Welcome to the Founders List Podcast. The official podcast of founders list dot com. The place for founders and entrepreneurs to connect, find potential co founders, relevant events, business partners and search vetted service providers to help build their businesses. And

now here's your host, Christopher Camp. Hello and welcome to the Founders List Podcast. The official podcast of founders list dot com. I'm your host, Christopher Kim, and I'm here today with Amber Christian, the founder of Wanderley Software Solutions. Amber,

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having each day, Chris,

as pleasure to have you here. So why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself before we launch into this?

Absolutely. So. As you said, I'm Amber Christian. I'm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have a 20 year careering technology, so I actually came straight out of college and went straight into tech and have been there ever since. I spent the bulk of my early career working for large corporations. I worked on enterprise resource planning systems as a P. I'm sure plenty of your audience will will know who they are. Is there one of the largest software companies in the world. And then I made a choice to start building software. Somewhere along the road. I took a detour on, and I spent a couple of years getting our product built. Bala Sena, and we'll dive it more into what that looked like it what that process was like. What was

it that sparked off the decision to go from South for sales to founding a software

company? So let me ask you this, Chris, have you ever sat in a meeting where you thought, Oh, this could be done better

only about

every other day, right? Or thought? Oh, I wonder how much money I wasted because this wasn't organized or boy, why do some people not ever talk in our meeting where all these other things that kind of occur over your career, as you are sitting in meeting after meeting after meeting? Well, I worked with large companies for so many years, and so I knew how much it cost when our meetings weren't productive or when we would have the same topic of conversation week after week after week. Then things wouldn't move, and I just hit a point in my career where I decided it was finally time to do something about it because I couldn't find any products at that time on the market that did anything to help Mitt make meetings run more effectively. You're

telling me, as we were talking before the show, your development process was a little bit different than your standard build the M V P and illiterate rapidly it. Could you tell me how you went about developing?

Yes. So Bella was a little different in that she was built with human centered design. When you say wait a second, she Yes, my software's a girl. And I tell people that proudly, that I consider her a girl. She's female. So what was unique about the process? So in a lot of cases, a startup founder or someone will we don't want to share the idea with anybody. Somebody might steal it. So I'm gonna build it in my basement. I'm gonna spend my year, year and 1/2 building, and I'm not gonna tell anybody, and I'm gonna present it to the world and go here.

Here, Chris, use my thing. You'd be like, Whoa, I didn't even ask for that thing. I don't know if I want that thing. Okay, maybe I'll try that thing and then you go. Well, this thing doesn't do what I would want it to, Dio. And so then you see Okay, Well, how should I change it? And you start going through that process than of changing and trying to figure out what you should add,

what you should take away. And it's very disruptive to the customer base, writes the first people that try it as the product is changing and trying to figure out what it's going to be. Bella was different and I said, OK, what if I talked to prospective customers or people that recognized they had challenges with meetings? What if I talked with them throughout the process of building the product so that I would understand what the most critical problems were so that I was solving those problems as opposed to building it myself and then asking them to look at it? It's very different. A lot more time is spent in design and iterating, it actually is more cost effective for your development. Build costs as well because you don't write the code until you're much further down the path of understanding the problem you're going to solve.

So you're getting all this information from your target user? I imagine you were overwhelmed with information. Was that the case?

Yes and no. So early on before, I had really figured out how deeply I wanted customers involved in the process. I had built an initial little M V P and showed some people that and then I had gotten this enormous list of feedback, and I said, There's no way to get a product a market like this on. I went back to the drawing board and used surveys to structure the research, and that was the key to not getting overwhelmed. So once you understand kind of the core problem that you're going after, one of the really interesting things you can do is say, OK, well, how do I understand more information about that problem? And so you designed surveys in a structured set of questions. So then what happens is when you go through these interviews and you ask the structured set of questions, you have a pool of answers to choose from, so you concert to see patterns in the data. So what you don't want to do is say, Here's my thing. Give me all the feedback cause yeah,

you're gonna be swimming. I want to pause the highlight What you said there because for my own sales and marketing perspective, structured questions are extremely important to get the kinds of answers that you want. People tend to just give you what you want to hear. If you say hey, give me feedback. Structured questions If you don't know how to do this out there, if you're listening, talk with somebody in sales and marketing or product development that understands what questions to ask

