I'm David Okuniev co-founder and creator of Typeform & VideoAsk

Beautiful and thoughtful answer. Thank you so much for the detailed answer. I am going to share this with our leadership team to read and understand this.

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:wave: Hi David, I am a huge Typeform fan. I’ve been particularly enamored with your product design and aesthetic which are so refreshingly unique in a world where software looks increasingly the same.

Perhaps it’s too early to answer this, but curious if you have a rough vision or plans for what will happen with VideoAsk once it’s achieved a certain level of success. From one of your answers here, I imagine it would either fold into the core Typeform team or exist on its own as part of the portfolio while you move on to the next VideoAsk. What signals will you look for to know when the time is right?

Also, what would you say you and Typeform do uniquely (or not) to continue to maintain and further your unique design aesthetic at scale?

Thanks! :heart:

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Wow, this is a trip!

I experienced Typeform’s growth firsthand as the company went from 50–130+ people in less than two years (2015/2016).

It seemed like there were a few people who were outsize drivers of culture in the earlier days; Santi, Linus, the ping pong crew, Herbet & Guilio (at least for me). I’m not sure if there’s an answer to this, but do you think there’s any way to retain a bit of that people-driven culture and freedom even when growing past 100? We’re going to be doubling our team to 20 by mid-year and I’m very conscious of the difficulty in keeping things together, especially once the headcount gets above 70-80 people.

On product velocity: you mentioned that VideoAsk has been way faster to develop because of the small team size. It seemed like the same factors played into how quickly Anders’ team were able to make progress on the V2 admin. What do you think is the ideal team size/makeup for this level of efficiency, and as you grow, how do you divide up the work to retain that?

Love from Mexico City,
The Ranger

p.s. besides the product itself, the barception was the best idea you guys have had :wink:

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Hey David,

Glad to be here! Thank you.

When you have limited funds (bootstrapping)- What are the key evaluation points for pivoting roadmap and stay agile as a response to such pandemic (or generally any unplanned) situations?

Thanks!

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Hey Knesia,

Often came across that question on my journey. Or more precisely “What if any competitor does the same”.

Although Google forms never went the ‘Typeform way’, most form/survey product followed suit eventually with the “One question at a time” format.

It’s generally hard to protect IP with Saas products, so my best answer over time has been to push forward as fast as you can and show your backside to your competitors (“let them see your ass”). Like this they are always copying whilst you are focusing on innovating and getting there first.

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Hey Ai @cathching !

Totally remember visiting your stand! Long time ago!!!

I knew it was time to step down as co-CEO long before I actually stepped down. In fact, I think I hung on too long in the role.

I’ve always seen myself as more of a creator than an operator and at some point as Typeform grew, my responsibilities started to change and I became more and more detached from product, having to deal with the day-to-day of a fast-growing startup. I was not happy.

As soon as I stepped down, I launched myself into VideoAsk and started prototyping the idea with another developer.

I was driven to the idea, not by any market forces or any user feedback… It just felt like the next logical step on the journey I started 10years ago to ‘Humanize’ forms… and coming to the conclusion of what could be more human than actually putting real humans in the forms, via Video!

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Wow! Daaaaaaaaave! Super nice to hear from you!

Companies are like organisms, they evolve as they grow.

I would set the right expectations with your team because you will always find resistance to change. If you are clear about the goal you want to reach and make sure they share the same vision, change will become a daily/monthly/yearly part of growing up as a company.

I do have nostalgia for the early days of Typeform. It was great, but some aspects of the culture, imo, was somewhat holding us back as we started to scale.

That said, when people leave/move on from Typeform today they usually send a goodbye email to the whole company in which they more than often highlight the people-driven culture. So even though we’re much better organised and effective through better structure and processes, we’ve retained that sense of belonging and kinship with colleagues.

To your other question…

VideoAsk has been super fast in customer delivery for several reasons:

  1. Small team with no dependencies
  2. Newer code base with more recent technologies (no legacy)
  3. I’m the acting PM, product designer and I’m also doing some FE development. This avoids slow decision making and bottlenecks.
  4. We can take more risks (smaller venture), so we can be more pragmatic, making us faster.

Ideal team size: 6, no more than 8. We’ve now split into 2 teams (Videoask Core / VideoAsk growth)

To your point about the v2 builder…
We’re just completing work now on the v2 builder for VideoAsk. We were just 2 people building that, Francisco and me. I think we would have been slower had we got the whole team involved + it means they were free to ship other features!

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Typeform looks and feels gorgeous. How do they approach product design? How big is the design team? How do they find the right product designers? How much effort goes into product copy?

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Hey David,

Thanks for taking the time for this!

Both Typeform and VideoAsk seem to have arisen as technological insights. But you’ve also figured out how to position them just right in the market. This isn’t always the case. The best products don’t always win, as they say. What has helped the most in this regard? And how would you advice another product-first founder to go about GTM?

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Hi David,

Thanks so much for doing this AMA with us. Typeform is just brilliant, we are big fans! I have the following questions.

