Chris Kim: Hello and welcome to the FoundersList podcast, the official podcast of FoundersList.com. I am your host, Christopher Kim, and I'm here today with Amber Christian, the founder of Wonderly Software Solutions.  Amber, welcome to the show.

Amber Christian: Thank you so much for having me today, Chris,

Chris Kim: It's a pleasure to have you here! So why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself before we launch into this.

Amber Christian: Absolutely. So as you said, I'm Amber Christian. I'm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have a 20 year career in technology. So I actually came straight out of college and went straight into tech and have been there ever since.

I spent the bulk of my early career working for large corporations. I worked on enterprise resource planning systems, SAP. I'm sure plenty of your audience will know who they are as they're one of the largest software companies in the world. And then I made a choice to start building software.

Somewhere along the road I took a detour and I spent a couple of years getting our product built, Bella Scena, and we'll dive more into what that looked like and what that process was like.

Chris Kim: What was it that sparked off the decision to go from software sales to founding a software company?

Amber Christian: So let me ask you this, Chris, have you ever sat in a meeting where you thought, Oh, this could be done better ?

Chris Kim: only about every other day.

Amber Christian: Right. Or thought, Oh, I wonder how much money I wasted because this wasn't organized? Or, boy, why do some people not ever talk in our meetings? Or all these other things that kind of occur over your career as you are sitting in meeting after meeting, after meeting.

Well, I worked with large companies for so many years, and so I knew how much it costs when our meetings weren't productive or when we would have the same topic of conversation week after week after week and things wouldn't move. And I just hit a point in my career where I decided it was finally time to do something about it because I couldn't find any products at that time on the market that did anything to help make meetings run more effectively.

Chris Kim: You were telling me as we were  talking before the show -  your development process  was a little bit different  than your standard, build the MVP and iterate rapidly.  Can you tell me how you went about developing ?

Amber Christian: Yes. So Bella was a little different in that she was built with human centered design.

And when you say, wait a second, she? Yes, my software's a girl and I tell people that proudly that I consider her a girl. She's female. So what was unique about the process? So in a lot of cases, a startup founder or someone will, we don't want to share the idea with anybody. Somebody might steal it. So I'm going to build it in my basement.

I'm going to spend my year, a year and a half building it. I'm not going to tell anybody and I'm going to present it to the world and go here, here, Chris. Use my thing. And you'd be like, Whoa, I didn't even ask for that thing. I don't know if I want that thing. well, can we be up? Try that thing. And then you go, well, this thing doesn't do what I would want it to do.

And so then you say, okay, well how should I change it? And you start going through that process then of changing and trying to figure out what you should add, what you should take away. And it's very disruptive to the customer base, right? It's the first people that try it as the product is changing and trying to figure out what it's going to be.

Bella was different in, I said, okay, what if I talked to prospective customers or people that recognized they had challenges with meetings? What if I talked with them throughout the process of building the product so that I would understand what the most critical problems were so that I was solving those problems as opposed to building it myself and then asking them to look at it.

It's a very different, a lot more time is spent in design and iterating. It actually is more cost effective for your development build costs as well, because you don't write the code until you're much further down the path of understanding the problem you're going to solve.

Chris Kim: So  you're getting all this information from your target user -  I imagine you were overwhelmed with information, was that the case?

Amber Christian: Yes and no. So early on before I had really figured out how deeply I wanted customers involved in the process, I had built an initial little MVP.

And showed some people that. And then I had gotten this enormous list of feedback and I said, there's no way to get a product to market like this. And I went back to the drawing board and used surveys to structure the research, and that was the key to not getting overwhelmed. So once you understand kind of the core problem that you're going after, one of the really interesting things you can do is say, 'okay, well how do I understand more information about that problem?'

And so you design surveys and a structured set of questions. So then what happens is when you go through these interviews and you ask the structured set of questions, you have a pool of answers to choose from. So you can start to see patterns in the data. So what you don't want to do is say, here's my thing.

Give me all the feedback. Cause yeah, you're going to be swimming.

Chris Kim:  I want to just pause to highlight what you said there, because from my own sales and marketing perspective, structured questions are extremely important to get the kinds of answers that you want.

  People tend to just give you what you want to hear. If you say, 'hey, give me feedback'.  Structured questions if you don't know how to do this out there, if you're listening , talk with somebody in sales and marketing or product development that understands  what questions to ask

Amber Christian: and how to ask them.

That's the other really important thing because as founders, we love our idea, right? We think our ideas great, everybody's going to want our idea or want to use our idea, but we need to ask the questions in an open-ended and unbiased way to make sure that we're not painting the poor interviewee into a corner right with the answer.

