain honest that we still have room for improvement on our OKRs.

I can however give you an example of how OKRs embody the experimental approach that gets results. The key is to craft OKRs that are entirely focused on the outcome, not the output.

We recently worked on Piktostory.com, and the main OKRs were:

  • Increasing activation rate to xx%
  • Acquiring xx,000 users who are in the target group

As compared to an output focused OKRs, such as:

  • Build features on the roadmap (payment, email system, admin dashboard, Helpscout, editor foundation, and core repurposing needs) by eoQ1 and launch Piktostory by X date

By giving a business metric that the team can focus on, they have tonnes of incentives to thoughtfully experiment and try to hit the numbers.

Hope that answers!

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Haha @wingman4sales The basic idea is if someone is having Monday blues, they need to consider whether or not Pikto is the right place for them! :star_struck:

Donā€™t get me wrong, I know that when going through Monday blues, itā€™s more likely a systemic problem than it is with the individual. So, the organization has a bigger role to play. We acknowledge this and deliberately build our engagement surveys to ensure that we have a pulse on what may potentially disengage people and transparently work on plans to make things better.

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Actually, Iā€™ve mostly tested this out with Europe than Asia in recent days. I would say that the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. I still get told that the reason why a senior hire went with Pikto in the end was because of this.

I do not release this document to every candidate but to the candidates that I think would be a perfect fit for the organization. Currently, I havenā€™t experienced any cultural differences. But yes, it did get a couple of people to say ā€œNot my cup of teaā€, which is okay because thatā€™s then a smart use of both partiesā€™ time!

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Hi @aditi1002, Love your question and I do get asked this quite a bit.

I believe that the ecosystem is super key to help a business scale, not because of funding etc since weā€™re bootstrapped, but more for access to mentors/advisors, talent and even business partners!

Mentors/advisors
It has been harder to find mentors and advisors that are familiar with SAAS or visual communication space in South East Asia. So Iā€™ve travelled frequently to the US to build and nurture a couple of connections. This was until the pandemic happened. I know that there are platforms that connect people online, but for an advisor type of relationship, Iā€™ve often found it needful to build the relationship in person. The absence of advisors makes it easy for the founders to stay in their comfort zone :slight_smile:

Talent
As an all-remote team, we have had no such barrier as around 50% of our team currently works outside Malaysia. We are limiting our recruiting efforts to the Asian/European time zones due to proximity and the need for ā€œsaneā€ hour synchronous overlaps. Barring the pandemic, we usually meet at least once or twice a year.

In other words, I think founders of a global startup that is primarily based in Asia needs to take some very active steps to stay hungry, not be complacent, and do more in order to connect with customers/advisors in a different continent. Being all-remote definitely helps in terms of attracting and retaining talent!

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Thatā€™s a really good question. We see single users within enterprise but are not actively converting them into enterprise teams. The other case is that Piktochart is primarily used to create reports and infographics. Often times, users share their accounts instead of using it in a real collaborative mode! :shushing_face:

There are some discussions internally about whether we should have a focused effort targeting enterprises but we have not taken any significant step in that direction.

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Thanks for your question @rajaraman, youā€™ve done your research on Piktochart! We have been talking about product positioning a lot over the past year. One of the more significant findings for us is that although we attract many verticals, itā€™s for a very specific use case.

To expand more, people who come to Piktochart usually have a need to condense information into a visual. That format which we have been known for, is infographics. When a HR, finance, marketing person thinks about how do they best present their findings or reports to convince their stakeholders, they come to Piktochart to create a visual to deliver these findings.

While we cater to a broad amount of verticals, our efforts are focused on fulfilling a specific use case, and not to help them design marketing materials as well as print etc. As to whether we would hunker down and focus on one particular vertical, it is not immediately obvious to us that it would be a good strategy. :grin:

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Hi @arif Good to see you here!

For a bootstrapped founder that has been doing this for 10 years, I can say that there is no exit plan! :rofl:

I say this with tongue in cheek. There are several options:

  1. Literally to have no exit and run the company for as long as we can.
  2. A merger and acquisition - we have previously considered this route in the past because we admired the founders and found good synergy between the products.
  3. Find a really good CEO to take over, so this is a founder exit.

I have always advocated ā€˜living life backwardsā€™ which basically begs the question ā€˜At my deathbed, what will I regret doing and regret not doing?ā€™. I then do a periodic (yearly) check on where I want to be in terms of both my personal and professional goals.

Hope that answers!

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Hey @Akhilesh,

Thank you for your question. By acquisition - Iā€™m guessing you mean acquiring users, talent and more?

There are a few learnings that I have made in the past years about building capital efficient business:

  1. Itā€™s wise to choose your marketing channels correctly. For us, we went with SEO and content marketing and we wouldnā€™t have otherwise been able to get hundreds of thousands of sign ups per month with minimal budget.
  2. Sometimes getting the best talent isnā€™t about a crazy huge budget, people are more motivated by purpose, culture and how they grow in the organization. This applies with perks too. Itā€™s not about the best and most expensive perks, but once again, if they are trusted and can make a great impact, that speaks a lot louder for talent acquisition and retention, rather than having the best swags or $$$ perks.
  3. I also learned that it is needful to convey the same mindset to the people working in the company. If the company focuses on profit and sustainability,then tell these stories internally and call out exemplary behaviors of people who have demonstrated that.

Hope that helps!

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Hey @cathching,

Thanks so much for joining us today! Loved all your time-honed perspectives on the ever-challenging matters of building and scaling. Thanks, again, for your time! :slight_smile: :cherry_blossom:

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And, as always, thanks to our wonderful members @wingman4sales, @Akhilesh, @aditi1002, and @arif, for joining the session with some equally thoughtful questions! :raised_hands:

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Thanks for doing this Ai!

That makes total sense! Can see how clear, measurable outcomes inform more hypothesis-driven thinking across the org. And itā€™s also interesting to hear how you contrast jobs-to-be-done with personas and how there are products where the former clearly dictates the latter.

I think continuously pushing us to make the shift towards outcome driven instead of output drive will be key for the organisationā€™s success in adopting OKRs.

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Thanks, Ai!
Glad to hear! Thereā€™s much to take away from your thinking on hiring and onboarding. Especially loved how you impress upon the collaborative nature of work for new hires from the outset. Iā€™m sure that makes it difficult for silos to take root. Great insight! And your observation on the SMB-enterprise question is helpful as well, it clarifies how land-and-expand models can differ a lot from product to product.

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