The Power of the Developer: How Jam Used Community to Scale with CEO Dani Grant
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And developer tools, if you bring value to developers, they use your products and you earn the right to exist. But if you don't bring value to developers, then they don't use your product and you don't get to exist. And IT, is that binary and is that ruthless? But isn't that exactly what the company should be .

from notable couple? This is found a real talk where we get real about the chAllenges that founders and start up executives face and how they've grown from tough experiences. Found a real talk is part of the notable capital family of podgers sts, and you can access all our pocket s at notable cap dot com and your host plan solent without further a do here. Today's episode.

Welcome to today's .

episode of founder real talk. I'm your host, gan Solomon, and i'm thrilled to have my partner han's tongue as costs along with me today. Hey, hands.

Hey, good.

And we are hands. And I are very, very excited. welcome. Danny grant, the founder and CEO of jam to founder real talk today. Jam allows faster communication between product and engineering teams about bugs and fixes. Daniel, her co found her artifact met at cloud flare, where they served as product managers.

They work through a bunch of frustrating debugging cycles with developers, which LED them to create a product to help developers, engineers, designers and product managers capture screen shots and development blocks in one click, enabling each of these constituents to quickly get on the same page and sink efforts. And so far, jam has been adopted by large companies like nike, disney sales force and others and has fixed four million bugs. Wow.

that's a lot of bugs going. I let the company series a back in twenty twenty one and has been exciting to see the teams of mountain we last talk to to her on this pocket. I was actually about a year and hf ago now today James trust by thirty two of the fortune one hundred companies were line and over one hundred and forty thousand happy .

users and there's some cool news uh coming out that jam and twelve other companies, including jogger notts like club, flare, get lab launched darkly, replant and others have banded together to give aspiring founders the resources they need to build scale AI native startups.

We're going to dive into how this dev starter pack, which is what they are calling IT, came together in its role as A I in open access, are shaping the future of software development and the impact of the company's efforts to build a robust AI ecosystem. That sounds very exciting. Will explore this with the any and also touch on how she's maintained incredibly rapid user, her plans for commercialization and what it's like grown jam. Danny wonna found a real talk.

IT is so awesome to be here. It's super cool and special to do this with the people who are actually inside the company with our lead investors.

Thanks, danny. So as homes mentioned, um you you're returning to found a real talk. We've talked about this before but maybe to level set just for the listeners. Can you share your origin story of jam? What inspired e due to transition from cloud flare to deciding to start your own company?

If you've ever worked with the engineers before, probably you've had this experience. You see something go wrong in the software. You make a ticket, you put all the information that you can find in the ticket, the engineer opens the ticket, they write, works fine on my, and then they close the ticket.

And it's so frustrated, right? Like you are just trying to help and you see a real issue for real users and you want to get IT fixed. And the engineer is also trying to help but simply doesn't have enough information to be able to trigger and deal with the bug.

And so it's like both sides are trying to create a Better user experience and there's a communication gap in the middle is so crazy that in thirty years of software engineering with modern web development, that everything else about how we develop for the web has changed, but not how we capture and report bugs. So when my co founder, I wear product managers together, cloud flare, we were on the fastest moving team in the company. IT was the team to go out and take huge risks, build new Greenfield businesses for the company.

And so we were trying to move as fast as possible, and we were trying to ship things that we're audacious that would work great out of the door. And we just found the back and forth about things that had to be fixed. Where is the thing that let us down? And before jam, our solution was we'd run around the office until we'd find the engineer that we thought would solve the bug and we've literally hand them our laptop.

But that means the engineer has to stop whatever they're doing completely context switch. It's like super disruptive ve for them and IT doesn't work in remote. And so we thought it's so crazy that there's no tool to share state.

And so that is now jam and fast board today. The product has been life for about two and half years. We're suing going across one hundred fifty thousand users, and it's been so cool to get to build our former selves.

Yeah that is a great story. Um as I mentioned in the intro um you got started um def starter pack and as a collaboration um among several different companies giving pills use our listeners a bit more of what that is, whose are involved, who are involved and how this actually work.