So it's really about open ended questions that allow them to give you context. The other reason you do this is later, Chris, when you go to market your product, is that  you have all kinds of good stories to use because these are the types of problems you know you solve. Right? So it made it really easy as we got further down the line to be able to talk about different scenarios, different situations, what we learned from research.

So it brought more credibility to our conversations with people because they could tell that really clearly. We didn't just come up with this ourselves. It was really grounded in research and structured answers from a variety of people, not just my buddies that would give me happy answers. But a lot of times I'm more further a field in the network. Second and third degree connections as well will give you some of the best possible feedback you can get. Right?

Chris Kim: And that's also a very valuable insight here. So you've talked a little bit about what you've done to make it easier to build out your product, but what I was wondering, and I've seen in 20 plus years of looking at it, pretty much zero products come to market without some frustrations  and delays and overruns and things like that. What were some of your frustrations when you were building out Bella Scena?

Amber Christian: Well, we had a running joke, so, so Bella, Scena helps you create unmissable meetings through meetings as a process technology.

So we would constantly joke about, well wouldn't it be really nice if we had some meeting management application to manage our own meetings.  It was a running gag. And that's a joke you can always make with me. But for me, I think the biggest frustration was I wanted everything to move faster.

And there's a life cycle to it. It ultimately ended up taking us two years to get to the market we had to build and in some cases we had to rip out and rebuild because some things we tried didn't really work right. And we had different skill sets of people. We had to swap some people in and swap some people out as we go.

And that's more normal than what anybody ever really talks about. Taking a full two years to get to market was nothing I ever thought would actually happen. I thought it would take six months and look back and make it now take your timeline and double it. Minimum.

Chris Kim: everything with software development is always overly aggressively plan.

But you know if you pick six months and it took two years. The fact is if you said, Hey, we're going to have this in a year, it might've taken you three so...

Amber Christian: It's exactly right and there there's just a life cycle to it. I'll tell you one piece of the process why it probably will take you longer than you expect,  trademarks.

If you actually go to trademark your names, I bet you the process will take you a year that you usually get the trademarks. And this is something nobody talks about from the time you searched for them. Figure out they're available and then go through all the steps of the process is actually a year in before my first trademarks were issued on, on the names.

So it was a long process to get through that as well. So there's reasons it just takes a while. So I think part of it is making sure you balance the pacing you're going at because you can't go all out all the time. That'll burn you out because the road will be longer than you expect.

Chris Kim:  You mentioned earlier to me that your, company was bootstrapped and still is.

Walk me through your decision to remain bootstrapped or was it a decision or was it just something that happened along the way?

Amber Christian: So at the time that I was building Bella, I was doing full time consulting work and building Bella on the side, and so I had enough consulting revenue to be able to afford to bootstrap.

At that point in time. I also knew I was based in the Midwest, which, well, actually not just the Midwest. Everywhere has gotten significantly more conservative about writing checks for companies that don't have anything written. You know, 10 years ago you might've been able to get money off a concept deck, you have to be a lot further now in, in most cases, and sure there will be anomalies to it, but it's a lot harder to fundraise without the product and without some traction and really the place we'd seen things go to.

And I, and I knew that without an actual product in the market and some traction, fundraising would be very difficult. I also, if we can be really practical, I'm a female. Tech led company. I also know that means it's harder for me to fundraise as well. It's just the reality. Look at the statistics. I'm not making any political statements.

Just go look at the numbers.

Chris Kim: And

Amber Christian: I

Chris Kim: I think it's important that we highlight that there are certain challenges and certain realities, and despite. How we want the world to work. we have to work around it and still get things done. So I think that was a good point that you made, right?

Amber Christian: yep. And so I knew, I'm like okay Amber, you got the consulting revenue and you spent all these years building up a great reputation in the SAP industry.

And I still do some part time consulting cause people will still call me and say, Hey, will you do this thing for me? So I mean I still, that's fine cause that just lets me keep bootstrapping and building with it. So even though Bella takes up most of my time, you know, that's the practical reality when you've had dual careers.

And that's in fact actually something that encourage a lot of people to do. If you jump off the cliff and quit everything and go straight into it, Murphy moves into your spare bedroom. Like just things go wrong, right? And you're like, ah. Or because things take longer, it puts financial pressures on you, and then you have to make decisions not maybe not quite the way you would have liked to otherwise.

