I’m Paul Joyce, Founder and CEO of Geckoboard. AMA!

[astha (Astha Rattan)]

Hi @paul,

Thank you so much for taking the time out to answer all the questions!

Your thoughtfulness and nuanced perspective shine through all the tactical and rather unobvious advice in here. I’m sure this AMA is going to be very useful for everyone!

I loved how expansive the insights are here — going from funding, to being, to the craft of entrepreneurship. And I esp. adore this honest and succinct nugget: “That requires inspiration, research and just a sprinkle of delusional thinking.”

Thank you, again, for joining us and sharing your lessons so generously. Hope to have you join us for another session very soon!

[astha (Astha Rattan)]

Also, a big thanks to @sofia, @davidhart, @ncameron, @Logesh, @jamesgill, @Akhilesh, and @Anushree for joining in today and making it a wonderful conversation.

We’ll see you around for the next AMA soon. Stay tuned for more details!

[paul (Paul Joyce)]

Thanks @astha, @akash and the rest of the team. I enjoyed every minute of it

[rajaraman (Rajaraman Santhanam)]

@paul

@rajaraman

Hey Paul,

Thanks for doing this!

Having been a founder for a decade or so now, it would be great to hear how your internal compass (building a business you wanted to work in) has overcome the tension with external ones (the market and its kaleidoscopic demands)? As you look back, what are some of the core ways of thinking and principles that have helped the most?

Hi @rajaraman - thanks for the question and to you and the team for hosting me today.

1. There definitely is a tension between internal ambitions and putting that into action in the real world!
2. My ambition to create a company I wanted to work in was shaped, in a large part, by my experiences of working in toxic environments in the past
3. Those experiences helped me understand what I didn’t want
4. They also helped me develop a positive picture of what I wanted this business to be, the parts I cared most deeply about were, and remain:
   a) Interesting and important problem domain that I felt strongly about
   b) Working with people I respect in a collegiate way on a shared goal
   c) Work:life balance - my kids were aged 3 and 1 when I started
5. It’s easy to idealise the future but, as we all know, building something from nothing is often brutally hard
6. I realised very early on that Geckoboard could easily take 24 hours/day, 7 days/week if I allowed it…
7. And that it was going to be a long term project
8. I soon found that I had to define my priorities more explicitly to avoid burning out or being overwhelmed
9. The process of explicitly stating, and living, my priorities with discipline were the best antidotes to being caught up in whirlwind
10. I don’t think I could have survived 10 years doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t drawn those lines in the sand
11. It also helped that I discussed this during interviews from a very early stage, which helps candidates to select in or out of that
12. Once you reach a critical mass of people who want the same things, it starts to get a lot easier
13. This has since been codified in our company values and has shaped a culture that persists ten years later
14. Which is not to say that it doesn’t still require active monitoring, but now there are many eyes on the problem, not just mine

Thanks for sharing this most personal of founding decisions, here, Paul! This is admirable. And I couldn’t agree more. No matter the stage, I’m sure everyone here can attest to the never-ending, all-consuming demands of starting up. But constantly being aware of what one’s in for and what the long-haul can look like, helps recenter priorities. Also loved how you think about culture’s role in solidifying that original line in the sand: “now there are many eyes on the problem, not just mine.

[Krish (Krish Subramanian)]

@paul

• Pricing hasn’t gotten any gets any easier, even 10 years in
• Between value positioning, pricing psychology etc it feels more like alchemy than science
• Despite that, our ASP is now 10x higher than it was when we started
• Pricing surveys, interviews etc can get you so far but the best way to learn is to try new pricing schemes
• We had to be prepared to take some risks in order to learn, the bigger he risk the great chance of busting out of local maximas, but that increases chance and magnitude of downsides also
• The best way to militate against the downsides of pricing risks is having the ability to execute quickly once we had made a decision
  a) We found that instrumenting pricing touchpoints and having the ability to rollback or change pricing quickly gave us the confidence us to be bolder and take riskier bets
  b) This changes the attitude to pricing experimentation from something that needs to be substantially right, to something that allows us to learn
• Being able to segment our customers into different groups based on how they perceive and articulate the value they get from the product is probably the single most important thing we did
• We’ve used various approaches using customer interviews, mapping to JTBD, understanding their journey in the product and as a business
• These are shared around between the team working on pricing
• Based on that, we then punt around some ideas, decide on one, model the upsides and downsides then, tweak it again then push it live
• Of course, this is an iterative approach and isolating signal from noise is difficult
• So stay fleet-footed and on top of the data

Paul, this has been a great session.

Thanks for doing it!

If there’s a more sincere and helpful, 12-point (manifesto?) brief on pricing, I’d be surprised. This brilliantly emphasises the twin pillars of pricing progress: 1) extending the boundaries by trying new models/schemes and developing an infrastructure that supports this experimentation, and 2) constantly revisiting the assumptions that define those very boundaries with thorough JTBD research!

Thanks, again, for sharing all these timeless reflections!