Hello, and welcome to the pragmatic product chat series where we tackle the biggest challenges facing today's product management, product marketing and other market and data driven professionals with some of the best minds in the industry. I'm Rebecca Kalogeris, vice president of marketing and product strategy at pragmatic Institute, and your host for this episode. And today, we are extremely excited to have Richard White on with us today, which is the CEO and founder of Fathom video, and was the founder and former CEO also user vote. So someone who spent a lot of time in the product space selling to product managers and product marketers like us, and who also has taken a very distinct product journey of his own, as he's found and released a new product here at Fathom video. So welcome, Richard.
Thank you for having me, Rebecca.
Oh, my pleasure. All right, Richard, start, let's give a just a little bit more background on you, and what Fathom video does today?
Sure. So I guess officially my background originally was as an engineer, and then kind of term product designer and then turned Yeah, I kind of ambiguous product person. You know, ran user voice for 12 years and you know, familiar voice, we're kind of a platform for managing product feedback at scale. And try to understand, like, what are the top issues your customers are reporting, and then started fathom the cache is about, you know, in October, September, October of 2020. And so the whole goal of Fathom actually is to remove something that I think most of us have experienced with when we're doing user research is this pain point of, I'm trying to conduct a great conversation, I'm trying to, you know, put on my detective hat and find those insights. And I'm also at the same time trying to be a court reporter. And like, stenography out, like what I'm hearing so that I can, I can remember it, and my team can remember it. And, you know, i is going to early 2020, where I end up doing a lot of user research calls for different projects. And he did like 300 Zoom calls, and like January 2020. And I was like, you know, having the conversations dutifully taking my notes, cleaning up my notes after the call. And then two weeks later, I don't exactly remember the court nuance, I share the bullet points of my team. And they just fall flat compared to the experience I had. And so it just felt like there's a bad game of telephone here. And there's got to be a better way to fix it. And so Fathom is a free app for zoom that records, transcribes your calls, and was importantly allows you like, highlight those key moments. And so we can kind of build a here's a highlight reel from this call, share those clips out with our team.
So there is really two reasons, Richard, thanks for sharing all that, that I wanted you on to come on the show. And the first is one of the main tenants that we teach is like the importance of Nikita, get out of the office, talk to your market, understand the market problems, understand how they describe him the language they use, understand, you know, the alternatives of use to solve those problems. Because that market problem knowledge and understanding is what you use to make every decision about your product from, from what to put on the shelf to how to make it fly off. And of course, we all know today that getting out of the office really just means like doing a zoom, but not with internal people. And and like you said, this is such a real problem to how to, you know, it's hard enough to systematize and get a process down for scheduling these but then how do I turn the great conversations that got me all excited and my eyes sparkling? How do I turn that into something that my peers can do? Because you're right, like, and I turn it into bullets? They're like, Oh, that's nice, Rebecca. And I'm like, no, no, you don't understand that. This was amazing. So there's that. But I also think it's such a great story, because you had used so much of the of the sort of market research and market grounding techniques in the development of it. So it's sort of like a tool to help us do ours and the story of how you did yours. But let's start with that. Like, let's start, like what the process when you first recognize that you were UserVoice, you started another company now, like you were sitting around with nothing to do, how did you discover that this was a problem that needed to be solved?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we were actually doing kind of customer discovery on a different product idea. And it was kind of adjacent to this, right? Which was it was actually I think more around like automating the scheduling of, of customer interviews. And and like I said, I first and foremost felt this pain point, right? It was like, first my pain point, right? That's like this, this really, this is a real pain, right? And what was funny though, it's also in the process of doing some interviews, I was asking him about the pain and scheduling. And I got a lot of pain around scheduling. But I also had almost a lot of competitions also heard, I also spend an hour for every 30 minutes of recorded content, cleaning up my notes and like putting the data in those, you know, so it's one of those things where I wasn't looking for that problem originally. It's kind of adjacency and I realize, gosh, even in doing this, I have this problem and that's actually a bigger problem, the scheduling one, and now I'm seeing you know, everyone I talked to you kind of validate that, hmm, maybe we should go look at that. You adjacent problem as opposed to the one we started off on.