It's the sort of rebel alliance of dev tools companies. We want more startups to be built, and all of our companies have different ways of offering deals for real startups. But it's really hard for a single developers trying to start a company to figure out what tools should I how do I get those deals apply for each one. And so we came together and we said, here, here's the essential starter pack of tools that you need to get started building something huge in the world, and there is one easy way to get deals on all of them. And our hope is that people will go out and build real things and not have to worry about what tools are using the Price they're paying, how to get the start of deal that .

such a so what is the importance of partnership um in this ecosystem um especially for developed s none .

of our tools exist in a silo. They're all used together as a stack. There are so many tools out there today, which is really cool. It's actually one of the most fun parts of being developed today, like there are so many cool things to play with.

But it's really, really hard to know what are all the tall les? How do I use them together? How do I pick? And so there's a sort of like tool fatigue.

There's a of tools marketplaces out there like for example, we're a customer of mercury. Mercury has a marketplace of tools, but such a picky one and we thought, let's just come together. One stack. You don't have to use a stack, but if you want to, one really easy way to get started.

Very great.

Makes a lot of sense. Suit my head, danny. sorry.

I think that the the thing is very exciting for me personally is in today's world, everything is just software like schools are software and hospitals like the whole page experience is software. And all the financial apps of today are software. And if you work out at home, your gym is software and you know rocket ships and car AI like the world is, is software based at this point.

And so it's actually really important that we're able to make developments in software because that's the speed at which the future arrives and like that's the speed which people's real experiences in the world and welfare companies have these incredible impacts. Like if you think about who made education free, it's like it's youtube in tiktok and it's really, really important to help more startups get started. And so for me personally, that's the thing that I get really .

excited about to that point. Um dev started packed keep chosen to focus on A I native startups and a is obviously if software is know every companies really now as software driven, as you say, AI is kind of seems to be the next frontier that you know everybody is either adopting or thinking about adopting to help power software make you smarter. Um tell us about like your perspective, how do you see A I change in the landscape for developers and startups? S more broadly.

when you start up, your only competitive advantage against the giants is how fast you can move. And so tools are actually very meaningful to startups because they are accelerators to the people of the start up. And when it's an AI tool and I can do even more of the work for you and even more the heavy lifting for you and accelerate you that little bit, that's very, very important.

I think that the in in the future, every tool built will have A I built in IT won't even be a question, but I won't even feel like an A I feature. It's just that's the new way of buildings software. And so I was really important for us when we were assembling the pack that we made sure that if you use this, if use the stack of tools that A I can just plug in, like running water, like electricity, it's like just having a server. It's just there.

You could. Another feature um that that hands and I and and our team at notable um know have really been focused on is building developer community in in developer focus companies. We've been luck enough to work with companies like hoshi corpn for cell, both of whom you generated a dramatic amount of loyalty and a lot of developer momentum.

Both of them did IT with open, open source projects that really help drive James different. But you also, as as as we've mentioned, have have generated a tremendous amount of usage and engagement amongst developers. How have you done IT in? What's what's the secret of your success?

We're so lucky. Like when you start a company, one of the things that I did not realize is the first time founder is that the company you choose to start dict ates, the people you are going to spend all of your time with.

And we are so that unlucky, because the people that we get to spend all of our time with, our super optimists, they are super high agency, their builders, they are people who sauce some problem in the world and decided they are going to be the people to solve IT. Like, what a positive group of people to spend one hundred percent of your time with IT is so awesome. So part of the reason why we do develop our community is we just love hanging out with our users.

We love seeing with their building and talking to them about IT. We love swapping notes like where builders over here creating our company, their builders over their creating theirs. And we're learning together but also developed tools.

Community is a non negotiable. It's not an option like in traditional sas. Community is a nice marketing layer on top. But in that tools, that's not the case. And that's not the case for two reasons.

The first is developers are making a different type of purchase decision where they are thinking very long term and they are making a decision for the whole company. And so they need all of the information, and they need to know if they can trust the company that they are choosing to use for a very, very long time. They need to be able to see behind the curtains of IT.