and how to ask them. That's the other really important thing, because as founders, we love our idea right. We think our ideas great. Everybody's gonna want our idea or want to use our idea. But we need to ask the questions in an open ended, an unbiased way to make sure that we're not painting the poor interviewee into a corner right with the answer. So it's really about open ended questions that allow them to give you context. The other reason. You two. This is later Chris. When you go to market your product, you have all kinds of good stories to use because these are the types of problems you know you solve, right? So it made it really easy as we got further down the line to be able to talk about different scenarios, different situations,

what we learned from research. So it brought more credibility to our conversations with people because they could tell that really clearly we didn't just come up with this ourselves. It was really grounded in research and structured answers from a variety of people, not just my buddies. That would give me happy answers, but a lot of times more further, a field in the network, second and third degree connections as well. We'll give you some of the best possible feedback you can get,

and that's also a very valuable insight here. So you've talked a little bit about what you've done to make it easier to build out your product. But what I was wondering and I've seen in 20 plus years of looking at it pretty much zero products come to market without some frustrations and delays and overruns and things like that. What were some of your frustrations when you were building out Bella Sina?

Well, we had a running joke. So So Bala Sena helps you create unmissable meetings through meetings as a process technology. So we would constantly joke about, Well, wouldn't it be really nice if we had some meeting management applications with their own meetings? It was it was a running gag, and that's a joke you can always make with me. But for me, I think the biggest frustrations. I wanted everything to move faster and there's a life cycle to it. It ultimately ended up taking us two years to get to the market. We had to build, and in some cases we had to rip out and rebuild cause and things we tried didn't really work right, and we had different skill sets of people's. We had to swap some people in and swap some people out as we go. That's more normal than what anybody ever really talks about. Taking a full two years to get to market was nothing I ever thought it would actually happen. I thought it would take six months. I look back and you know your time on and double at minimum.

Everything with software development is always overly aggressively planned. But you know, if you pick six months into two years. The fact is, if you said, Hey, we're gonna have this in a year it might have taken your three, so

it's exactly right, and there's just a life cycle to it. I'll tell you one piece of the process. Why it probably will take you longer than you expect trademarks. If you actually go to trademark your names, I bet you the process will take you a year that you get the trademarks and this is something nobody talks about from the time of you search for them, figure out there available and then go through. All the steps of the process is actually a year in. Before my first trademarks were issued on the names. So it was a long process to get through that as well. So there's reasons it just takes a while. So I think part of it is making sure you balance the pacing you're going at because you can't go all out all the time. That'll burn you out because the road will be longer than you expect.

You mentioned earlier to me that your company was bootstrapped and still is. Walk me through your decision to remain bootstrapped. Or was it a decision, or was it just something that happened along the way?

So at the time that I was building Bella, I was doing full time consulting work in building Bella on this side, and so I had enough consulting revenue to be able to afford to bootstrap. At that point in time, I also knew I was based in the Midwest, which, actually not just the Midwest everywhere has gotten significantly more conservative about writing checks for companies that don't have anything written. You know, 10 years ago you might have been able to get money off a concept deck. You have to be a lot further now in in most cases, and sure there will be anomalies to it. But it's a lot harder to fundraise without the product and without some traction and really the place we had seen things go to, and I knew that without an actual product in the market and some traction fundraising would be very difficult, I also, if we could be really practical, a female tech lead company. I also know that means it's harder for me to fundraise as well. It's just a reality. Look at the statistics. I'm not making any political statement. Just go look at the numbers.

And I said, I think it's important that we highlight that there are certain challenges in certain realities. And despite how we want the world to work, we have to work around it and still get things done. So I think that was a good point that you made

right there. Yup. And sinew in like Okay, Amber, you got the consulting revenue and you spent all these years building up a great reputation in the S A. P industry and I still do some part time consulting cause people still call me today. Will you do this thing for me? So I mean, he's still that's fine, because that just lets me keep bootstrapping and building with it. So even though Bella takes up most of my time, you know that's the practical reality when you've had dual careers. And that's in fact extra something that encourage a lot of people to dio. If you jump off the cliff and quit everything and go straight into it, Murphy moves into your spare bedroom like just things go wrong, right? And you're like,

ah or because things take longer, it puts financial pressures on you. And then you have to make decisions. Not maybe not quite the way you would have liked to otherwise. So I would encourage people to say, You know, if you can keep some cider part time thing really think about that because it can help you, whether the stories and can give you more stamina, you might have to balance it out a little bit, but that's actually something I recommend. And very few people talked about that when I started. You know, a lot of the advice I heard as well, if you haven't quit everything, you're not all in. It was like, Wait a second.

