I’m Rich Waldron, Founder and CEO of Tray.io. AMA!

I’ve got another one, Rich. :slight_smile:

I learned that Tray.io managed to acquire some major logos quite early on. Were you deliberate about onboarding big-name brands from the early days? What did it mean for your product roadmap, as such companies are typically way more demanding than SMBs or startups? And how did this tie with your philosophy of building from the gut as much as customer development?

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Hi Krish - awesome!

Yes - we were deliberate about landing some key logos early on, we felt it would help to build trust with future prospects. I think in an ideal world you’re building a solution based on the experience you want to bring to the world, and weaving in what you’re learning about the challenges customers face - for us this was really split by stage. The pre-customer stage was heavily focused on constructing the foundation for that vision, and as we onboarded customers we were able to begin to weave in the learnings from them.

In our experience this was certainly tough (and initially a lot of learning on the job) to get that balance right, I think it requires the discipline to do the right thing for where you’re heading with the expectation on the direction from a customer. I don’t think this challenge every really fades away it just seems to evolve over time.

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Thanks for stopping by and casting a concise and thoughtful light upon the ideas that have shaped Tray.io, @richwaldron! Especially the messy (ripe with uncertainties) truths of scaling up. :sunflower:

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And, thanks, as always, to our ever-thoughtful Relay founders, @aditi1002, @ncameron, @jamesgill, @hector, @raviramani, @navydish, and @Deepika, for joining us! :raised_hands:

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That’s excellent, @richwaldron, thank you. To add to this, from what we’ve seen at Chargebee, I believe striving to build functionality that are must-have for the fastest-growing customers can be a brilliant accelerant for the roadmap. Your point about having functionality to grow with them resonates with me.

Of course, the challenge of deliberate learning and building in parallel, as you’ve said, never really fades away. And often it gets harder when when you’re building for different segments.

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Thanks, @richwaldron. As you’ve phrased it well, org design is indeed a ‘forever iteration,’ constantly being revisited as the org itself acquires new forms. To me, how you’ve thought about structuring different teams, seems like a great way of acknowledging the unique, function-specific sub-cultures that exist within a company.

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