So versus if you choose salesforce, salesforce can build confidence with you by showing you very nice flashy graphics. But if you're developer, the flashy graphics makes you think, what are you hiding behind there? And so for developer companies, you have to be products and people first.

And one way you can do that is by investing in your community and just showing, like we are, the people here, like there's no curtain, you can interact. You can interact directly. The other thing about developer tools is that they are sort of ruthless but perfect, and that they are a hundred percent incentives aligned with your users.

So in develop tools, if you bring value to developers, they use your product and you earn the right to exist. But if you don't bring value to developers, then they don't use your product and you don't get to exist. And IT, is that binary and is that ruthless? But isn't that exactly what the company should be? And so the key for a developed to start up is to stay as close to the user as possible.

And you can do that without community. You just have to be talking to them every single day. And so really is an unnegotiable .

great points and that you mention that dea pull space is quite, quite competitive. There are a lot of tools all and people can get fatigue. Um based on what the points you just mention can give us a couple examples um that h show there were key moments in your development um cycle um the help definition jm and uh show that you are extreme novation and body add to users.

There are these moments. There are small. Okay, as a founder, there are small moments that means so much like we just posted a community event in new york last week, we did a demos.

IT was also. And at the end of the event, this woman comes up to me and he says, I love jam. I am a non technical founder, and so jam means a lot to me.

And it's like stories like this where it's someone was able to impact the world and accomplish their dreams, start companies, do big things and work with engineers little IT Better without having to like have years of training, be an engineer themselves that is so darn cool. We have A A team using um jam H I. I like just the best call with them.

They're building software for churches, but they're not soft. They don't have engineering backgrounds, they have church backgrounds. And jam is the tool that allows them to communicate with this, Steve agency that's building the platform and the otherwise wouldn't be able to or so they say and and that like that is just so done.

Cool IT also helps when we hear these stories. That helps us a line on what's important. So a lot of tools take the following trotere's ory. They start with one simple thing. And as people start using the tool more and more, they had more advanced features and they go up market, they become more pro.

But what we hear is it's really, really important for someone with no engineering background to be able to pick up and start using jam and deliver value immediately. And so we have to stayed dead simple always. And so these conversations .

define our .

strategy .

to I love IT you as you're building jam, you're also a CEO maybe CEO for the first time and being cees not easy. And curious like if you could share a little bit of your experience as you've scaled jam. Obviously, you mentioned earlier like the importance in a dev tools company of being a very open book giving giving people of you behind the curtain, and you've done that really well.

You have a podcast where you talk about all the issues and chAllenges that you're facing. Um but it's clear you have like lots of stresses, lots of uncertainties that you're dealing with around product and people and go to market and all these things. Um maybe talk about um you know a chAllenge or two you faced um and a tough decision you've had you've had to make as a CEO how you dealt with her and what what's had been like in any any thoughts on you know for others who are listening, who are either see eos themselves were thinking about being eos advice you'd give, it's it's .

such an honor and a privilege. And yes, yes, there are there are a lot of stressors in tough moments, but I have an eleven out of ten co founder like out of this world. I'm so lucky.

And this is kind of the adventure we wanted. You know, like you, you get to choose how to spend your time. People choose different adventures.

I will never choose, try athletes, but I will always again and again startups. One of the hardest moments um in the company for me personally was when we started. We were two product managers from cloud flare.

We were Operating in a world that already had product market fit and a user base of millions of developers. We were used to the mode where you launch something you send out like an email blast. And the next day, ten thousand people use IT, right?

When we started the company, we did a bunch of user interviews. People are super excited about the problem space. Um we launched on product time. Thousands of people signed up and then the next day, no one used to what's happening. And then then we did IT again like let's just lunch again, you know like you hear the advice, like just keep launching.

So we launched again and again, like lots of people signed up, they were excited about at all would solve that problem just there was no ninety five percent turned by the next week. Like do we suck? Like what's happening and and when you're the beginning of that, it's like, okay, you know what to do but when you're eighteen months in and that's still the case and you have seven failures behind you and you're like, okay to the eighth attempt, that's that's quite hard.

And and the thing that is hard about IT is your brain is wired to not make you do things that don't work consistently. Like that is how human survived, like in your brain that feels wrong. But I also is hard because you've this amazing team around you, you've made promises to them like, hey, together we want to build something this big.

