Today we’re joined by Tempo AI Founder and CEO Raj Singh. Coming from an engineering background, Raj fell into the mobile space by luck in 1998 and has dabbled in gaming, music, video, lifestyle, utility, and productivity.
But it wasn’t until he started thinking about how he always seemed to be late for everything that he got the idea for Tempo AI, a calendar app with assistant capabilities that can take a “psychographic profile” of your activity to help cater to your needs. A successful pre-launch with a curated list of influencers lead to thousands trying to sign-up during the official release and crashing the system.
Keypoint Takeaways: Behind Tempo AI
Raj wanted Tempo AI to help users better prepare for meetings with features like outer-dialing into a conference call and finding new insights on a person you’ve just met. The team created a product where you can simply say a name, and Tempo displays their photo, social media profiles, and CrunchSpace info among other sources to get a full view of who you’re about to meet. It can also shows common connections so you can refine your networking, give you details on an upcoming flight and tell you how to when to leave based on where you’re going.
Standing out from the competition
Raj knew the calendar app market was saturated, and designed Tempo with a unique but elegantly simple experience in mind. Anyone can use Tempo just to keep up with connections and calendars, but it also keeps the busy professional persona in mind who juggles multiple meetings and connections.
While Siri and Google Now offers some similar features as Tempo, Raj sees his competition as mostly a broad and shallow tool that tries to target anyone and everyone. While a soccer Mom or teenager could use Tempo, it’s really designed with business professionals in mind. Raj also doesn’t think having a smartphone with built-in apps really hurts his business. He guesses there are about two-hundred million iPhones in the U.S., and a large portion of those users never use their calendars and simply glance at the date an time.
Creating a psychographic profile
Tempo does something other calendar apps haven’t really done before—it classifies calendar data. Tempo can tell a user what their work-life balance ratio is, show the number of one-on-one meetings and times you’ve worked out, where you go for coffee and when you seem to have a preference for meeting times. Tempo essentially creates a psychographic profile of its users and employs natural language to figure out what the intent of your meetings and actions are all about.
Like most calendar apps, Tempo pushes out a notification to you so you know when your meeting is about to start. But based on all the data it collects, it also pushes out a second notification with the action it thinks you’re most likely to take. That could be dialing in for a call, getting directions to a meeting or finding out more information about the person you’re meeting with. From there Tempo analyses your open rate and the action you’re taking to help refine how it assists you in the future.
Pre-launching with an influencer list
Tempo found success in acquiring its first wave of customers by pre-launching. The team took time to curate a set of influencers and warmed up advisors and friends to create an alpha group. Raj discovered the scarcity of keeping the list small made his contacts feel a personal connection to the product. But more importantly, the list of influencers were mostly busy professionals who truly benefited from the features of the app.
In addition to a great list of influencers, Tempo put together a significant amount of press opportunities to help boost the day of the launch. It paid off and they saw a few thousand downloads within minutes. Ultimately the system stopped working, and Tempo couldn’t handle any more users. The system simply wasn’t elastic and designed for that much scale that fast. In order to straighten out the issue, they set-up a reservation line so users could be notified when the app was ready. The reservation system itself created another thread of scarcity and buzz around the product.
Soon the reservation line reached to the hundreds of thousands—and that was just for the launch on iPhone within the U.S. Tempo had no choice but to push forwards 24-hours a day, nearly 7-days a week to get the system working and process reservations. While the reservation system ultimately worked, Raj says he wouldn’t necessarily go that route again.
Naming doubts
The team was torn on whether or not to focus on Tempo as a calendar app or assistant, but ultimately the users guided the decision with their feedback. They settled on marketing it as a calendar app and weave an assistant capability around it. It wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, but the customers helped narrow the focus on how they viewed the app, and how they wanted to use it. Raj warns it’s very difficult to detract from the influence of the name once it’s public and uses Foursquare as a cautionary tale. Despite Foursquare constantly trying to change the message behind the product, people still see it as a check-in experience.
Recruiting talent with your network
Raj taps into LinkedIn to recruit for Tempo, and focuses on his personal engineering connections to find top talent. He also aggressively leverages his alumni connections and alma mater, something he sees as a grossly underused recruiting technique. Once names and connections are entered into a candidate spreadsheet, Raj treats those new prospects as someone to get to know over time. Essentially his interviewing process could take months or more.
