← The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
462: Polly: Lessons on Building a 7-Figure SaaS on Slack's Platform - with Bilal Aijazi
00:57:26
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Transcript90 lines
- [00:00]
Bilal Ajazi
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Omar Khan
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode I talk to Bilal Ajazi, the co founder of Polly, an engagement platform that brings polls, surveys and feedback workflows into the tools teams already use like Slack Teams and Zoom. In 2015, Bilal was working at a consumer messaging company. Watching apps like WeChat evolve from simple chat tools into full blown platforms. He figured the same shift would happen at work. So he and his co founder Sameer started experimenting with simple solutions to collect feedback. Their first attempt was an email based tool but but engagement was terrible. People just treated it like another survey to avoid. Then Slack opened up their API and Bilal noticed that people on Twitter were asking for Slack polls. So the founders quickly ported their product over. But the installation process was clunky. Five manual steps that required copying and pasting tokens across different screens. Yet 80% of people still completed the setup. So they were clearly providing something people wanted. Then one day somebody posted Polly on product hunt and they went viral overnight. They were getting thousands of new signups every month and struggling to keep their servers running. But they had zero revenue. Their first paying customer spent $8 a month for a fantasy football league. Then came the real challenge. Figuring out who would actually pay. Most users just wanted to do something casual with polls like pick lunch spots. But through hundreds of conversations they found where the real money was and they focused on company all hands, sales kickoffs and big important meetings where feedback actually mattered. And just as things clicked, Slack threw a spanner in the works. Polly had built a workflow feature for automating feedback and six months later, Slack launched their own solution. The founders had to make a choice. Stay on Slack and hope for the best or take a massive risk and rebuild everything for multiple platforms. They ended up expanding to Teams, Zoom and Google Meet and embedded directly into presentations. Rebuilding their entire infrastructure was a huge undertaking, but really they had no choice. Today Polly serves millions of monthly active users, generates multiple seven figures in ARR with a team of just 20 people. In this episode you'll learn how Bilal discovered that only 12% of Polly users would ever become creators and why that was actually a good thing for the business.
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Bilal Ajazi
Why?
- [02:44]
Omar Khan
Their first paying customer at $8 a month for fantasy football led them to HR teams who now pay for five figure deals. How Adding simple booking demo hooks through Polly enabled hundreds of customer conversations that reveal their real monetization path. We talk about what happened when Slack launched Workflow Builder six months after Polly signed their first five figure deal, and how they survived and why. Bilal believes that every founder building on platforms must eventually become a platform themselves or risk getting crushed. So I hope you enjoy it. I talk to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They're an AI powered product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your B2B SaaS platform or AI agent. Built by serial entrepreneurs, they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. They They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. Right now they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call@Gearhart IO. That's Gearheart IO. Your company's credentials could be on the dark web right now and you wouldn't even know until it's too late. Nordsteller detects threats before they escalate. It monitors the dark web for leaked credentials, tracks your attack surface and protects your brand from impersonation. Built by the team behind NordVPN. Don't wait until your data is for sale on the dark web. Book a demo and mention Black Friday 20 for 20% off at Sasclub IO Nord. That's Sasclub IO Nord. Your messaging infrastructure shouldn't be your bottleneck. SignalHouse is the next generation communication platform built for modern SaaS companies. Easy to use, APIs that connect in minutes, instant A2P approvals, better pricing than legacy providers, and top tier support included. Whether you're sending 10 messages or 10 million, you get speed, transparency and reliability without the complexity. Visit SignalHouse IO. That's SignalHouse IO. Bilal, welcome to the show.
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Bilal Ajazi
Thanks Amir. Glad to be here.
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Omar Khan
Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you?
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Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, absolutely. Everyone has a plan. And to lay a punch in the face, Mike Tyson. It's just so, so true. And I think it's so true for founders in particular, because the only reality, I think, in startup life is that you will get punched in the face. Sometimes multiple times in the same day.
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Omar Khan
Yep. So tell. Excuse me. So tell us about Polly. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're hoping to solve?
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Bilal Ajazi
Absolutely. So we're an engagement platform that works across all the different ways that your teams work, whether that's channels like Slack or teams meetings, platforms like Zoom or Google Meet, and presentation platforms like Google Slides or PowerPoint. And so what, what we help you do is just make your company a more engaging place to work. So anything from running your town hall on Polly, enabling things like Q and A, live quizzes, live engagement, to your learning and development programs, to post event feedback, Polly just helps you drive better engagement cycles and engagement feedback within your company. Our typical buyers are folks that are leading internal communications people, business partners, executive assistants, chiefs of staff, folks that are responsible for really the organization and the culture at your company as it scales.
- [06:41]
Omar Khan
Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
- [06:48]
Bilal Ajazi
We're at multiple seven figures in ARR and about 20 people across the team.