So I think we're fixing two problems. How did you? How did you decide that this one had was maybe a bigger problem, right? What helps you kind of weigh those, the two against gotta go? Hmm,
this one, there's a lot of moving parts to the, the scheduling problem, right. And when we actually found like you were trying to schedule automated calls for for product managers, and we realize, okay, we got to have customer success involved, too, because they often are gatekeeping access to customers or so. And so I looked at one of these solutions. And I was like, there's a lot of moving parts of this and requires a lot of buy in from a lot of different people. And then I looked on the other side of like, Okay, what if we just made an app that I could use myself, or just to get buy in from me? And so one part was, like, Oh, I think there's an easier to execute product here. Secondarily, I think also, it just, you know, we did a prototype where we actually, you know, I just manually took together a bunch of like, Zoom call recordings and stitch them into a short highlight reel. And I shared it with my team, I cut it all hands. And this is I think, my other pain point was like, I'd show these bullet points. And I said to my team in the big kind of, like, zone out. And when I showed them a, here's what we've learned in research, and here's the, you know, three minute highlight reel. Everyone's eyes lit up, right? And I was like, oh, okay, so that was a good test, like, okay, even the simple Nike version, that was actually really expensive for me to make, because I do it manually. Like, the output was really good, and people really liked it. And we really went from there to Okay, let's do a little more research on this when we talk to other people, my team. And obviously, I used to run our sales team, actually, for a minute at att user voice. And so actually, one of the biggest challenges my sales team was to get them to take good notes, right? Some people took really crappy notes, some people took like, overly verbose notes, but even the best notes, I found myself always being like, Yeah, but what did it actually sound like when they objected to our price or mentioned the competitor. And so then I started thinking about, Oh, my gosh, this actually could be an easier execute product requires less buy in from, you know, less stakeholders, and may have a bigger Tam, there might be a bigger market here. You know, it's not just people doing product research, it's also doing customer calls, you know, Customer Success calls, sales calls, you name it. And so that was I think, the kind of quick progression of the research and then obviously went from there to there's other people in the space, I need to go interview a bunch of customers, there's right and go figure out, do I actually own something or my reinventing a wheel that's already out there that I'm just kind of ignorant of
love that, right? I mean, a lot of a lot of new companies and founders are problems that we had personally that then we made an organization, right, the problem becomes, when you don't like validate that you're not the only one who has it. So clearly, you did that, then you were talking to competitors. And then, you know, I'm 100% confident that the market research wasn't done there. And that as you continue to do any prototype, and went through there that you continue to do that process. So talk to me a little bit about, like, how you found people to test along the way? And were you sort of identified as the right points in order to bring in sort of market feedback to make sure you're iterating? in the right direction?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, we first started with, you know, customers and stuff that were internal to us. And also, you know, other people at the company. So I, you know, rough interviews with sales folks and customer success, we also use a platform called user interviews to basically find people that weren't in network that fit a certain profile to interview to talk to. And that was that was super valuable. And along the way there, I kind of would cat out catalog part of my intake process therapy, what other tools do you use? And if they happen to be kind of a, you know, a user of one of these competing tools, I'd have almost like a slightly different kind of interview script for them. And then I'd also just did my personal network, reach out my person that hey, anyone? Do we have anyone that fits this profile that I've worked with before that name is at a company that does that? So it's helpful too, because I think sometimes you're in network, folks, especially if they are, you've got good relationships there. They give you a slightly different perspective than random person on paying $50 for a 20 minute conversation with right. And both these that like, I think both his perspectives are really important. I wouldn't want to just have the people paying to talk to me, and I wouldn't want to just have like, my friends talk to me they're having both perspectives, helps you then kind of add an extra layer of veracity to that research.
Yeah, yeah. And so then, as you as you've done this process up, so it's like three questions. I hate that. I could say which one I would ask. All right, first question. As you said, this was a free product. It's it's just because you're a kind giving person, or is there a model that you see as this grows and expands to an enterprise version that would be paid or or sort of?
Yeah, we certainly think there's probably a future version that we make that's more targeted at, you know, a team or a manager and slightly different set of features that we can monetize on. I also I'm just a big fan of, of separating out monetization from growth. I think it's both of those things are very difficult to do and I think a lot of companies tend to do them both at once. Time, which sometimes means you end up with mediocre results for both. Right? I, you know, I'd say, I would say probably for, you know, we've been doing this for like 18 months or so I would say for the last probably eight to 10 months, we spent a third of our time just on onboarding process, right like, and I shudder to think what happened if I also parallel had to take a third of my time to also do monetization and like spent with that, I also think it's easier to do the research, we need to do a monetization once we have a stable of customers using it. Especially for a product like ours, where it does require behavior change, that we're getting you to put down your pen and paper or you know, don't open that Google Doc and instead, use our app while you're on the call. And so it's a little hard, I think, for us to do monetization research on people that aren't yet users. Because it's, it's unlike anything you've used before it there's, it's the best time to ask you is after you've had a couple calls using Fathom. And so that's I think the other reason why if we had monetized too early, we probably would have hindered growth, and we probably would have gotten false signal because people would have been giving us aspirational answers, they wouldn't be grounded in people that are using our product every day like we have now.