Interns are also a valuable asset at Tempo, and Raj makes connections with professors at local universities to recruit top performers. He gives the students part-time jobs and internships so Tempo is at the top of their mind come graduation. To help combat the disconnection with remote workers and interns, Tempo opens up Google Hangouts with a two-way open mic so everyone feels they’re in the office working together.
Resources:
“The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” – Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz, gives advice on the essentials of running a start-up and how difficult it really is to manage.
“Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (Lean Series)” – Delves into measuring and analyzing how businesses grow to figure out if a problem is real, if you have right customers, what to build, how to monetize it and spread the word.
“Steve Jobs” – The Apple founder’s biography written from candid interviews, talk with friends and colleagues.
Transcript:
Eric: Hi everyone. Welcome to this week’s edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. I’m your host Eric Siu and today we have Raj Singh from Tempo AI. How do you pronounce the last name again? I always get it wrong.
Raj: It’s Raj Singh.
Eric: Singh. Got it.
Raj: Actually there’s no -H-
Eric: Okay. Cool man. So how’s it going?
Raj: It’s good. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m really looking forward to this.
Eric: Yeah. Thanks for being here. So, the way I usually like to start these is to hear a little more about your background and we’ll go from there.
Raj: Sure. So I, more by luck than by plan I have been in the mobile industry for quite some time. I was an engineer by trade. I was building mobile apps in ’98. I was doing app games. I had worked in a variety of different sort of roles; product manager, and engineering, business development, I had some of my own things, and in a variety of spaces I’ve been mobile: gaming, music, video, life-style, utility, presently productivity, and it’s definitely been a sort of an awesome journey watching how the apps store and iPOS system have sort of evolved.
Eric: Got it. Cool. So, your business right now is it Tempo AI, right?
Raj: Correct.
Eric: Can you tell us a little about Tempo AI and what it does exactly?
Raj: Yeah. When we started Tempo the sort of focus was…I was thinking a lot about my days working in business development and how…People who know me know that I’m often late to things, and it’s not by design, and it’s a terrible habit or whatever it is, but I just would be late. And that coupled with another very common experience, because I used to deal a lot with OEMs, like Samsung and OG and etcetera, and you’d go into these meetings, and there’d always be five or six other people around the table and you had no idea who they were. They weren’t invited, they were just there.
The kernel of the idea really started with something really simple: Can I just let people know I’m running late? Can I just build a simple tool for that? That would’ve made my life a little bit easier, especially while you’re driving you don’t want to text. And so we started there and as we started building it what we realized that we were really building an assistant that was very much focused on the professional. We continued to sort of push down that path and ultimately we were able to do what we called Tempo Smart Calendar and it’s very much…it’s trial will be out on other platforms soon, but it’s very much focused around: How can you better prepare for meetings? But also providing you a number of quick runtime actions, whether it’s outer-dialing into a conference call, or dealing insights about a person you just met, to whatever it might be.
Eric: Got it. Cool. So, its IOS mainly…I mean, I imagine a lot of other identifications popping up, I mean how would it work for me? Any examples on…I know you gave me one example, but I want a typical use case.
Raj: Sure. Yeah. Well I imagine in your world you’re meeting new people a lot. I’m a new person, and sometimes you know, maybe you want a little bit of an icebreaker or maybe let’s just see what he looks like, or maybe you want to know a little bit about Tempo. You can open up your calendar in Tempo and you could click “Raj” and it will display not only photos about me, but information from Twitter, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and About Me, and Crunch Space, and Angels, and all these different sources. And you’re getting kind of like a full sort of preview of who Raj is.
You get some ideas for some icebreakers. Or maybe you wanted some more details. You’re curious like, “I want to know more about Raj’s company.” So I can click “Tempo”, you can see your mutual connections, you realize, “Wow! I have some friends who know people at Tempo as well.” I can see them back in Tempo when it was started. And this sort of…this example gives a case where it’s helping you…be just a little bit better…Maybe this evening you’re having dinner with your friends, you know, pretty normal, and you’re like, “Shoot, what time should I leave?” Maybe on Android you’ll Google Now; fine [laughter, cross talk] you don’t have this benefit.