- [06:55]
Omar Khan
Okay, great. And how many customers or users do you have across the board?
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Bilal Ajazi
We are a massive platform in that we have millions of monthly active users and lifetime users are well into the tens of millions. We're one of the biggest third party apps in the Slack and Teams ecosystems, which are tens of millions DAUs type of products. And, and so we have a massive freemium top of funnel motion and we're really proud to say that we get used every day in thousands and thousands of workspaces.
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Omar Khan
Great. So you founded the business in 2015, I think. Where did the idea come from?
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Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, so it was really a confluence of two things. In my career, I had been working on messaging platforms for some time. The company I was at before as an employee was a consumer messaging company kind of competing with WhatsApp or back in the day there was an app called Viber that people were using for personal communications. And what I'd started to see was that especially in Asia, a lot of work was starting to happen in the messaging format. People were getting used to using it in their personal, personal lives. And work was happening, business transactions, communication was going on on things like WeChat, Kakao Line, those kinds of apps. And so there was a little bit of like, that's like a thing for me. Like it was the kernel of an idea that enterprise chat is going to become a thing was kind of kicking around in the back of my head while I was working at this other company. And, and that combined with the idea of just driving better engagement, better understanding of the ground truth within an organization was ultimately what led to Polly. One of my experiences working at Microsoft was That engineers often had a really good idea of what the health of a project was, but that got lost as you went through different layers of management. And if you went and sent out a form to people, people wouldn't fill that out. It was like, yeah, whatever, another survey. I think you were at Microsoft as well. Microsoft had this gigantic annual survey that they would send out and engagement rates tended to be really low. And so we kind of looked at Slack when it came out and we're like, this is super engaging. People naturally want to use this product. How can we derive those ground truth insights, that feedback from the folks that are actually doing the work within a platform like this? And that was the kernel of an idea that Polly was born from.
- [09:39]
Omar Khan
Great. So you and your co founder Sameer set out to build this product. How did you get started? Did you spend a bunch of time trying to validate it or. Both of you are technical founders, so did you just start building something? What happened next?
- [09:55]
Bilal Ajazi
So we actually initially started with the idea of getting that ground truth going in an email based product and actually landed a couple of customers on that email based product. And we quickly realized like engagement rates weren't what we wanted to see. And so when Slack opened up their, their app directory, actually they hadn't even opened up the app directory we launched on the platform. When they opened up their API, they didn't even know yet that they were going to have an app store. So we were literally one of the first ever Slack applications to be built and we just took that email backend that we built and launched it. I had seen some people on Twitter asking for polls on Slack and so I just kind of responded to them and like, hey, look, we built this thing, can you give it a try? And one of those folks posted on Product Hunt and we ended up being one of the top products on Product Hunt on that day. And that then eventually drove SEO for people searching for apps on Slack or polls on Slack. And until Slack got a proper app store, that SEO is what drove us. And it was like a very painful manual install process back then. Like single click app installs were something that, that came much later in the Slack ecosystem. But it was, you know, I think it's really powerful when there's new products that people really want to adopt. They're willing to go through a lot of pain to extend those products and make those products really work well for them. And that was one of the core insights that drove the early growth loops at Polly.
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Omar Khan
Okay, so the first version of the product was it Just polls. That's the one thing that you focused on or was it doing some other things too?
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Bilal Ajazi
So it was basically asking questions. And like that question can be a one time question, it could be a recurring question. So initially it was just like, hey, how likely is this project to ship on time? And so it was like a status question that you could ask. We then made it general purpose when we launched on Slack that you could ask any question. And, and when you ask a general purpose question, that's just called a poll. And we kind of advertised it as polls in Slack and eventually actually we weren't initially called Poly, we were initially called Subcurrent and we rebranded to Polly because that piece of the product just took over everything else.
- [12:18]
Omar Khan
Interesting. Just explain a little bit about what someone had to do to install that first product in Slack. You know this just as well. As a founder you have this desire to build a great product for it to be beautiful, seamless, one click. But sometimes you just gotta go with what you have. Right? So just what was the reality at that time?
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Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, so at that time the only type of integration that Slack had was something called custom bots. And so you could basically build like a new, a new bot within your ecosystem in Slack and you would have to create a new token that you could call the Slack API with. And the technical founders out there will recognize this. You have to open up a web socket with Slack to actually communicate with them. They didn't even have like an HTTP API at that time. And so you would literally go create, you would log into subcurrent at the time we would tell you go install, go create a custom bot on this page in your Slack workspace. It will give you a token. Copy that token and put it back here. Now on the next step you will have to install a slash command extension. This is how you do that. It will give you a token copy and paste that token back here. And like we had like an 80% completion on that like five step flow. And like I was coming from the mobile app world where like you get an 80% drop off on every single additional step. And so we knew there was something there that like people really wanted this ability and it made sense, right? Like in a channel setting you want to have group decision making, group action. You want to figure out like what do you name that next class that you're building or that next object that you're building. Remember the early audience in Slack were developers and people were really excited to go and extend Slack into this ecosystem burgeoning ecosystem of apps. So we launched this in May of 2015, and then by the end of the year, Slack actually launched their own app directory. And then shortly thereafter, they launched an investment fund for Slack apps. And so I think we were very, very early to the idea, but Slack really embraced it and took it forward to the next level.
