# Private, profitable, and people-first, we’re celebrating our 20th birthday. I’m Natalie Nagele, Co-Founder and CEO of Wildbit. AMA! **URL:** \ **Category:** AMAs\ **Tags:** past-guests, culture, team-structures, product-agnostic, positioning\ **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:** 16
**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, 7:24pm 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/501/16 "2020-11-12T19:24:55Z")
> [@rajaraman](#): > > Hey Natalie 👋 > > So glad to see yet another SaaS veteran here! Really looking forward to the session. There’s so much to learn from the Wildbit journey. What really resonates with me is how you talk about being people-first and product-agnostic at the same time. > > Chargebee, too, started out as a gathering of four friends who wanted to build something together. The product found us later. And, even today, after all these years of building, I can attest to the fact that the team we’ve built is what we continue to cherish most. But we’re still focussed, as is the case with most founders, on a single product. > > I’m keen to understand what being product-agnostic comprises. Given that how deeply one understands a given market, a particular persona, and the myriad workflows, is central to how one innovates and grows. In that light, how do you consider the trade-offs and advantages of teams spread across multiple products? > > Thanks, > Rajaraman Hi Rajaraman! This is a wonderful question. I’ll start by saying that the reason Wildbit turned 20 is because we have multiple products. If we only had Beanstalk, it would have plateaued and our options would have really pushed us to sell. Having different products in different markets is a superpower to building a long-term, sustainable business. I think you see this more in non-tech companies. In tech we call these pivots, and we see them often as company missions shift (I’m thinking of Mailchimp here: They went from email marketing to all marketing for small businesses). But in non-tech it’s not unusual to have multiple product lines to mitigate risks, especially risks we can’t control. Market shifts are just one example. I agree with you on the importance of really, deeply, understanding your customer and your market. For us that has never felt like a heavy lift because it’s built into how we work. We have a brilliant customer-facing team who are attuned to what customers are saying and feeling. They share all those details with the product teams. We also tend to dogfood and use our own products, so we become our own customers. We also don’t have a traditional sales team. We only do pre-sales conversations to help support potential customers. And the biggest difference on our team is that “sales” lives in Product. Rian, our Head of Product, takes most sales calls. Our customers appreciate that, and it’s a competitive advantage. With a product agnostic approach, we’re not focused on a single market, persona, or industry. Instead, we look at how the products can support our broader Wildbit goals. Then we give as much autonomy as possible to the folks who are doing the work, and trust them to get it right. As an example, our [DMARC Digests](https://dmarcdigests.com/) product took off pretty quickly and is managed by two folks on our team who share most of the work. Between the two of them, they are also doing marketing, customer research, design, and development to figure out what’s next. It’s not too different than the four of you starting out. You don’t need a huge team to understand different markets. You need to create space for small teams to have the autonomy and trust to understand what to build next. As I write this, I’m thinking about [this HBR article on how Apple is organized for innovation](https://hbr.org/amp/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation). We do things in a similar way, with teams that can go deep on problems, with the authority to make decisions. --- _[View the full topic](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)._