Your first users will show you the real product

Every time we tested these more bespoke ideas, people wanted to use it for all this other stuff because it's just a very, very generically powerful technology.

There is nothing broken about a 35 message one-on-one email conversation. It's totally fine. It's a series of letters back and forth. As soon as you add one more person to that, it gets a lot messier.

For me, it's a person who is just on the cusp of taking the action you want to take... I would try to find a country where we had a lot of growth, but for some reason our conversion rates were terrible. So we had a lot of traffic, but conversion rates were terrible. And I was like, okay, that's the marginal user. This is the person who is just on the cusp of coming in, wants to come in as you can see by the traffic, but we can't get them in.

And dbt Labs started as Fishtown Analytics, a consulting firm. So they worked really, really closely and hands-on with all of their consulting partners to get the pain point and really solve firsthand challenges that they saw. I think that combination of being at the right place at the right time and also getting to work really closely with people's day-to-day problems created a really special experience.

Whenever they encountered paper cuts or friction or the workflow was taking longer than they expected, they would build that into dbt. And that really matured the experience of the product because the people who were building it, the founders were also day-to-day working with these customers or clients that had pain points.