- [14:51]
Omar Khan
Okay, so May 2015, you launch. It took you about a year or so to kind of figure things out. And then you sort of hit this viral growth moment. Just tell me about what happened. How quickly did you start growing? And then just explain a little bit about what was that journey to getting there.
- [15:16]
Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, so Product Hunt was really what kicked it off in May 2015. That user that we posted to Twitter on, he posted us on Product Hunt. And then that's how people found us. That led to some SEO around Slack apps, Slack Polls, and we ended up being ranked really highly because there was nothing else out there. And then people went through this really painful five step installation process to get going. But like, we were adding thousands of workspaces a month, we were having trouble keeping our servers up and running. And so it was very clearly like a massive growth moment. And by the end of the year, we had enough users that we were like, hey, we think we can build a premium paid motion on top of this. And so we started building additional features, some of which today still form our paywall. Like things like anonymity were paid features on top of Polly. That holds true today. Things like hiding results were a paid feature on Polly, and that still holds true today. And so I think some of those early ideas really carried forward into the bedrock of the product, if you will. And they really helped us see that it was more than a project and became a company at that point.
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Omar Khan
So wait, so that that clunky onboarding install experience that you described, you were getting like thousands of people doing that every month?
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Bilal Ajazi
Yes, sir. Wow. Yeah, it's just insane demand. I attribute this to like the viral success of Slack. Right? So this is the time when the best in class probably chat product out there was Hipchat. And Slack was just like a generational shift in that way of working. And so people were just hungry to make Slack their own, customize it, extend it, and we were right there to help them do that. And to this day, we're one of the biggest apps in the Slack ecosystem.
- [17:21]
Omar Khan
So let's talk about monetization. So you're getting this growth. There's clearly demand if people are willing to jump through all those hoops to install your product. How did you then figure out the monetization? So was the plan always okay, we're going to have a freemium play here and then we're going to figure out what the premium version of this looks like?
- [17:43]
Bilal Ajazi
Absolutely. That has always been the plan. It's something that we as technical founders are very suited to. We had experience building viral products. So the app I was at, the app I was working at before Polly, we had built this viral mobile messaging app, got to 40 million active users of that product again through an app store play. And so it really for us, we always knew that there was going to be a free component, a paid component and eventually an enterprise component. And that largely has held true to Bali in its present day form as well.
- [18:24]
Omar Khan
Let's talk about how did you get those first paying customers?
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Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, so it was actually like once you have a large user base and we were already at like by the end of 2015, tens of thousands of active monthly users, then we just started, we started putting out experiments for monetization and directly within the product, we didn't really like go out and push for it. One of the things that I would say was most successful and I would say like if you're early in your journey as a founder, like less than your first million of ARR, we have always at Poly and this is also still true today. If you sign up for the product, you can book a demo or you'll get an email from somebody at Poly and just say like, hey, can you have any product feedback for us? And those hooks really enabled us to talk to customers and just understand what they were looking for, what use cases they were trying to solve for, and how we could then sequence our product bets to enable better monetization of the product and actually drive a conversion to paid. And so very quickly things like multi question surveys, anonymity, private results became really, really important. You have to remember our initial email based product was asking the same question over and over again. So we had recurrence from the get go as as not just a paid bet, but also as something that drove retention because it just drove a frequency of use that you wouldn't see otherwise. And so yeah, I mean we just kind of kept talking to customers, figuring out which features were most interesting and then building those out. And then there was a matter of just kind of figuring out the price point and going from there. That was something that we had to iterate on a ton because the way that Slack apps work is that once you install a bot, as they were called back then, they're called apps today, but bots are available for everybody in the workspace. And so there's like this piece that you're giving value to everybody in the workspace because one person installs it, everybody gets access to it. How do you charge? Do you charge for the entire workspace? Do you charge for the individual creator? That's always been a tension at Poly because a lot of our free usage kind of comes from those users who are on the margins of Poly. And I think that is one of the pitfalls of building a very horizontal product is like you have to identify who is your user and who is your buyer. Those are very different things in our world. And I think a lot of horizontal freemium products, you're going to run into those challenges. And I think getting crisp and clear on that upfront is going to help you in building the right things and having the right go to market Motion.
- [21:15]
Omar Khan
What did you try first with pricing?
