Varyence’s Post

Transcript

Back to my original mention of variance, on why we chose variance is because of this technology leader, business operations leader and marketing and sales leadership that is all under one umbrella. You now have the ability to bring that all together and get advice in various different areas, which has helped us to be able to stabilize the application, make it more secure and to be able to grow user adoption. So actually I was gonna be deploying 100 users for one company that we sold an enterprise license to. It was our first and largest enterprise license that we had sold. And during that time, we had released and modified various different elements of the infrastructure to support growth. Unfortunately, there was a problem that we had and that was all of these major changes that we have made severely slowed down the application and our engineering team was really stumped. This is a true story. I am literally 4 hours away from going on stage to on board 100 users at one time and the application took anywhere between 1:00 to 3:00. And at long delays just to get one click into the application. And so I turned around and I called my CTO counterpart over at Variance and said I have an emergency, I need help. And he turned around and Jason said to me, got it. I understand the problem. Let's get our team on it. And I kid you not, that was 4 hours before I said to everyone, I'm walking on stage. Please make this work. And sure enough, we fix the one of the major problems that we were having within that 4 hour time period that took our team weeks to unpack and unearth. And it wasn't because anybody was smarter than our team. What it was is it was a different set of eyes and a different lens to look at something and say we need to tweak this, tweak that, tweak this, tweak that. And it was all around the development operations of the actual server infrastructure that really helped us in a significant way. And the reason why it was so significant. Was because I literally was able to walk on stage, I got a message on my phone saying all is fixed and I actually was able to present an on board 100 users that day. So one of the big challenges that we have as Co founders or founders do not have a technical cofounder in the organization is there are many, many, many options to choose from. Many outsourcing organizations that provide bodies and people. But what was very unique in working with variants was that I had two sides of the coin. That I could work with the technical side and the digital marketing side and bringing those two things together really was a nice marriage for helping us to understand how does technology that we would design develop and go to market with, how can we integrate digital marketing strategies to grow and scale that. And so that was very important when looking at variance amongst all other folks. And we're now talking about, oh, I've got a digital marketing team that can do some SEO over here and do that and then I've got. Some tech developers, we're talking about actually having defined strategies that can come together that can help you grow and scale the application as such. As such, once we started working with variants, literally within a couple months, our actual growth in terms of usage of the application went from typing about 40 million characters a month to between 60 and 70 million characters a month. So it was huge growth. And in fact, when investors looked at our charts, they saw finally the hockey stick. And that's what people were looking for. So that was one of the major reasons why we wanted to go with variants. And how that came about was through conversations both with the partners of the firm, Jason and Vicki and Strauss, to be able to understand the three heads in the organization, one overseeing marketing, one overseeing business and operations, and the other ones overseeing technical. And that was a nice marriage that I could bring together these three different types of silos that traditionally are one agency for this and. One partner for that one part I could bring together under one roof and that was very important to me to be able to have that on the product adoption and product usage. We actually started working with variants on the design. Now interestingly enough, we actually worked with UI UX designers in the past and those designers, we felt like from our product side, we were doing most of the strategic thinking and putting in at least 50% of the effort to get product design out when working with variance. By working with a tenured individual who had worked and scaled enterprise applications, it really helped us to take a lot of the weight off of our shoulders from UX, UI design and think about individual functionality that will benefit our customers. And that's where the designer came into place with their experience. And having worked in multiple applications, what we've seen over the last few months is our level of effort went from 50%, down 50% of the effort to be able to get some product out, down to only 25. Percent of that effort. So it was a considerable amount of time that we save. Of course, we're still innately involved in that design process from a product standpoint, but now we've got somebody who's bringing the strategies to us as opposed to we're bringing all the strategies there.