So I would encourage people to say, you know, if you can keep some side or part time thing, really think about that. Because it can help you weather the storms and can give you more stamina. You might have to balance it out a little bit, but that's actually something I recommend, and very few people talked about that when I started.

You know, a lot of the advice I heard as well, if you haven't quit everything, you're not all in. And I was like. Wait a second.

Chris Kim:  We're going to have  a very  important debate around that, on this podcast for sure. Because I'm hearing it  from all sides, probably like you did, where , a lot of them will say, Hey, you have to jump right in.

You've got to have no parachute. You gotta  just go in there  and work at it and make it so that this matters more than anything else. And  all that and the grind.. And then there's your perspective, which. It was like, Hey, if I could provide my own runway and  bootstrap and not have to, give up any control to investors, right away, then, then more's the better.

So it's good to hear, your side  and  you put it so well that, I think it'd be very valuable for our listeners.

Amber Christian: Yeah. The other component to it as well is. You know, who knows? Maybe I will raise someday. I don't know. I've never taken that fully off the table. If the time's right, the circumstances right.

Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. I don't know. At this point it's still pretty early in the game, right. I just know I've been able to get this far and been able to do it, and that worked for me because the other side of it too is the moment you take investor money. Now there's other things that come along with that, and if you want to go do a fundraise, be prepared for that to be your life.

That's the other thing that, you know, fundraisers take a while and they may take you away from what you're working on, on your product as well. So I'm not saying don't do it. Just be aware of how you need to plan it out and what you'll need to do so that you have a good understanding of what it might take in order to do it

Chris Kim: Yeah, that's a very good point, especially since it goes along with the reality that -  depending on your personality type -  being rejected by 60  investors before you get a 'yes ' could really take a kind of a psychological toll. Whereas,  if you're actually have some customers and then you're doing something and going along, then you could kind of take that more in stride.

Amber Christian: Right? You can weather the storm a little bit better when the, like when you're like, okay, I know I've got some people over here that actually like this, if they're paying for it. And 

Chris Kim: So let's  move on to  your customers here. How did you find your first customers?  Walk me through your process of who you were going to approach first and your customer acquisition journey .

Amber Christian: So my initial customers, and we have to step back a little bit and think about how Bella was designed and how I originally planned to go to market. So the problem of planning effective meetings exists at many levels. It exists for people inside of companies.

Inside of large corporations, small companies, it exists for consultants, people that are working in the gig economy because they have to schedule things with people, you know? So it existed at many different levels and for a lot of different people. One of the things that I also knew, because I came from a B2B background and worked in the consulting industry before, I knew that a typical sales cycle for a big B2B deal can often be eight to 12 months.

It can be even longer. I'm not saying it won't happen shorter. Okay. But the BTB horizons tend to take longer. You have to get into budget cycles. You have to get into making sure you have all the right integrations so it fits in their processes. There's just a lot more components to that. So I started with what  looks and feels more like a B to C approach.

It was really a B to independent gig and small, really tiny startup company kind of approach. That's where I started because they got the first customers on the platform. It got me people continuing to iterate and give me feedback. As a human centered designer, that feedback is so critical and to what we build.

So for a lot of that, for me, it was really starting to actually just push out once the product was ready and get those first customers and work with them to improve the product even more. Once we went to market.

Chris Kim: That's great. And how far ahead would you say that you're planning out your next steps, is it all roadmapped or are you  taking it  as you get feedback?

Amber Christian: So what we're doing now, we feedback at a couple of different levels. We have feedback from existing customers that look for new features. Then there's feedback from prospects in the sales process as well. Right? And so these are different, different types of feedback. Some of it is things that prevent deals from getting done, where they say, Oh, well, unless you have an integration to X, Y, Z, it doesn't fit in our processes.

So that's another set of feedback. So what we tend to do is. I've stepped back and looked at a roadmap. I had a loose roadmap for the year. Ha, no, that doesn't work. about three months is about right. Right. Now, even within that though, something, it, it prepare people for, as an early stage company, you're going to be iterating a lot.

So there's more than a few months might be a bit too much to try to plan in a speaking from one who's tried to over plan. And here's why: So you're, you've got those customers and you're working through bugs and you're working through some new features and have kind of a loose plan on that. But then you're actually trying to sell to new customers.

And so new features and new things are emerging and you want to be able to kind of step back and look at both sets of those together because:  One set is going to help prevent churn, make sure customers are happy. On the one hand, the other set is about growing and adding more business, and so this is a balancing act and I find it to be a balancing act for myself as well.