It's such a good point, too, right? Like pricing questions around a product, the weather isn't as strong comparison are really, really hard. And if you have the option to do that, that with me, that's fantastic. I mean, you talk a little bit about using the app, while you're on the call, is it something where like you tag things as it's going. So it's not just like it's recording in the background? Or you can go back at it, but you can interact with it as it's going to be like, oh, I want to remember that one because that was interesting.
Yeah, that's 100%. Right. It's interesting, because the original version we we had, we've, you know, I think the first version we had actually was we take the Zoom has built in recording, and we would take that built in recording, we put it into our system, and we'd allow you to like annotate it after the call. And we very quickly learned there are a couple problems with that. One, a zoom would often take 20 to 30 minutes, sometimes more to get you the recording. And so like there's just this real quick time decay after the meeting is over, I don't want to wait 30 minutes, then go back in and annotate it. And so we kind of built out our own recording infrastructure. So now we could get it to you almost instantly, which was a lot better. Because you know what I'm trying to replace notetaking. So no, taking the one nice diabetes is immediacy in your workflow. Simply I'm used to cleaning up my notes right after the call. So that was one thing we did is like, Okay, now we can get it to you within five seconds, the call being ended. And you can go through and find the parts that matter. The second thing we learned was like no one wants to do that, though, right? I don't want to, I just had the 30 minute call, I don't want to like puzzle back through it to find the moments of matter. You generally know in the moment, this is a noteworthy moment on the call. And so what we've done is made almost like you don't think like a remote control, right, almost like like a soundboard. And we got kind of these buttons weighed out where it's like, you know, action item or, you know, positive reaction or negative reaction when we customize those on the roll. Right? So product managers will customize different types of highlights buttons, or tags, if you will, versus like a salesperson, stuff like that they might get like pain points, whatnot. But the idea is, when I'm on the call, and I hear something noteworthy instead of me typing out something in my notes or writing 10 on pen and paper, I click one of these buttons. And then our system basically flags that part of the call by listening for when that person starts talking when they stopped talking Great. Here's like a 32nd portion of the call that you said was a positive reaction or an insight or an action item.
So I realized that they asked that question like, What a dangerous question was like, what if you're like, No, it doesn't do that, Rebecca? Oh, no. And so I am glad it happened. But b I am glutton for punishment, I'm gonna do another question like this is you had mentioned in the beginning talking about how one of the things that I've done is, instead of doing bullet points, you were able to make like a highlight video, but that it was very manual, in this application, is there a part of it that helps kind of pull those things together into a highlight video?
Yeah. And so basically, the highlight, I think the the key simplifying assumption we came up with was, when you're on the call, you click buttons, again, they're kind of named buttons when you hear something important. And then afterwards, you can say, like, you can now jump to all those highlights, you can, you know, I've got three pieces of feedback to Caymans call, I can get a link directly to those, the highlight reel of that feedback, I can drop into Slack and drop in my CRM, in fact, will actually automate both of those things. So yeah, so there's a lot different ways to kind of slice and dice the highlights from your call and get them into all the right systems that people need to see.
Love that. Now this third, I'm asking, because I'm getting again, a third question, which I suspect you're gonna say no, but that's okay. But one of the things that we also talked about one of the things we've actually got internally, a new course coming out about is taking all of that qualitative information and how do I like, tag it and theme it and start to make it quantitative, which is one of the most difficult parts about market visits cuz you're like, I heard this amazing thing and it doesn't. You can have 20 market visits, and they all say the same thing. And we all know as product managers, that's like significant signal. But still, if you like, go to the boardroom, like I talked to 20 people, and then you know, you try to move and also quantify like, if you've had this conversation after over three months, it can be hard to zoom back and remember the theme so with the tagging of pieces, is there something in there today with Furthermore, maybe something like on the horizon? Or can I just like put it in as a request? Because I would really like that?
Yeah, we don't have anything native and Fathom for this at the moment, right. So but but certainly it's on our radar. And actually, we use my last couple of user voice of product to do this for fallow, right. So, you know, using a certain product where you can just log people's feedback. And, you know, here's what they said. And part of that you can just, we actually log the link to the highlight. So, you know, our team actually does, anytime, every time you do your first call with fathom, you'll get an email from someone like on our success team, asking you actually pay you to take a 15 minute interview with us to ask you how the process went. And out of that, obviously, you can measure we get a lot of product feedback. And we actually tag all that put it in user voice, which then feeds back into a Slack channel. So it's like a Slack channel over inbound feedback. And what's nice about this is we get kind of the best of both worlds one, I have a view on user voice, we can see, here's the top 15 Things we get asked about, I can click into one of those things. And not only just anyone can see the video clips, here's the person that asked for this, right though, the raw primary source stuff. And we also have a Slack channel. So the our entire company is seeing the steady stream of prior feedback come in. And again, because it's just the visual, the video is so much more engaging than bullet points and tax, you know, our engineers are watching like, here's this person saying I need this integration, or I really need you know, this optimization or workflow change and stuff like that.