We're gonna have ah, very important debate around that on this podcast, for sure, because I'm hearing it from all sides. Probably like you did where a lot of them will say, Hey, do you have to jump right in? You gotta have no parachute. You gotta just go in there and work it and make it so that this matters more than anything else and all that in the grind. And then there's your perspective, which is like, Hey, if I could provide my own runway in Bootstrap and not have to give up any control to investors right away. Then then more's the better. So it's good to hear your side. And we put it so well that I think would be very valuable for our listeners.

Yeah, the the other component to it as well is you know, who knows? Maybe I will raise someday. I don't know. I've never taken that fully off the table. If the times right circumstances right, maybe I will. Maybe I won't. I don't know what this void. It's still pretty early in the game, right? I just know I have been able to get this far and been able to do it. And that worked for me because the other side of it, too, is the moment you take investor money. Now there's other things that come along with that.

And if you want to go to a fundraise, be prepared for that to be your life. That's the other thing that you know. Fundraisers take a while, and they may take you away from what you're working on on your product as well. So I'm not saying Don't do it. Just be aware of how you need to plan it out and what you'll need to do so that you have a good understanding of what it might take in order to do

it. Yeah, that's a very good point, especially since he goes along with the reality that depending on your personality type, being rejected by 60 investors before you get Ah, yes, could really take that kind of a psychological tool. Whereas if you actually have some customers and then you're doing something and going along, then you could kind of take that more in stride,

right? It's You can weather the storm a little bit better when they're like a nearly. Okay, I know I've got some people over here actually like this. They're paying for it.

So let's move on to your customers here. How did you find your first customers? Walk me through your process of who you're gonna approach first and your customer acquisition journey.

So my initial customers and we have to step back a little bit and think about how Bella was designed and how I originally planned to go to market. So the problem of planning effective meetings exists at many levels. It exists for people inside of companies inside a large corporations. Small companies. It exists for consultants, people that are working the gig economy because they have to schedule things with people you know. So that existed at many different levels and for a lot of different people. One of the things that I also knew because I came from a B two b background and worked in the consulting industry before I knew that a typical sale cycle offer a big B two B deal can often be 8 to 12 months. It can be even longer. I'm not seeing it won't happen shorter, but the B two B horizons tend to take longer. You have to get into budget cycles. You have to get into making sure you have all the right integration, so it fits in their processes. There's just a lot more components to that. So I started with what looks and feels more like a BTC approach. It was really a beat,

a independent gig and small, really tiny startup company kind of approach. That's where I started because it got the first customers on the platform. It got me people continuing to iterating, give me feedback as a human centered designer. That feedback is so critical and to what we build. So for a lot of that for me, it was really starting to actually just push out once the product was ready and get those first customers and work with them to improve the product, even Mawr. Once we went

to market. That's great. And how far ahead would you say that you're planning out your next steps? Is it Raul Roadmap dirty? Taking it as you get feedback.

So what we're doing now? Sweet feedback. A couple different levels. We have feedback from existing customers that look for new features. Then there's feedback from prospects in the sales process as well, right? And so these air different different types of feedback. Some of it is things that prevent deals from getting done where they say, Oh, well, unless you have an integration toe X y Z, it doesn't fit in our processes. So that's another seven feedback. So what we tend to do is I've stepped back and looked at a road map. I had a loose roadmap for the year. No, that doesn't work.

About three months is about right right now. Even within that, though, something it prepare people for as an early stage company, you're gonna be iterating alma it So there's more than a few months. Might be a bit too much to try to plan in a speaking from one who's tried to over plan and here's why. So you're you've got those customers and you're working through bugs and you're working through some new features and you have kind of a loose plan on that. But then you're actually trying to sell to new customers. And so new features and new things are emerging, and you want to be able to come to step back and look at both sets of those together because one set is gonna help, you know, prevent turn. Make sure customers are happy. On the one hand, the other set is about growing and adding more business. And so this is a balancing act, and I find it to be balancing act for myself as well.

