# Private, profitable, and people-first, we’re celebrating our 20th birthday. I’m Natalie Nagele, Co-Founder and CEO of Wildbit. AMA!

**URL:** https://gorelay.co/t/private-profitable-and-people-first-we-re-celebrating-our-20th-birthday-i-m-natalie-nagele-co-founder-and-ceo-of-wildbit-ama/501
**Category:** AMAs
**Tags:** culture, team-structures, product-agnostic, positioning, past-guests
**Created:** [November 5, 2020, 1:51pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/private-profitable-and-people-first-we-re-celebrating-our-20th-birthday-i-m-natalie-nagele-co-founder-and-ceo-of-wildbit-ama/501 "2020-11-05T13:51:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 14

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### Author: ![natalie](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/gorelay.co/natalie/32/362_2.png) [@natalie](https://gorelay.co/u/natalie)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2020, 7:08pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/private-profitable-and-people-first-we-re-celebrating-our-20th-birthday-i-m-natalie-nagele-co-founder-and-ceo-of-wildbit-ama/501/14 "2020-11-12T19:08:18Z")

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> [@Krish](#):
>
> Thanks for doing this, Natalie!
> 
> Really excited to learn from a fellow founder who has been in the trenches for twenty years now. That’s almost as long as SaaS has been around! 🙂 Having seen cycles and cycles of strategies play out, across multiple successful products, must feel like a founding superpower, right?
> 
> Guess that’s what informs how admirably you’ve dealt with the shutting down of Conveyor, an initiative five years in the making. You’re absolutely right. Most of us have experienced failure of that sort, if not with new products, with major features that we may have invested a lot in.
> 
> I’m curious to hear how you judged both the processes and the outcomes in that scenario. If both had some issues, how did you reconcile them? How did you enable the team behind that project to get back on track? And how has that experience changed your understanding of risk?

Thanks Krish!

Goodness, there were an infinite number of learnings from Conveyor! Where do I even start? 🙂

We were building Conveyor with a proven and talented team, along with a profitable business and confidence that we could solve any problem. That led us to push forward by eating the elephant all at once instead of one bite at a time. In hindsight, and going forward, we should have defined what failure looks like ahead of time in addition to what success looks like. Had we done that, I hope we would have seen that we were taking on more than we should have a lot sooner. We shared more of those lessons learned and takeaways on [our blog](https://wildbit.com/blog/2020/06/23/finding-a-new-home-for-conveyor).

Enabling the team to get back on track was the immediate priority once we made the decision to stop working on the product. In Wildbit’s world, where people come first, back on track means enabling the team toward a motivated, happy state. We knew that every person on that team needed to work on something that would make a meaningful impact to customers. Working on something for so long without it reaching customers’ hands can be extremely demoralizing. We wanted to be sure they were able to work on a project that directly impacted customers immediately afterwards, to help them remember what that feels like and reiterate what incredibly talented folks they really are.

To solve for those goals, we opted for some projects that would be finished within 3 months. The Conveyor folks formed new teams and worked on two of our big releases this year: [DMARC Digests](https://dmarcdigests.com/) and [People-First Jobs](https://peoplefirstjobs.com/).

I’m not sure that our understanding of risk has changed. What changed was the desire to build something small again, instead of jumping into a complex product. We still love taking calculated risks, as long as they don’t risk the entire business. On the outside it may look like Conveyor was risky because we spent over $3M on it over time. In reality we never risked the house. What we learned was how to notice failures earlier.

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