That's awesome. I love it. You got those research loops all the way through? I have to say, Richard, that this sounds like I mean, like just from a problem that I personally have in my team has, it sounds like a great product to check out. And I also think it's a great story about how you've used both drone tools, but also the the sort of good strong product management processes that we talked about to validate an x ray, as you've done that, right? And then you've kind of got I'm sure a roadmap going forward, like, where are you guys headed? Like, what are the next things that you're looking to tackle with them?
We really started off again, solving this problem of like, I don't want to take notes notes. I, you know, to me notes are like kind of insane in general, right? Like, it's like, yeah, we've had hours of content with our customers and what shows up in our CRM or into our research or just like a bunch of bullet points. Right. So we started with that. We've also started to kind of expand our vision, just to what are all the things we can do to help you run a good meeting, that software is welcome to do right? A trial, I want to avoid some of the things I like to do when building software, avoid things that require diligence, or there's a lot of products, there's like, if you're very diligent with this product, you get a good outcome. Most I don't want more diligence. And if I have enough of it, so what are the things that software can automatically do? So for example, we added features more recently, where, you know, if I start monologuing, for two minutes or more, it gives me a little warning. Right? Okay, you're okay. It gives me a little warning, like how much time is remaining in the meeting. It's so many like talk time at regular intervals, I'd actually beta testing a version right now where it tells me, here's who you're on the call with, here's the last time you met with them. Here's information about them in their CRM, their LinkedIn profile their job titles, right? So you just think about that I've started thinking about, again, Kalighat job to be done, like the job to be done is like, I have to get on this call. And there's a lot of stuff that happens before and after the call. Right? And obviously, we we've already focused a lot on what happens during the call in terms of highlighting the notes, or the noteworthy moments, but what are all the things on the back end of that, that we can make easier? Right? So we focused a lot on data entry and automated data entry into CRMs. We're gonna first next do automated data entry into like a task management tools. Right? So click up is on our on our radar, a few others. So we kind of work back to front. So we're first focusing on where were all the where does this data need to go need to get your CRM needs getting your slack, it needs to get your notion it needs to get and like, make sure you have good integration there. And also the front end, what are all the things we can do to basically help you do that pre call prep? Because we're all on kind of back to back calls, right? We generally have, it's kind of a fun product, because everyone's using it always in a hurry. Right? So what I tell my team is like when people use our products, they have no patience for us to be slow, or for us to be unintuitive because they're jumping on a meeting. And I don't know about you, but I've never jumped on a meeting and not been kind of in a rush. And so we think about what are all the things we can do to basically, you know, crease the on ramps to doing your next meeting.
Because someone listening right now is pondering this very question. I'm going to ask it. Do you have any plans like going outside of soon? Or will it always be zoom?
In or Zoom is such a dominant market share right now that that, you know, it's one of the things where I'm sure at some point, we might be compelled to go outside as in but there's such a market share. There's so many, I'd rather improve the product and really deepen it for the existing set of users before broadening the pool of potential users. I actually think yeah, we we launched I think very late by startup standards. But I think in this day and age, that's important, because you only get really one shot to make a first impression. And so I think you really want to when people first experience your product I really think should have a depth of functionality. to it. And so I'm really focused now on what's build that depth of functionality for our users, all the things I just mentioned right above and beyond just the recording pieces, before we worry about market expansion.
Okay, so then I'm gonna guess I've got a lot of product managers product market is listening, and you would use this product, you're ready for us, right? You're ready for them to go.
Oh, yeah. If you go to fathom video slash pod, we actually have a pretty long waitlist. It's about 70k. So but if you go to fathom video slash pod, you will skip directly to the front of that list, and probably over and all together.
I love that. Right. And I also just wrote it down, because I will also be jumping. Jumping ahead. But yeah, so Fathom video, seven dot video slash pot. Correct. Perfect. We will also drop that in the description so people know. But, Richard, I am excited both for thank you for sharing the story of how you You came with that product. I think it's always interesting to all of us. I think for some of us, this could be a valuable tool. And it also I hope that as your journey continues that you check with us and talk about how you've evolved your products and how you've used, you know, sort of your own tools and your own product management best practices to continue to evolve it. I think we all love to hear founder stories from founders with a distinct product bent. So we really appreciate you joining us today.
Awesome. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.
Awesome. All right. That does it for today's episode. Thank you everyone for listening. And don't forget to join us next week when we tackle another great topic designed to help you elevate your product, your company and your career.