This is the journey of joining us on. And you've made promises to investors and have taken real people's money and like yeah like investors have like whatever, but it's like real pension funds. It's real money like this.

This is not a joke. And so it's that like holding the responsibility that I I found very, very hard. One of the things that was really helpful for me is do you know south garden is.

Maybe you could tell .

us that god is my favorite marketer of all time. I listened to every podcast he goes on. I read a blog. I read his books. If I were to start another company today, the first thing I would do, as I would download his book, this is marketing and I would walk up because it's all about um building things that change people lives and marketing being a function that helps them do that and anything else being spam.

He is so great one one of the things that he says is you most businesses fail, it's not a matter of if, but went like you can be twelve years into us and then and then IT fails. And so you have to get really comfortable with that. I was not very comfortable that i'm honestly not but but he says, okay, just imagine for a moment that your business will fail.

What would have still made those twelve years worth IT? And for me, that was a really helpful reframe where I thought, okay, let's say we never make IT to product market that what if IT takes twenty four derated and they were done and there's there's nothing else what we've still made this time worth IT. And it's the experience of getting to work with this really special team and getting to see the team achieve and level up together and like do great things together. And and so that reframed because like and there are sounds every day but but those two moments also happen every day and other reframing is very, very helpful for me.

For on those early days, what were some of the key moments that made a difference that started seeing a Better a closer early signals of potentially apart of market IT?

When we started, we were following the standard started advice out there, which is like ship often ship messy. You'll know you have product market fit when users will jump through hoops to use your product. You know it's pm f when users will use a bugging product.

You know like fifteen years ago when this sort of became start up lor, I think that was probably true. But since then, a lot of things happen like fifteen years ago, facebook released its mobile lap. Like now we have mobile, we work remote.

The tool sly you use at work just have to work a hundred percent of the time. Otherwise you cannot use them because you're taking your social capital on them and actually, they fail you. Your day gets worse because you have to redo work like and so the quality bar is really, really high for someone to retain.

And one of the things that we had to change was our framing. Instead of ship fast, messy, just experiment and learn. We had to make smaller bets that could be higher quality on day one. And I was only when we stop shopping bugs in order to experiment with flavors of jam before product market fit, that things started working.

Yeah that the context of the advice that are a given is extremely import advice that will know ten years ago fifteen years ago may not be as well today and people don't often think about that when you first starting out. So that's a great, great, great device. Um what also changed for you um did the day um after you first started a jm and what are the some adjustments you have made personally, psychologically um if from a mental state of mind to be able to um deal with the manager and eventual thrive in IT one of .

the processes that I didn't really expect is the sort of process of finding your words. The more people that join the team, the the more important is to be able to get the context and the strategy from your head into theirs so we can all execute really fast and make a very alive decisions together in the early days. This is easy.

You're just in ice. And like you can be in every discussion and you can offer like, oh, historically, we do this that didn't work. Like you can just be there and say that.

But when the team is bigger, you can't. And actually, if you are able to communicate this context, IT slows everyone down because there are lots of different opinions about how to do things. But every company has a strategy, and that strategy is built over time.

It's actually important that everyone knows what is what is our hypothesis and what strategy is. And so finding our words has been a really, really important thing um for me. And IT changes how I communicate the team data day and IT changes how I think about things like when I see something thing happened, I think, oh, that's where that shouldn't be happening.

Rather than trying to fix the thing, I try to find the words and say, like, because our strategy is this, we should take a different approach. And so here is an example. There is a different quality bar at different companies, but at our company, we are fAiling to developers, the most skeptical audience of all audiences of all time.

We are a new start up, and we are asking them to bring us into their workplace and trust us and introduce us to their colleagues. The bar has to like our bar has to be high because we're in the business of building trust. And so what's our strategy? Our strategies to always illicit a while and everything that we do.

So in other companies, it's OK to just tweet to tweet. It's OK to just email to email. It's okay to have a boring win or like these things don't break the brand.