  1. I love your company success flywheel. How has your team adapted to being remote? What have you done to keep your culture going?
  2. I completely agree with your statement of combing customer feedback and vision. How do you achieve the balance of just the right amount of feedback while sticking to your vision for the product?

Thanks in advance.
Best wishes for your success.
Ravi

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Hey David,

Another Typeform fan, here! Thanks for doing this!

I’ve got a broad one. As someone who has led fast-moving, impactful teams (both big and small) what are some of your key mental models/frameworks when it comes to leading product teams?

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Hey @brendan,

Thanks for the kind words!

VideoAsk will be handed over to the main product org in the next 12m, however, the team working on VideoAsk will continue and the product, as such, will continue too.

As far as I’m concerned we’ve more or less found product market fit and can now start doubling down and scaling. This means that in the next 12m I’ll be looking at kickstarting a new innovation cycle (inside Typeform) and moving on.

To your question on design aesthetic at scale…
I think it started early, with championing design principles such as “Every interaction/detail counts”, “Make things a little more human” etc… . This has empowered the company to set the bar high when it comes to product experience. I would not say this is unique to Typeform though, there are plenty of amazing companies out there really looking after the experience on their product, always trying to push the envelope and delighting the customer.

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Hi Shruti,

Thanks for the kudos.

We have two design teams:

Product design (product)
Design studio (brand & marketing design)

There are roughly 10 members in each team.

You might be surprised to hear that we’ve actually struggled over the years to hire designers to the company, even though we are so design centric. I hope its because we set the bar too high :wink:

Our approach is based on strong design principles that we’ve developed internally that act as a mast in order to keep the quality high. Obviously you also need to hire good designers!

As far as product copy goes, we have people in the company dedicated to product and marketing copy and we somewhat pride ourselves on being on the cutting edge of product and marketing copy.

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Hi Aditi,

I would say both Typeform and VideoAsk have actually risen from customer insights instead.
In this case, meaning, we were thinking about what the customer would benefit from as opposed to purely thinking about the technology involved.

Both product benefit from a GTM ‘joker’ card. By that, I mean, given that both products are inherently viral (products that create distributable content), in both cases we just put the product out there, people started building typeforms/videoasks, distributing them and presto there is your viral loop. We’re lucky in that sense.

Of course just product virality alone did got us to where we are. In our case we have a particularity that makes it challenging to go to market. Both our products are very horizontal (multiple use cases…like Trello) 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.

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Thanks Ravi!

  1. We’re now fully remote and have embraced it. We asked the entire company if they would want to go back to the office (when possible) and most opted for a hybrid model where they would mainly work from home but a few times a month would come back to a central hub to mingle, meet and work.
    I think we’ve adapted pretty well. As far as keeping the culture going, the main challenge is not being able to spend time together f2f (as most of us are locked down) + there are no company events so we lose the opportunity to really bond. So we’re left with ‘Zoom’ in order to have all-hands, our "Meaningful"conference series which we kicked off last year and lastly just relying on teams to create bonds through their own online meetings.

  2. I don’t know if there is a recipe for this. In my case I generally lean more on intuition and use customer feedback to challenge my own intuitions.

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Hi Akhilesh,

The following is pasted directly from an internal document in the VideoAsk team to define how we work:


What makes us a high-performing team?

  • High level of trust (allows us to have less process and less meetings & just get on with it).
  • Willingness to always help each other.
  • We have a wide range of high level skills .
  • We know what good looks like.
  • We #ownit .
  • We put the customer first.
  • We’re pragmatic .
  • We ship ship ship :rocket:.

note: I would also add here that the fact that we generally don’t all work on one feature together at the same time makes us more efficient…it makes us have more #ownership. At times we will work in pairs, but there should always be a clear owner/driver. Even though there are efficiency gains working in our silos, we should document when necessary our work, in order to allow others to take over when need be.


Hope this helps!

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@Deepika Not sure I understand what kind of answer you are looking for, could you give me a little more context?

@dokuniev We are a bootstrapped early-stage organisation, and we are in the phase of pivoting our offering to be relevant to post covid consumer behaviour. The question was what are the key evaluation points from business/finance/market/customer standpoints that we should not be missing out while we are making decisions on pivoting?

Looking forward to your views…

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@Deepika

I guess I’d say…

  • Make sure you have a clear vision of what you want to pivot to and beyond + make sure you have enough runway to get there as you may lose some customers during the pivot (if its radical).
  • Go out again to customers and battle test the new vision. Make sure the product changes are something that people will truly need, not just want.
  • Roll out these changes gradually, descope as much as possible so you can course correct as you get feedback without losing too much time.
  • And finally make sure your new model can also work in a post covid world that may eventually rectify back to a pre-covid one. i.e Be careful with riding the covid wave

Hope this helps.

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Thanks David. This is helpful. Reimagining design for an existing space is much harder than it looks from the outside! Great stuff.

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