I will say that some of the greatest works of fiction that I have ever seen have been company roadmaps, therefore five years down the line, so you really got to keep it in mind. I feel like a lot of times things go a little better if you have a road map, even if it doesn't hit. But at the same time, the reality on the ground is definitely going to make you made changes in the field.

In it early, that one of the things that's really interesting. So how if I balance to that off right, you say Okay, well, you gotta have a plan. Yeah, there's absolutely a plan at at, ah, high level of where I want to be and how I've balancing. So I talked about the whole idea of the existing customers versus the new customers. But the other thing that I balance that off with is any payments of technical debt and things that improve your operations. And so you kind of have a three legged stool going there in terms of your road map. And so one thing you could think about in terms of prioritization is it say, Well, you'll never work on improving some of the underlying things. You should if you just look at the customer requests and you just look at the prospect of customer requests.

Yeah, that's a house of cards. You also have to have this operations piece as well as part of your planning and prioritization. So for us just says as an example. We recently went through an exercise where, you know, when we were first building software. You know, just getting the build out the door was kind of these manual scripts and, you know, you do whatever you gotta do to get the thing out the door. And as we had, different people come in and out. So there's gotta be a better way to do this. These have to be easier. How can I meet needs faster?

And so we embrace something in tech, the skull, continuous integration. It's really just a fancy way of saying I can move faster in a better way, less likelihood of breaking things. It's really it sounds very glorious, right? But we really looked at saying, Oh, okay, well, part of the systems and tools we have, Okay, there's some things we could add there. So we balance what I call kind of technical debt or operations with the customer work and the prospect of customer work,

the kind of transitions well, toe to my next question, which is you have a history of working as a consultant with very large monolithic organisations implementing solutions. And that's, Ah, experience that a lot of our companies are better on Founders List are not gonna have so just kind of very quick. What tips do you have for somebody who's just trying to crack getting into larger businesses and selling for the first time?

First thing I would tell you is your your initial conversations aren't about here. You should use my product. The first conversations should be more exploratory to figure out if there's even a fit there in one of the things that I've done that's worked well for me is a lot of initial conversations. I asked people to take a look at it and give me feedback, and that is something you should do. Is an early stage company. You could do that with wire frames, by the way, you don't even have to have a built product. You can do that very, very early on to gauge one, whether there's existing competitors in the marketplace that you don't know about. If they're using something already, that they're unhappy with what would be needed in order to actually move those deals forward. And so I would say the initial conversation should really be exploratory in nature, where you're asking a lot of questions in not just trying to sell them on here, take my product.

But you want to understand where does your product fit in to that organization because of your product doesn't actually fit in if it sticks out like a sore thumb over here. And you know, now they have all this friction and extra stuff they're gonna have to do. It's hot, harder sell for your product. And so when you're going into the big companies, they have to think about the change management. Oh, this is another product. Okay, well, how does this play with everything else I have? Who's gonna know anything about this? Like they have a whole different syriza challenges from the company side. So you want to make sure you understand as much as possible about those challenges and get those conversations going early on so that you'll have those answers be like, Oh,

the change management's really hard. Oh, well, we come with a pre set up training for you. We come with this set of documentation. That's customizable and and you can rattle off this whole list of things you have in there like Oh, okay, this isn't so bad

that right there is critically, critically important. I've seen a lot of people say, Well, hey, this companies using product X, and it's costing them $50,000 a year to implement. Or we could do it for 20. But they don't realize that down the process chained, they'd have to spend way, way more money to change things, to work with your system. Potentially then. And you really have to make it easy for them.

Absolutely. And that might mean there's more features or things have to be more seamless. You might have to be designed some things, and in fact, I've actually found myself in that in that place as well, where I'd say what was possible two years ago with some technology. What wasn't possible then is possible now, so we're constantly iterating and refining to make it think about making it a as frictionless and experience where the B two B customer as possible and how you just become a no brainer for them vs one more person. They have to deal with