Chris Kim:  I will say that, some of the greatest works of fiction that I've ever seen have been company roadmaps, you know, four or five years down the line. So you really got to keep it in mind. I feel like a lot of times things go a little better if you have a roadmap, even if it doesn't hit it, but at the same time the reality on the ground is definitely gonna make you make changes in the field.

Amber Christian: One of the things that's really interesting, so how have I balanced that off? Right? Cause you say, okay, well you got to have a plan. Yeah. There's absolutely a plan and at a high level of where I want to be and how I've balanced things.

So I talked about the whole idea of the existing customers versus the new customers. But the other thing that I. I balance that off with is any payments of technical debt and things that improve your operations. And so you kind of have a three legged stool going there in terms of your roadmap. And so one thing you could think about in terms of prioritization is to say, well, you'll never work on improving some of the underlying things you should.

 if you just look at the customer requests and you just look at the prospect of customer requests. Yeah. That's a house of cards. You also have to have this operations piece as well as part of your planning and prioritization. So for us, it says, as an example, we recently went through an exercise where, you know, when we're first building software, you know, just getting the build out the door, it was kind of these manual scripts and you know, you do whatever you gotta do to get the thing out the door.

And as we had different people come in and out, I said, there's gotta be a better way to do this. These have to be easier. How can I meet needs faster? And so we embraced something in tech that's called continuous integration. It's really just a fancy way of saying I can move faster, in a better way, with less likely to breaking things.

It's really, it's sounds very glorious, right? But we really looked at saying, Oh, okay, well, part of the systems and tools we have, okay, there's some things we could add there. So we balance what I call kind of technical debt or operations with the customer work and the prospect of customer work.

Chris Kim:  It kind of transitions well to my next question, which is, you have a history of working as a consultant with very large monolithic organizations implementing solutions. And that's a  experience that a lot of our companies  that are on founders list are not going to have.

So just kind of very quick what. Tips do you have for somebody who's just trying to crack  getting into  larger businesses and selling for the first time?

Amber Christian: First thing I would tell you is your, your initial conversations aren't about here. You should use my product. the first conversations should be more exploratory to figure out if there's even a fit there and one of the things that I've done that's worked well for me is a lot of initial conversations.

I ask people to take a look at it and give me feedback. And that is something you should do as an early stage company. You can do that with wire frames, by the way, you don't even have to have a built product. You can do that very, very early on to gauge one, whether there's existing competitors in the marketplace that you don't know about, if they're using something already that they're unhappy with,

what would be needed in order to actually move those deals forward? And so I would say the initial conversation should really be exploratory in nature, where you're asking a lot of questions and not just trying to sell them on here, take my product. But you want to understand where does your product fit in to that organization.

Because if your product doesn't actually fit in, if it sticks out like a sore thumb over here, and you know, now they have all this friction and extra stuff they're going to have to do. It's a lot harder sell for your product. And so when you're going into the big companies, they have to think about the change management.

Oh, this is another product. Okay, well how does this play with everything else? I have. Who's going to know anything about this? Like they have a whole different series of challenges from the company side. So you want to make sure you understand as much as possible about those challenges and get those conversations going early on so that you'll have those answers and be like, Oh, the change management is really hard.

Oh, well, we come with a preset, a training for you. We come with this set of documentation that's customizable and you can rattle off this whole list of things you have in there. Like, Oh. Okay. Maybe this isn't so bad.

Chris Kim: And  that right there is critically, critically important.  I've seen a lot of people say, well, Hey, this company is using product X and it's costing them $50,000 a year to implement. Oh, we could do it for 20, but they don't  realize  that  down  the process chain , they'd have to spend way, way more money to change things, to work with your system potentially. Then you really have to make it easy for them.

Amber Christian: Absolutely. And that might mean there's more features or things have to be more seamless.

You might have to redesign some things. And in fact, I've actually found myself in that, in that place as well, where I'd say what was possible two years ago with some technology, what wasn't possible then. Yeah. Is possible now. So we're constantly iterating and refining to make it think about making it as frictionless and experience for the B2B customer as possible and how you just become a no brainer for them versus one more person they have to deal with.

Chris Kim:  I often hear well, how do I close customers? How do I close?  And maybe closing is important, but it  really should just be the punctuation on the end of a sentence. Everything else has to be in place first usually through the course of months for  that to even happened.

So I think this conversation would be valuable to some of the listeners out there. But transitioning just a bit, and this is kind of the final question I'm going to ask you, is you've been in tech for a long time about as long as I have. Right. So you graduated college in 2000. For you, what are the biggest changes you've seen out there  in the tech landscape as it relates to  your experience.