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Bilal Ajazi
We tried initially creator based pricing and actually our very first customer was a guy running a fantasy football league in his company on Slack. And so he would put out a poly every week to get the picks from his teammates. And so it was really interesting. I mean it was, I think it was like maybe $8 a month or something. Today our lowest plan starts at $12 a month. So it's not like too different than where we've landed landed today. But yeah, it was like a product manager at some company that is now defunct, but he was just running his fantasy football league and actually ironically, he loved the product so much that he was. He started asking us if we.
- [22:08]
Omar Khan
Were.
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Bilal Ajazi
Available to like for his HR team to use. And so that ended up being one of those first conversations that we had with HR folks who end up becoming a core part of our buyer Persona now.
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Omar Khan
Okay, and how long did you stick with that creator pricing?
- [22:27]
Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, so creator pricing in some form or the other has been persistent Norm at Polly, um, we have had periods where we've only done team wide pricing. Um, but we've very quickly always moved away from it because there's just certain types of free usage that when you try to monetize it ends up driving churn really high. And you know, that's just a suboptimal business outcome for everybody because you don't want people to pay for a product that, that they ultimately feel like they only needed temporarily or didn't need at all. And I think we always want to have revenue that we know is going to be sticky and that is going to grow with us over time, like I think that's something that I always advise founders that are earlier in the journey is like you want to stay really focused on retention because ultimately that's what drives the entire business model in SaaS.
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Omar Khan
So creative pricing is basically saying, you know, let's say one person can create these polls, everybody else can just answer them. If you do sort of workspace type pricing, or it could be you pay one fee for the whole workspace and maybe they can decide how many creators they want to have in there and so on. And it sounds like you're saying there was no way to do like per user, per seat type pricing would slack.
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Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, creator pricing is essentially a seat based pricing. Right? Because I'm buying a seat for like people that are creating polys. And so you can buy multiple seats, you can buy a single seat. So that would essentially, that would be seat based pricing. We have an, on our enterprise tier, a model that works really well is like you don't really want to administer like, hey, Bob has a seat this month and maybe some like Jill has a use case next month. And I don't want to like administer all of these seats. And so on our enterprise tier, typically we just charge you based on your monthly active users across the entire product creators and responders. And that's ultimately, it makes it really easy to administer and manage. And as a horizontal product, it makes sense from an administrator perspective as well because you don't have to worry about, okay, like I need to know who's going to use the product ahead of time. It can organically be adopted similar to the way that you don't gate who uses Slack within your company.
- [24:51]
Omar Khan
Now when you and I were talking earlier, you mentioned that free to paid conversion has been a challenge for you guys. Tell me about what that was like in that first year or so because you've got this massive user base. But how well were you converting people people into these paid plans?
- [25:13]
Bilal Ajazi
Even today, like we have a lot more free users than paid users. I think that's true of most premium products anyways. But like it really came down to who you were trying to monetize. If you were trying to monetize like, you know, somebody who's trying to figure out what they want to name their next class or, you know, maybe where they want to go for lunch, that's just like not going to be an effective monetization strategy. And I think that was like a key. Early learning for us is that not every creator is meant to be monetized. A lot of These are, they're like pollinators for us, right? They help bring the app into the organization. And then you have to find those flowers, you have to find those users that really have a day to day need for something like poly. Like for example, a really common use case for us is like, I have a company, all hands and I just spent 150 man hours on this meeting. Was it actually an effective use of time? I need to figure that out. And I can just send out a Polly, have reminders, be automatically configured, get open structured feedback, get quantitative feedback on how that use of time went and do it in like 30 seconds after the meeting. And so those types of use cases then started really standing out. And then now you're like, okay, who actually runs those types of events? Who runs the sales kickoffs? Who runs the all hands? And you're really like hunting for those users to show them the value of product.
- [26:48]
Omar Khan
How did you decide initially? You mentioned a few things that you introduce as paid offerings. How did you decide what you were going to put behind a paywall, what you were going to make free? This is a constant struggle that many founders face with freemium is you don't want to have such a crappy freemium plan that people don't get any value out of it, but you also don't want to give them so much that they're like never going to upgrade. Well, there will always be lots of people who never will, but the people who are your ICP should upgrade.
- [27:27]
Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean I think, I think it's deeply understanding your use cases. This is what again makes horizontal so hard is that you have so many use cases to sift through that you have to like be like, okay, this use case is not monetizable. This use case is monetizable. And how do we drive more of the latter? And you don't want, you don't, you don't not want the former, but you just view that as legion. And I think really getting crisp on that. The only way to do this, talk to a lot of customers that are willing to pay. And that's where those like hooks within the product where like after you pay you always book, you can book a demo or you have like an outreach email to provide product feedback. It helps you get on those calls where you can discover those use cases and then tailor the product in that direction. And so we just found over time that like really staying focused on these really expensive core events, core rituals that you're running as a company and getting attached to those rituals is what drives paid conversion and sticky paid conversion over time. And so that's what we've really focused on. So like for example, late last year we launched our Google Slides integration and earlier this year our PowerPoint integration that allows you to embed Polly directly within the event. So now you're not just using Polly for post event feedback, you're actually using Polly within the event to run an icebreaker to make sure that you're assessing what's actually happening in the content slide that has happened before the Polly slide, and to do interactive Q and A that synchronizes really easily across your slack or teams into your slide deck. And so it was really kind of identifying what vertical is going to be the most efficient for us and then focusing our product development efforts on that.
