Hi Ravi! Thanks for your questions.
- We talk about this a lot amongst the team. How does being people-first impact our customers? Our customers are wonderful, and they really love us. How did that happen?
Business gurus tell us that taking care of your team means they will take care of your customers better. And this is true. But what that means in practice is our team cares very deeply about our customers, advocates for them, and empathizes with them. Because at Wildbit they have the space and the permission to care. A practical example of this is how we’ve always had rules around how we deploy new features. It was never, ever, acceptable to have our own customers test our products. Everything goes through QA. We will take longer to fix edge cases before releasing, always.
We also have a Customer Support team that fights like hell for each customer. They have the power to hold back a release if they feel strongly it will impact a customer poorly. They know our customers so well that they often act as their advocate when it comes to product development and feature prioritization.
- Yes, absolutely. We attribute being people-first to our ability to launch many products—we call this “product agnostic”. We often refer to the team’s entrepreneurial spirit, but I think it’s less about being a starter, and more about having the space and permission to be creative, take risks, and speak up. The small DMARC Digests team of Matt West and Ilya Sabanin, with help from Jeremy Polley, made most decisions on their own. From how much to charge, to what goes on the marketing pages, to what features to build. We, as founders, just provide support and feedback from a 30,000 foot view. But we trust them to make the best decisions they know to make. And since they’re closer to the work, we know in most cases they’ll make a better decision than we would. What we bring to the table is a place to feel safe in making mistakes, a stable salary, and decades of experience. But otherwise, it’s on them to make it work!