But for us, we cannot do that. No boring tweet, no boring webinars, no boring emails, no bad features. Everything must illicit a while, but illicit welcoming different things, right? So I would be perfectly reasonable.

I only said this for an engineer, jim, to spend a year on a feature to make IT every animation perfect because we're in the business is sitting a while. And so you've to counter baLance that with well, where we start when we've got to be fast. So what what is that baLance at jam? And again, we have to find our words.

So at jm is twenty five percent extra time of the time to IT took to build something to polish IT and make IT well. And so if we spent four weeks building something that extra one week of polish makes a huge difference. If we spent four days just spent one more day.

And so but at the beginning, I wasn't speaking like this. I was speaking in the concrete. And as we the team, one of the things that change is going sort of higher level and trying to find the word self, everyone pattern match.

One of things that both go, and I notice you do assuming well, is that over last three and half four years working with you, you iterate very quickly. He always ask very thoughtful and penetrating questions and you try to get the essence of of of things and then figure out at the end so who does best anywhere I go talking them and learn even more.

So that amount of learning you take in give you the death to be able to um summarize and the high level that capture the assets. How of people talk about trade ffs, but you quantify with a twenty four percent extra time to do something makes a lot easier. And what else was non technical quote quote to kind of follow.

So if I can answer my next question, my question next loves coming up, which is what is your leadership style? And if you can spend more on that, how do you vote internally and internally with the users figure out ways, words, examples, contacts to make IT easier for the non technical query to regret what you're doing with the problem you trying to solve is a huge problem is not just for the prosume ers or the process is for everybody. So especially in the era A, I so love to have you ship IT more of your leadership, though.

before that, actually the good as you gave me actually could us for you. There's a lot of talk about like how much do your investors make an impact? Like how much is a matter who you take capital from and actually working with. Notable is like proof of what an impact that can be.

And one of the things that we're very lucky about working with you all is whenever we're working on our next kind of big chAllenge for the company, you proactively think about who could we talk to learn from and that really makes a huge difference, is also extremely humbling. Like um we are talking in the team the other day, we are building our first P L G growth teams. So like if you listen to like the company stories of miro and slack, like their P L G growth teams, some of the most important teams in their company's trajectories, we just started our and I could imagine that ten years will look back.

And like that was such a big moment for us, but it's so humbling because starting this new growth team, IT feels like we're like learning to swim and getting to talk to Michael phelps about how to swim. It's like absolutely unreal. But really, it's like, thank you to you that we have the opportunity to get advice from the people who figured that out best before us.

Thank you for kind words. But all the party.

this is not the purpose.

Very excited and thank you for saying that they worked so hard for you. Um but you can spend bit more on your leadership style. It's easy to miss that. So I want to put the line my back onto you a ship, a bit more of how you lead, how you learn to lead, because I think extremely valuable lessons for other founders.

I don't think I have I don't think I don't think I I have this like locked down and figured out, but i'll tell you what I aspire to. When one thing I hear a lot of founder say is they say in in my first company, I was holding on for dear life, trying to control everything. I feel that.

And then you hear them say in my second company, I just let go and let the company happen. You'll here second time founders say, like, I hire all these great people. My job is to get out other way and let them do the thing.

That is great. I think as a first time founder, it's like jam is existent. Al, for me, like I want, I would do anything to keep a going.

It's the project is such an important project in my life, right? And so so my tendency is to hold on too tight. But actually, you know, we've higher this incredible team like the team work with right now. I ve never worked with such a thing.

There is so good and and if only I can just let go and let them do the thing and trust even more like imagine imagine what is possible um there are small things that I do in my day to try and do that more because it's it's hard to do like i'm too invested. One thing I do is I don't take calls on this. I have paper and a pencil next to me.

And the reason is if I don't when I have a concern or a thought or a suggestion, I will just say that, because otherwise I will forget IT so in favor. Next to me, I can write IT down. I can see where they take the whole conversation.

And then at the end, I can go back to my notes. And so I have to do these manual things in order to do the act of, like letting go and lowing the team. But I really do aspire to that because our team is amazing. And the role should be, stand back.

let IT happen. Took, took a great 啊， in my mind, A A really great attribute that you're bring to the company. But IT IT feels like it's there is a baLance.