- [29:11]
Omar Khan
So in theory that sounds great, but if you've got a massive user base, you've got, it's horizontal. How did you figure that out? I mean, now that you explain it and you look back, it sort of makes sense when you're in the middle.
- [29:30]
Bilal Ajazi
Of all of that so hard.
- [29:33]
Omar Khan
What did you do?
- [29:34]
Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, so like I can, I can tell you lots of things that we tried to do and that didn't work. So there's really two plays at that point. Yeah, there's really two plays at that point. Right. If you have a mass market horizontal product, you either need to build a second mass market horizontal product that is paid adjacent to your free one. Right. And this is like very standard open source play.
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Omar Khan
Right.
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Bilal Ajazi
Like if I have like a big open source project, let's say like MongoDB, right. I'm going to offer MongoDB free, but if I want to host MongoDB, I have to pay for it. Because now like, you know, I'm getting all these professional services and whatnot. In our case, our freemium product is already hosted. We're giving it to you for free already, like running the servers and everything. And so what we start, what we tried to build is like, okay, you have these one off polls for free, but if you want to do automation on them, you want to, you need to be able to build that and build, you need to be able to pay for that. And so like, hey, you can automate polys through like a life cycle of a key scenario. So like, for example, one of our customers was like, hey, I have this really big influx of customer support agents every month because, you know, our product or sorry, every tax season. So there was somebody who sold services during tax season. And so every tax season we have like this big influx of customer support agents and I want to understand how the escalation is going from T1 to T2. Are people actually getting the information that they need in that handoff? I want to send a Polly every time a ticket closes and I want to be able to do that in an automated, scalable fashion. And that's something that's really, really important to our business. We're like, great, this is fantastic. We have heard other customers who are like, I have a service desk and I want to see how effective that service desk is. I want to get CSAT on an ongoing basis. Let's build a product for that. So we built a product for that where you can automate those types of things via an API, send out a poly, and we got real paying customers for it. Five figure deals being done to go build this. And we called it Poly Workflows. Six months later, Slack came out with what was called Slack Workflow Builder. It was just like a very. They acquired a company called Missions and they built a workflow builder. And so it didn't do quite what Poly Workflows did, but it did stall our adoption of Poly Workflows to some degree because it just confused the market. And I think that's one of the risks of always playing on a platform, is that you don't know exactly where the platform is going to go and what they're going to build. You know, Slack's an investor and a great partner and we love working with them, but it's always a risk when you're working with a big partner that they may end up choosing to do something that is very similar to what you're up to.
- [32:35]
Omar Khan
So how much time do you spend looking at these platforms and what they're doing in being able to decide what features you're going to build, where you're going to invest?
- [32:47]
Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important. We try to maintain really good relationships with all of our partners, go to their events, have our points of contact there. You know, just to give you an example, like when Satya Nadella talks about the teams, platform and ecosystem, Polly is usually one of the apps he mentions alongside companies like Atlassian and ServiceNow, just in terms of like the, the breadth and scale of adoption that we've brought to the platform. But at the same time, you know, they also have to keep growing their platforms and they can sometimes extend into areas that are overlapping. Microsoft Forms was around even before Teams, and then, you know, well, after teams, Microsoft Forms extended into teams and so there's always this kind of coopetition that happens there. Similar to what again, like let's take MongoDB for example. One of their biggest competitors is like hosting MongoDB on a hyperscale or like AWS. They in fact had like a big licensing fight on it. So I think at any scale you're going to run into platforms, whether it's an ad platform, whether it's an app platform, whether it's, you know, Google changing things on your SEO. There are just places that you need to have really great cooperation with the larger partners in your ecosystem, whether it's a product or channel partnership. And I don't think we're too different from that in terms of how other companies monitor what's going on in their ad ecosystem.
- [34:12]
Omar Khan
For example, you know, a lot of founders who build on top of platforms often have this fear that they're going to wake up one day and it's not just going to be the platform has built the feature that your team was spending the last three months building. They're going to build the whole product as a feature into the platform. Is that something that keeps you up at night?