I often hear How do I close customers how to buy clothes and that may be close is important, but it's really should just be the punctuation on the end of a sentence. Everything else has to be in place first, usually through the course of months. For that even happened. So absolutely, I think this conversation would be valuable to some of the listeners out there, but transitioning just a bit. And this is kind of the final question I'm gonna ask you is Ah, you've been in Tech for a long time about as long as I have, right? So you graduated college in 2000 for you. What are the biggest changes you've seen out there in the tech landscape as it relates to your experience? It's broad question, but

so he didn't have cell phones like not smartphones at that point in time. So when I came out of school, everybody had desktop computers and it was laughing because we whenever we wanted to take work home, we had to print things, and so I would have to spread out all these papers across my floor of different screens, screenshots of trying on things. It was terrible, but that was the time I

pager with me. You know, I thought it was the pinnacle

of ready. Oh, honey, I hated having a BlackBerry. I will tell you this much Sorry, BlackBerry, but I didn't know what's not into that when I had to have one. But you know, things are much more mobile, of course, and I think customers Still, though, you really have to be able to meet them where they're at. The empathy for the customer and the customer journey is something that has helped me throughout the process. I had to learn and figure that out, but in terms of how it's changed, its constant leaps and bounds.

And the biggest thing I've learned is you have to be a consistent and constant learner about what's happening. And so what you really need to do is you need a network with other founders. You need to be networking with people all the time, and not it because you're looking for anything from them. But what you'll find is in those conversations you'll discover something they're doing, and you're like a second. Where we doing that. You got to remember the teams and the people that you're working with have their own spheres of knowledge and depending on how well, how well networked they are and how much of a continuous learners they are, they'll have a set of perspectives on how you solve problems. But other people might have other perspectives that are super helpful. And so you want to be constantly learning from other people and meeting other people. Even it even I'm a huge introvert. And so it's actually know your most people like you gotta be kidding me, citizen every, like,

there's no way you could be in interpret. Oh yeah, I am just me uncle Collapse and heat later. But you have to be constantly meeting at set up some sort of structure to meet people, whether it's podcast in your network with the guests later, you can connect with me outside of this. I love it when people do that, or you go to events specifically for founders, where you just want to constantly be doing that because the times are going to come when you don't know what to do. Is a founder. You need to be able to pick up the phone and call someone and ask instead of being alone and trying to soldier through.

That's very important, and I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention that. Founders list dot com has a lot of groups, and a lot of resource is for founders to get together and collaborate toe ask service providers, professionals, any kind of question that you wanna have in tow to get feedback on your founder. Journey. Amber Christian Wonderfully Software Solutions Thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for

having me and where can people get in contact with you?

So the easiest way to find these actually linked in you can look me up, Amber, Christian. Or you can go to Wonder Early software dot com. Or you can go to meet Bella sina dot com. If you'd like to check Bell

out. Okay, Once again, that product is Bella Sina, and it's to have unmissable meetings. That's right. Hey, my name is Travis Drummer. I'm the founder of Highly Composite and we do data management for testing Web applications. I've been working on it for a few weeks, and there's a prototype up at highly composite dot com. I went with this idea because I worked at a company that does crowd based testing for applications, and the management component was always really hard. So I'm open to having a co founder. The stuff that Founders List is doing is is really cool. Looking for someone like me on the software engineering side have been a sales engineer, so I can handle a lot of the kind of business sale side of things.

But I'm doing coding by myself, and it sounds, ah, lot more fun to co two. Someone else got a pretty nice code base already written in Python Django. So if it sounds interesting, just reach out on my founder of those profile Hi, I'm Philip on an founder act Founders is Thanks for listening to our first podcast today with Christopher and Amber. We've got plenty more lined up for the next few weeks, but would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding our podcasts. Meanwhile, we've also got a few new things on founders list dot com. Firstly, we're building out our new groups section. You can join groups by interest. Example.

Fintech founders were impact founders or by location in New York City founders Philly founders. Indian founders, etcetera or even by incubator or accelerator, like the Y Combinator alumni group for textiles found this group and so on. I'd like to invite you to join one or more groups by joining a group you give uses a bit of context about yourself, but are also able to interact with founders in different networks before to get out and list off top podcasts and newsletters for founders. You can check them out at found business dot com, and you can also recommend your favorite podcasts or let us know which podcasts on newsletters we might be missing. Finally, we're continuing to feature co founders each week. If you're looking for a co founder for your start up or interested in joining an existing starter, check out founders list dot com slash co founders. Well, that's it from me, as always. Thanks for using Founders list on. Please do let us know if you have any hints or suggestions about what we can do to improve our platform.