# I'm David Hart, Co-Founder and COO of ScreenCloud and other tech businesses, AMA!

**URL:** <https://gorelay.co/t/im-david-hart-co-founder-and-coo-of-screencloud-and-other-tech-businesses-ama/225>\
**Category:** AMAs\
**Tags:** past-guests, co-founders, fundraising, services, customer-acquisition, metrics\
**Created:** [March 5, 2020, 8:25am UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/im-david-hart-co-founder-and-coo-of-screencloud-and-other-tech-businesses-ama/225 "2020-03-05T08:25:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 21

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![davidhart](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/gorelay.co/davidhart/32/98_2.png) [@davidhart](https://gorelay.co/u/davidhart)\
**Post date:** [March 12, 2020, 6:14pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/im-david-hart-co-founder-and-coo-of-screencloud-and-other-tech-businesses-ama/225/21 "2020-03-12T18:14:21Z")

</div>

> [@raviramani](#):
>
> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you so much for doing this AMA with us. Your articles were wonderful and made me realize that writing about the journey as is important as the journey itself. Will aim to put that into action 🙂
> 
> We run a document collaboration platform called kriyadocs focused on the publishing domain. Much like yourself, we started off as a services business and have transformed ourselves into a product business. However, all of our customers from the services side have become enterprise customers on the SaaS side. Ideally, we would have liked to have started off clean but these customers were also our early adopters and supported us as we built the product. Therefore they are here to stay 🙂
> 
> We are now looking to grow our platform with fully self-serve customers. I have the following questions
> 
> 1. What changes in the company’s mindset is necessary to make sure that product path is successful?
> 2. How would you slowly wean off your enterprise customers from a high degree of services engagement?
> 3. How do you get your product team to realize that small gaps in the product which have so far been papered over by services have to be addressed asap to enable us to grow?
> 
> I look forward to your responses.  
> Thanks  
> Ravi

Hi Ravi

Wow - great questions.

1. The main mindset change is that you are no longer building for individual clients, you are building what’s best for your business aspirations. When you are a consultancy you do everything your customers ask you to do (more or less). But, your main priority now shifts to the product and that product has to be solving problems for the majority of your customers (or in line with your roadmap) rather than what an individual wants. It’s quite hard when someone says “can you make it do this?” not to respond by doing what they ask. But, actually your product roadmap priorities are much more important. The danger is that you get sidetracked, or spend all of your time and money building something that only one customer cares about.
2. By learning to say ‘no’. By explaining that you can’t do consultancy and that you are thankful for their ideas and it will be discussed at the next product planning meeting and when you have more news about whether or when it will be incorporated, you will let them know. You could also split out a separate Pro Services team, but you have to separate out recurring revenue from non-recurring project based revenue. Don’t fudge the two and focus primarily on building the recurring element!
3. Not sure! I guess exactly as you say: if you want to scale it is impossible to ‘paper over the gaps’ with manual services. The company has a choice: do they want to stay where they are or do they want to scale. If they want to scale, you need to build a scaleable product and go to market process.

---

_[View the full topic](https://gorelay.co/t/im-david-hart-co-founder-and-coo-of-screencloud-and-other-tech-businesses-ama/225)._