- [34:39]
Bilal Ajazi
No, not really. And the reason is a lot of the big platforms have a lot of different priorities that they need to manage and just kind of staying really focused on a specific use case and sticking with it over time, their bottom line and their internal priorities are just going to be very different. Let's take Microsoft as an example, right? Like Microsoft for a time was really interested in HR. They acquired a company called Ally to build OKRs into their Viva platform. And then like last year they announced they're sunsetting it because that just isn't a priority anymore with everything that's focused on AI. Rightly so. Right. Like that's, that's like the right thing to do for Microsoft. We've had our instances of that as well where Microsoft will build like they for the longest time held off on building a native polling app in Slack in teams, but then ultimately did build one because they felt like too many teams users were not installing third party apps, they were only installing first party apps. So they built a first party version. But even to this day we have a much better app rating than the first party Microsoft polls product. And it's because like, you know, a team of dedicated attention to continue to iterate on the product is going to beat out a one time effort to plug a gap. And I think we're seeing that in the AI world as well. Things like cursor came out and stole an entire category from under GitHub's nose. And once you get big enough and people are ingrained enough with you and you become a habitual product, I think it gives you a lot of opportunities to keep growing. I think that's the real key thing is that you have to keep innovating, you have to keep moving, keep your nose to the grindstone and keep building and good things will happen from there.
- [36:30]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I mean in many ways it's similar sort of playbook with, you know, we talked about David Shim, we both know him and what he's doing with Read AI. If you were, if you were kind of all in and just doing something for Slack, that might be a much higher risk thing. But when you get into a place where you're like, no, we are everywhere. We're on Zoom, we're on Google Slides, we're on teams, I think it manages the risks a little bit better.
- [37:09]
Bilal Ajazi
I think every platform company needs to, every company that's building on a platform ultimately needs to become a platform itself. And so it's like how do you become attached not to polls in Slack but to Poly as a company and to the product of Polly that is working across the different apps that you're using for your day to day productivity. And where you fail to do that is you expose yourself to risk. Absolutely. But you know, this was true whether it was Zynga on Facebook a decade ago or like you know what Polly or Reed are trying to do today.
- [37:43]
Omar Khan
Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about like we talked about like the, the free users, the premium and then sort of this enterprise piece. You and Samir, both technical co founders in that type of situation you might be getting advice like you should have a business sales type co founder as well and so on. And the ideal thing for a technical co founder in many ways is I just build a product, people find it, they pay for it and I never have to talk to any customers. Right. But, but unfortunately it, it's, it doesn't quite work like that most of the time.
- [38:29]
Bilal Ajazi
No, no, absolutely not. No, I mean actually very, very quickly what we, what we realized is that there is going to be a sales component to our product as well. And the reason for that is that when you are administering an app at a workspace wide level, it requires certain degree of controls and oversight that's required. Right. Like I have to appro. Sure. It's not exfiltrating data from my Slack instance or you have corporate sensitive secrets in there. You need to make sure that you're doing right by your users. And you also want to make sure that you're enabling the right tools for your users in a day to day basis. And so that really quickly became a piece of our motion is how do you sell Polygon at a workspace level? Because it really should be like a birthright tool because everybody has a need for it, whether you're trying to figure out how your project's going all the way up to how your all hands was. And so absolutely one of the pieces of advice I always have founders is you are selling. Always. You have to sell the vision of your company to your customers, to your investors, to your co founders, to your employees. And you have to do it yourself. It's not something that somebody comes in and sprinkles some sales fairy dust on the product. You have to be able to articulate that vision and walk the customer through that journey and good things will happen from that. And so if you don't enjoy talking to customers, you have to figure out a way to enjoy it, because that is your job.
- [40:08]
Omar Khan
And so as a technical founder who started going out and selling, what was one thing you wish you had learned faster?
- [40:20]
Bilal Ajazi
One thing that I wish I had always done is like have, have a clear understanding of who the buyer is. Like that was something that horizontal, especially as a horizontal product. And how we came up, we early on had this notion that every, every user of Polly should become a paying user. And I think it was just like a misguided notion that ultimately led to a lot of mistakes downstream. And so just like very crisply being able to articulate who the buyer is, it sounds so trite and like trivial, but actually is fundamental because especially in these kinds of like massively adopted horizontal products, you have a lot of users who are just never going to pay. And that's probably okay.
- [41:07]
Omar Khan
Just go back to the getting to the buyer. So in many ways the way I think about this is you have Polly, you make that kind of broad distribution for free. People come across it, they start using it, whether it's for some business thing or it's whether it's like fantasy football or whatever they want to do. And the bet you're making is that at some point this product is going to get used by more than one person in a company and eventually in front of a buyer who is going to want to pay for it for something more valuable. But in many cases, founders aren't very good at figuring out that virality, that viral component on this. And so for you Guys, was it like, just, okay, we'll get it out there and we just hope that, you know, the right people find it, or were there some deliberate, intentional things you did in the product to help drive the variety?