You going back to something you said earlier, um you were very prescriptive and you you needed to help people understand what you meant, for example, by you know spending an extra twenty five percent on every project to polish IT, you could have bitten everybody shorts on every project saying that's not polished enough, but instead you were able to abstract and kind of come up with A A company value that everyone can then follow. So you you are defining the rules, the road for jam. While you're also as a leader trying to give people rope to let them go.

You run with an interesting baLance um that I think if you if you don't keep right, you know you could end up stiffing progress. On the one hand, if your two hands on as a leader, but um if you're two hands off, you may end up with the company that doesn't really reflect what you wanted to build. So is there's kind of this this middle ground that you you appear to have charted really well.

any and I mean, I don't it's what I fired. I fired to charge IT. Well, I think IT is an interesting IT is an interesting tension.

And actually the internet blew up about this tension just last week. Yes, right. Like founder mode is the home shouldn't have the baLance.

You should just step in and and just be involved in everything. But of course, that we've all worked on teams. Those teams are kind of demoralizing to beyond. How do you expect a team of great people to do their best work if file founder moving all the time IT doesn't work and actually know our best ideas are not for me or from artists, they're from the team.

And like an example is a one of the engineering and team was remarking about how when he's writing code, he's always looking like looking at these like sort of utilities for developers like um basically four converter. And these ads are super ugly. They have ten.

They these websites are super ugly with tons of ads on them. They are super slow. They're not private. Like just we like developers building modern software using these archive tools like four, five times a day.

You like, could we build our own that we would use? And also maybe like we could open source IT for other developers too. And so we launched an add free, open source, completely private set of the utilities a couple of weeks ago.

And now there's an open source community of people who are adding to them. Adding more utilities like this is what such a positive thing to do in the world. And IT didn't come from me, didn't come from artifact. IT came from preston, who is an engineer, the team and is so awesome and like it's just it's clear that found their mode isn't quite .

right but of course is about well I could have to argue that the the rest your team um are thinking like cofounder ers um you have built a culture that and power them to feel that way so all could be quite as a result.

okay. I don't think it's culture. I think it's who you hire. There are people in the world who just they they they're like future founders, like they're going to start a company .

this matter and you want .

to hire the future founders in your start up because they treat everything like like, okay, we own this. We own this together.

Lets go awesome. Well, I guess you after jamb becomes an only after jamb becomes a huge success in those future founders, want to actually become founders, then hopefully homes and I will have a chance to beat them.

And this is the third time again, and I have worked together on on the board. And the first time was a airbnb. Second time I was, uh, not a more, but we club were very closely.

I was slack. Um this is the third one. Um we were very excited about your potential upside from here.

and I don't feel any pressure from that.

You have joshi, albeit thank thank for we should give him a big shot out for introducing you to us. You know, way back four years ago.

beginning of IT really is such .

another speaking of pressure, danny, one of to ask you another question or two. Before we hit our speed round, maybe we could touch on commercialization and your thoughts there, how you thinking about IT. What are your plans? How's that changing? You know, your mindset as a founder, eeta, my cofounder.

nine students of cloud flare cloud. There was the only product company I had worked at before starting jm. everything. Their playbook is the playbook we grew up on and it's the playbook we use at gym.

And the thing that we saw cloud for you super successfully was, first, just focus on building a product that developers loved like grow, grow to a massive size of developers using their product. And over time, users pulled them up market with paid features that only real companies, real enterprises could be for and wanted. So we followed the same playbook at jim.

First, we just released a product IT was completely free. And then as the user based grew, we started to get we put up a pricing page with the contact us form, and we've held on the calls, listen to what people wanted. And IT seems like companies want to pay for additional security, data protection, access controls, things that they require as a corporation.

And so we started building those features and then added pay plans for that. So for example, a couple weeks ago, we just launched single sign on support, and now we are selling single sign on as a paid feature. I don't think we're done. We're gna keep going. But like this model of letting users take us to where we need to go.

okay. Um any anything that people should be ready for or you know maybe you talk a little bit about that you're dots on timely and you know objectives you're hope to achieve that you can share i'll .

share that this this same week this podcast is going live. We're launching something huge. This is a huge moment for the company, and i'm so, so excited about IT. Up until now, jam was a tool for internal teams to report bugs internally to each other.