Amber Christian: We didn't have cell phones, like not smart phones, at that point in time. So when I came out of school, everybody had desktop computers and I was laughing because we, whenever we wanted to take work home, we had to print things. And so I would have to spread out all these papers across my floor of different screens, screenshots, if he drawing on things.

It was terrible. But that was the time.

Chris Kim: I had a pager with me. You know, I just thought it was the pinnacle of ready.

Amber Christian: Oh, and I hated having a Blackberry. I will tell you this much. Sorry, Blackberry. But I did mean I was not into that when I had to have one. but you know, it, things are much more mobile, of course.

And I think customers still though, you really have to be able to meet them where they're at, the empathy for the customer. And the customer journey is something that has helped me throughout the process. I had to learn and figure that out. But in, in terms of how it's changed, it's constantly leaps and bounds.

And the biggest thing I've learned is you have to be a consistent and constant learner about what's happening. And so what you really need to do is you need to network with other founders. You need to be networking with people all the time and not because you're looking for anything from them.

But what you'll find is in those conversations, you'll discover something they're doing and you're like, Oh, wait a second. Why aren't we doing that? Because you gotta remember the teams and the people that you're working with have their own spheres of knowledge. And depending on how well, how well networked they are and how much of a continuous learners they are, they'll have a set of perspectives on how you solve problems.

But other people might have other perspectives that are super helpful. And so you want to be constantly learning from other people and meeting other people even even, you know. I'm a huge introvert, and so it's actually, I know you most people like you gotta be kidding me. Listen, this interview, you're like, there's no way you can be an introvert.

Oh yeah, I am just me. I'll go collapse and heap later. But you have to be constantly meeting and set up some sort of structure to meet people. Whether it's podcasts and your network with the guests later. even you can connect with me outside of this. I love it when people do that. Or you go to events specifically for founders where you just want to constantly be doing that because the times are going to come when you don't know what to do.

As a founder, you need to be able to pick up the phone and call someone and ask instead of being alone and trying to soldier through.

Chris Kim: That's very important. And I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention that FoundersList.com has a lot of groups and a lot of resources for founders to get together and collaborate to ask service providers, professionals, any kind of question that you want to have and to get feedback on your founder journey.

Amber Christian Wonderly software solutions. Thank you so much for being here today!

Amber Christian: Thank you for having me.

Chris Kim: And, where can people get in contact with you.

Amber Christian: So the easiest way to find me is actually LinkedIn. You can look me up, Amber, Christian, or you can go to wonderfully software.com or you can go to meet Bella ciena.com if you'd like to check Bella out.

Chris Kim: Okay. once again, that product is Bella Siena and it's to have unmissable meetings.

Amber Christian: That's right.

Travis Jungroth: Hey, my name is Travis Jungroth. I'm the founder of Highly Composite and we do data management for testing web applications. I've been working on it for a few weeks and there's a prototype up at highlycomposite.com. I went with this idea because I worked at a company that does crowd based testing for applications and the management component was.

It was always really hard. So I'm open to having a cofounder. The stuff that founder's list is doing is, is really cool. Looking for someone like me  on the software engineering side. I've been a sales engineer, so I can handle a lot of the kind of business sales side of things,  but I'm doing coding by myself and it sounds a lot more fun to code to someone else.

Got a pretty nice code base already written in Python, Django. So if it sounds interesting, just reach out on my FoundersList profile.

Philip Camillieri: Hi, I'm Phillip and I'm founder at founders list. Thanks for listening to our first podcast today with Christopher and Amber. We've got plenty more lined up for the next few weeks, but we'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding our podcasts. Meanwhile, we've also got a few new things on founder's list.com.

 firstly, we're building out our new group section. you can join groups by interest example, FinTech founders or impact founders. Or by location, New York city founders, Philly founders, Indian founders, et cetera, or even by incubator or accelerator  like the Y Combinator alumni group or textiles, founders group and so on.

I'd like to invite you to join one or more groups by joining a group. You give users a bit of context about yourself, but are also able to interact with founders in different networks. We've also built out a list of top podcasts and newsletters for founders. You can check them out at founder's list.com and you can also recommend your favorite podcasts or let us know which podcasts and newsletters we might be missing.

Finally, we're continuing to feature co-founders each week. If you're looking for a cofounder for your startup or interested in joining an existing startup, check out founders list.com/ co-founders. Well, that's it for me.  As always, thanks for using founder's list and please do let us know if you have any hints or suggestions about what we can do to improve our platform.

Thank you.