- [42:14]
Bilal Ajazi
So I'm a huge believer in lifecycle marketing for that kind of a circumstance. So, like kind of finding the right users within an organization and then getting them into email flows. So that's one of the good things with Polly is that because you are installed at a workspace level, like there's, there's good ways to, to reach the right users. And I think, you know, things like email are a great channel for that and a known channel. We had this incredible virality built into the product and still do to this day, which is it's inherently a social product. Right. Like, I am going to create a poly and their poly is useless if I don't send it to anybody. Right. And so some percentage of creators will always come from your responders. And that was always what drove that viral adoption loop at Polly is like, I create a Polly, I'll send it to five people. Historically, our rate has been around 12% of responders will eventually become creators, and then they maybe send it to a larger group, and then that larger group, 12% now become a creator, and so on and so on and so on. And so that really drove that adoption. And that means that we did eventually get seen by the right users and then adopted for the right use cases. But we also did things like lifecycle marketing to drive that adoption curve faster at the organizations that we landed in.
- [43:46]
Omar Khan
Okay, so on the one hand, it's like, let's just do a really good job at making the product easy to use, onboarding, getting to that moment where they can send out that first poll or survey as quickly as possible. The better you do that, the more people in the organization are going to see Polly. But how do you. You mentioned something about email flows and things like getting the right people there. How do you connect the dots and find those people and get them onto an email list?
- [44:19]
Bilal Ajazi
So, for example, once you respond to a Polly for the first time, we'll get you to sign up to learn more about the product. And then you're essentially doing these responder to creator loops to drive adoption. And so you're always looking for what is the hook to get people from point A to point B to point C. And, and if you have a really clear buyer's journey in your, in your head, then you'll have a really clear user journey that matches that. And you're eventually leading the users to, to, to that, to that buying point. And that's, I think it's a hard one lesson and it's very different for every company and every motion. It was particularly difficult for us because of how horizontal and how widely adopted the product was because there's just a lot of data to sift through and a lot of users to talk to, to kind of get to the point where we had repeatability around that.
- [45:15]
Omar Khan
Okay, cool. Before we wrap up and get onto the lightning round, I want to pick your brain and give. If someone is listening to this and they're saying, sounds great, I want to go and build something on top of a platform, an existing ecosystem, tons of benefits. From what I've seen Bilal do with Poly, I'm going to do the same thing and inevitably they're going to end up with, if they are successful, a horizontal user base.
- [45:46]
Bilal Ajazi
Not necessarily. Not necessarily. So on that point you can build a very vertical product on a horizontal platform. So, you know, let's take an example like what we built a general purpose feedback, engagement polling solution to start with. But if you like really focused on like, hey, my job is to do ITC SAP on Slack, then you have very, very vertical product on a horizontal platform. You're not meant to be for everybody. And so I don't, I don't. I think the horizontal and vertical aspect of it are actually independent of building on the platform aspect of it. Those are two separate things and I think building on platforms is fantastic. My one piece of candid takeaway advice would be don't get high on the supply of building on the platform. Remember, the goal is always to bring people back to your platform and make sure that people understand that this app that they're using here is part of an entire network and family of apps you're using. You know, Poly or Read or Loom or these types of products. You're not just using it within Slack or just using it within Atlassian Jira or whatever the case might be. And then the second thing that I would say is that if you're horizontal, horizontal can be great for again, things like Read and Loom are great examples of companies that have done this well alongside us. Um, but then you have to get really specific about being able to talk to specific verticals and make sure that you know who is getting what benefit and how you're going to drive the go to market motion for those specific users. Ultimately people buy the product and you have to be able to talk to those people.
- [47:37]
Omar Khan
I'M curious, if you were starting over today, would you still take the same approach and say overall, we're going to have this horizontal product and then we'll figure out where to focus? Or would you take like that it example and say it'd be smarter if we picked a vertical, one vertical at a time, just because it's going to help us just differentiate niche down, all of that stuff. I'm just curious, which way would you go if you were starting over?
- [48:13]
Bilal Ajazi
I mean, I'm very grateful for the journey that we've had. I think it's. I don't think there's a right answer. It depends on who you are as a founder, what unique advantages you have, what skills you have and how you're going to try to play. What I will say is that the traditional SaaS playbook is probably easier in a verticalized category just because you know exactly who you're selling to and what the value prop will be for that individual user. It's a lot harder and a lot messier from horizontal products and it requires a lot more rigor to be able to get to true scale there. But I don't think there's a right way. I think there's fantastic companies that have been built in both ways. There's companies that are just entire public companies built like Viva, that's CRM for pharmaceuticals. That is what we do. And I think it can be a fantastic way to build a company as well. Just I don't particularly think that there's something inherently better about sales. LED versus plg, for example. There are just different ways of building companies and of building products, and I think they're both equally valid. It just depends on who you are as a founder and what you're bringing to the table.