But we saw our users do something very interesting, which is like if you write into pipe drive support, if you write into eleven love support, they will tell you to install the gem chm extension to report the bug back to them. And we're like a this is so cool, but the oh no like what a terrible experience for someone just trying to show share a bug with a new customer support agent. And so for the first time starting this week, if you can now share bugs back to customer support agents without having to install anything, we just launched jam for customer support. And i'm so, so, so excited for everyone to go use IT. So one thing to check out is gender customer support.

very cool.

Give sure anything more about your a part of plants and also um what's like work with your customers. And now you have a wide range of customers from h soups initially to now four hundred companies. So how do you think about product role map and and building features and parties and features? We have customers from such a different wider range of profiles and before. For our customers.

consistency is the most important thing because consistency helps developers move faster. So when you're developer and you're opening up jury tickets, the first thing you do, you just try to figure out like what am I seeing here? What's happening? What is this? What am I supposed to be doing? And so actually, every ticket is in the one standard gem format.

Then IT actually helps developers move faster because they don't need to figure out what's happening. They know this format. And so the direction that our customers are pulling us in is get more tickets reported in this format.

So right now, the web team will be using jam, but what about mobile? So that's coming syrian or ah just examples like that. So customer support is a big one.

Our internal team bugs are follow than jim, but turn a is an external user is reporting a bug. There goes that format. And so we're really excited to expand to help our customers move faster, which is one consistent format for all your bugs.

Basically engineering to spend all their time thinking about what's next, building new products, new features. They should not spend any time thinking about bugs. And we're like happy to garbage collect and deal with that of the business.

So how do you think about your I C P um and um do they all have to be developed themselves or are they going to have different roles and contacts? Um for example, is is I was a first party solution or this actually to be release for third parties um separate agencies and development firms and IT in completion houses and so forth and so forth.

It's it's cool to see so many of our power users are using jm across multiple companies because in an agency mount, when you're working with many clients, that back and fourth has even less tooling because it's happening over often and just emails and it's the back and forth is often across time zones and the back and forth. If IT adds a ton of overhead that's like viable hours, it's it's just too expensive.

You can't manage as many clients and really has an impact. And it's really, really cool to see web development agencies picking up jam. And with that across multiple companies, I hear the question behind the question. I think at some point will have up like a full you reseller channel. But for the time being, it's it's all been very organic and it's been really, really qual to sea.

I think our users have to listen to have to turn back in couple years from now to hear your insights on the top.

I have a question for you before .

we read let's heit.

I'm curious you've you've seen jm from day zero three product until until where IT is today. What's IT like to be an investor in this company? Like i'm curious to hear your perspective at all this.

You go first, you go first, dance .

gLance, going like the go, two persons will comes to any everything enterprise special info related. Um I am difficult. Someone's more coming from h sort of consumer uh user adoption basement tablets um but to seeing guys iterate and iteration and iterate from the very beginning, I think a lot of people on death me how hard is to go from zero to one but once you get to one, how to go from one to five or ten is not as simple and as you missing and the changes you make um you and the ability that you you have to relate to and user and the empathy and that's a key word.

A lot of companies and in the consumer space don't spend time thinking and let alone enterprise companies, the empathy you have for your users is incredible. And so whether if someone just focus on numbers, want to go you know up scale and get more, I per uses the acquire um your city to um empathy and therefore make the product as a little goal for everyone to use leads you to something potentially very, very big. As you know, i'm very i'm more unbiased and um and excited about what the third party solution could be um in the commercial value late through that.

But that wouldn't have happened if you didn't build tour that so easy people were a wide to use. And so the empathy towards your users and users and see how make us really leave for more people to use, given the opportunity in the right to rebuild a much bigger outcome uh than otherwise. And that that's where I feel that you have the thunder have the right values, the team have the right values. You actually eventually lead to much bigger our customers is what tech innovations supposed to be bring more benefits to human kind.