- [49:28]
Omar Khan
I would probably guess most people would never have to deal with that problem in the sense that we built this product and it just took off. We had this inflection point and, you know, it's doing really well horizontally. And now we've got this problem to figure out where we focus.
- [49:45]
Bilal Ajazi
No, absolutely. Whatever leads you to users using your product. Right. Like, I'm always reminded of that Paul Graham thing, which is just like, build something people want. Right? That's like, that's like the starting point. And I think that's. It's been so true at Polly, right? Like, build something people want and that will lead you to water has like always been one of the driving kind of principles at Polly. And we're, we continue to be focused on that. The other thing I'LL say is talk to your users as much as possible to help you drive and figure out what it is that they actually want.
- [50:20]
Omar Khan
Cool.
- [50:21]
Bilal Ajazi
Good advice.
- [50:21]
Omar Khan
Okay, let's wrap up and get onto the Lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Okay, what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [50:34]
Bilal Ajazi
There's a great polygram essay that's called Just Don't Die and I think that's fantastic business advice. There were so many points in the Poly journey where we were just like, is this actually a thing? Like, is this a company or a project? We built that email based product initially and we had like two paying customers and we're just like, well, somebody paid for it, so there's something here. Let's keep going. And then we built the Slack thing and we started getting all these free users and we're like, well, we don't know what people are gonna pay for, but like, there's clearly something here. Let's keep going. I'm a huge believer in that. Sometimes the only thing that you need to do is just not die to keep figuring out ways to keep thriving.
- [51:19]
Omar Khan
Just be a cockroach, right?
- [51:20]
Bilal Ajazi
Just be a cockroach. I think that's so important. People talk about the resilience that you need as a founder. Part of it is that you just know that this thing is working and this is how it's going to work and you make your way through, right, Slack, kind of building your flagship product. It was like a moment where I remember we all looked each other on the team and like, what do we do now? Let's keep building.
- [51:48]
Omar Khan
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [51:51]
Bilal Ajazi
A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. And the reason for that is that I always like to think of what your place in the world is. And one of the reasons that I do what I do, what I love, and I love this act of company building, is that it's kind of your ability to make a dent in the universe, right? Like you build something that is used by millions of people, it's just satisfying in and of itself of just kind of proving some impact in the world. And I like A Brief History of Nearly Everything because it kind of gives you this centering reminder of what it actually means to exist in the world and the universe and then the role that you might have to play with how you use your life to actually make a dent in that universe.
- [52:40]
Omar Khan
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [52:45]
Bilal Ajazi
I mean, I have to go with the resilience that is the corollary to just don't die, um, is like good things will happen if you keep figuring out ways to not just survive, but thrive. And a lot of times the path isn't obvious, but things like positive things happen as you continue to build things that people want.
- [53:09]
Omar Khan
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [53:13]
Bilal Ajazi
I do a weekly hour of reflection and writing down what's the most important thing that I need to accomplish in that week going forward. And that's the piece of writing that I refer back to every week, every day during that week. And I think it's the centering ritual that drives my entire week. And it builds on itself week over week, month over month, year over year.
- [53:39]
Omar Khan
I like it. What's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [53:44]
Bilal Ajazi
So I have this idea that personal productivity really is very personal. Everybody's psychology is very different. And so like general purpose to do apps or note taking apps don't work. I think like with the era of like customizable software with AI, this is actually like a really interesting prospect to uncover because like some people are visual thinkers, some people are hyper organized, some people prefer clutter or like, maybe not clutter but like more open space thinking. And I think like the standard to do list app is not the best productivity tool for everybody. And so what that means, I think it's like something that morphs into your way of working based on how you respond to the setup of your week or your month or your year.
- [54:34]
Omar Khan
Cool. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [54:38]
Bilal Ajazi
I lived in five different cities before I was 20. We moved around a fair bit as in my childhood. And I think it, it really helped me have a global perspective and think about how I could best use my life to not just kind of make this little niche of an area that I live in better, but the whole world better.
- [55:02]
Omar Khan
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [55:05]
Bilal Ajazi
So you can see I have a bunch of Legos behind me. So I have young kids and just kind of inculcating that sense of curiosity in them, that sense of wonder. I think that's been a big part of what's driven me as a founder and I think it's going to be super important for the coming age of AI and yeah. So just again, figuring out ways to drive that forward in the people around me is super critical to me.
- [55:32]
Omar Khan
Love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your lessons of building this business and some of the ups and downs. If people want to check out Polly, they can go to Polly. That's P O L L Y A I. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [55:51]
Bilal Ajazi
Yeah, I'm Bilal at Polly AI.
- [55:53]
Omar Khan
Thanks man. It's been a pleasure. I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [55:56]
Bilal Ajazi
Appreciate that. Thank you omer.
- [55:58]
Omar Khan
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