It's a simple perspective.

Right hands taught me a lot in this process as well about kind of that the importance of empathy and um you know putting putting, let's say, consumer the demands of a consumer lands on the product of A A company that seeks to serve businesses like jam.

One thing, danny, that i'll emphasize that hang saluted to was the iteration um in in the early days um you released a lot of versions of jam that most founders would have said this is good enough like we're getting good enough numbers. This is working. This is what we're going with and you just we're relentless in pursuing you Better and Better than twenty five percent polish. You you really exercised yourself.

And when IT came to version five not being good enough and then version six and then version seven, IT was, um I think you know, your drive to really meet the need of the customer and have that empathy is something that I as an investor, I I A ton a tone of respect for because IT IT took patients and I think we talked about the baLance that you have to achieve as an as a CEO between being two hands on and two hands off. There's this baLance also at a company between really shipping fast but also being patient. And you I think jam has very strong product velocity and hopefully will have full company velocity as you continue to grow.

But you also had patients and you making sure you should have had a right before you start going as fast as you count down the path. It's been really caught to watch as an nava star in you. I just can't wait.

I know homes feels the same. Can't wait to see where where jam goes. So no pressure.

no pressure. But I have been it's too kind.

I think one really I think there's one really, really important thing, which is. When you're free product market fit, the investors you bring on board can be make or break. And if you bring on patient capital like you all are, then then you get the opportunity even to iterate like but there are other investors in the world who would have told us like, okay, return the funds.

Or like doesn't seem like this is working sort of discouraged just or said, like seeing a lot of companies, I don't you're going to get there this else. And so IT really, really, really mattered to us to have people like you on board. And I really, really appreciate that.

Well, we're going to test your appreciation now by putting you .

on the hot seat.

Let's go right. Just say the first thing that comes your mind. What's the most unusual or unexpected the use of jam that you've seen customers use, use jam for. But James, of bug reporting tool.

Everything we talk about out inside the company is about bug reporting there. When you open a jam, there are giant console network logs like it's a bug reporting tool and people are just sharing like, oh, had an idea, I recorded IT with jam and sharing James with each other like what are you doing?

Start tend to use whatever .

works for them sure sign you've .

created a really easy to use product .

exactly again yeah empathy and ethos go together um if jane or a superhero, what was the superpowers .

me squashing? starbury? Last week I was assessed, I got to speak, IT was so cool. I've watched hundred hours of sastry to build gem, and I ran into one of our users in percent.

And he said, by the way, I created like a like a secret handshake for jam, and I might tell me more, what is IT? And he goes like that, okay? Because you are wishing you're making jam.

I see. got. That's very good. We have a channel .

inside the company is called users save the dentist, things where it's like mostly for user feed back. But that one went in there. Two.

alright. Well, that's quite the superpower. Last one, what we sort of touched on, on customer support. So maybe you can elaborate on that. The next big thing that James focused on.

This is such a cool moment. There is, you know, when you start a company, you start small, small scope, do one thing, do one error thing, do IT well. And that earns you the ability to do the next thing in the next thing and next thing.

And that's how these like small, narrow tools like sales for syria become these massive ecosystems. And it's so cool that our customers are pulling us in the direction of do more things. So gene, for customer support is the next big one.

There's a time to do there. But mobile, this top apps anywhere that you're developing, we're getting told to do bug reporting for that too. And i'm so, so excited in this moment to see jm go from this sort of narrow just for web apps into a platform you can use whereever you're developing.

Well, dani, years so excited, and I know i'm speaking for hans. We are also so excited in our entire team at notable really feels very appreciative of all the hard work you article one your team are doing and are very excited about your future, thanks to spend a time with us today. We'll insert uh a link to find the death starter pack in the shown notes um and i'm sure you can also find that on the jam website jammed at dev.

Um and I hope lots of people go valid themselves of IT. Congrats on that launch and congrats on all your progress. Thanks for spending time with us and thanks homes for joined in today.

And a way we go. Let's plan to do another episode. The three of us in another year and a half and who knows where you'll be, be really .

going to find out, can wait, wait. Thank you.

thanks. thanks.

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