You open up Tempo, it gives you the drive time and so you know exactly, “Okay, I should probably allocate twenty-five minutes. I should probably leave soon to get over there because [inaudible 0:04:30.2] traffic might look like. Maybe next week I imagine, just in your role, you’re traveling a lot. A lot of folks will…Typically you’re given systems, some people will forward their itinerary to [ph][Triplet], some people will print it out, some people save it to [inaudible 0:04:45.2] but a large number of people actually still put it in their calendar, they put it in the calendar.
Well, Tempo will see that flight, and it’ll show you the flight status, right there in the calendar. So, what it’s doing is, it’s working on a lot of those common work forms that we experience, whether it’s making calls, whether it’s meeting people, whether it’s traveling to locations, and it’s automating all of that, to help you affectively be better prepared and sort of save you a few minutes each day and kind of reduce the stress that goes along with that.
Eric: Got it. Cool. So, I know there’s a few, obviously, competitors in this space [cough]. I’ve used a few tools like that before. So, how do you guys…How does Tempo stand out, because I already have…like you said, there’s a Google Now of the world and there’s various IOS apps, so how does Tempo stand out?
Raj: You know, I think there’s kind of two camps here. One camp is calendars and there’s a number of calendar alternatives for both iPhone and Android from a number of companies. With an app camp we have really taken a focus of trying to build a very simple experience, but at the same time adding a lot of utility for the professional persona, the person who does have meetings. You can certainly use Tempo, and it’s still a great experience if you have a few events a day and you mostly have to dos, and to dos are very common in your calendar, but it’s really about providing quick work for a quick utility for those people that are busy.
On the other end of the spectrum in the assistant sort of world, you have Siri, you have Google Now, you have others. What we have found is, for the most part they’ve been very, what we like to say, this is not in a negative way, horizontal. What we mean by that is very broad and shallow. So, you’ll get people now, there’s ninety or hundred different some cards now that you can get in Google Now.
I’m not trying to go deep on any particular work pro, they’re just trying to go as pervasive as they can, or as broad as they can, which is perfectly fine if you’re thinking about targeting the purist form of the consumer; you’re targeting a student, or a kid, or a soccer mom, or whatever it might be. But if you go a step further and you really think about how assistance is going to evolve, we tend to believe that they’re going to be very vertical for particular personas.
There will be assistance for the internal sales rep of a telecom industry, there’ll be an assistant for the pizza delivery guy. These are very, very sort of vertical incentives. We’re not necessarily going that vertical, but we took a little bit more of a vertical approach as compared to Google Now, that sort of top targeting those that use their calendar. And interestingly, although there’s maybe two-hundred million, or whatever number of iPhones out there in the U.S. A large number of people don’t even use their calendar. They just really look at the iPhone and the date. So there a target sort of user base.
Eric: Got it. Okay. I know, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s an aspect of machine learning built into Tempo AI right?
Raj: That’s correct.
Eric: Okay. Can you explain to the audience what machine learning is and kind of how it factors into your app?
Raj: Yeah, you know, as I mentioned earlier we like to say it’s sort of looks like a phone, feels like an assistant. And one of the things that we do in Tempo is we classify calendar data. Interestingly this is really never been done. So, what we can do with this is we can tell you what your work/life balance ratio is, how many one on one meetings you have, verses one to many, how many times you exercise, what your favorite coffee shop is, your favorite restaurant, when you seem to prefer to have meetings, all sorts of inferences that would ultimately create a cycle of psychographic profile out of the particular user.
We have seventy-four different reading classifications which is quite a bit and this isn’t just simple keyword’s spotting, for example you put in a title Raj-colon-John, [to the] human eye, that’s a one on one meeting, you’re meeting one on one, but the machine just sees two names and a colon. Keyword spotting wouldn’t infer that it’s a one on one meeting.
We use natural language to try to infer what we think the intent of the meeting is. What this enables us to do, by understanding the intent of the meeting is we can be very smart with our notifications. Which is part of the larger sort of growth hacking kind of story, is in addition to pushing a calendar notification to you, which is what you would normally expect, we push a second notification, and the second notification is what we think is the most likely action that you want to take. And so, that action, interestingly in calendar, usually boils down to five or six things; dial me in, tell me more about the person, navigate me there, be the flight status, etcetera, wish Happy Birthday, whatever it is, and…but we’re continuing to improve on that.
And where we apply machine learning is twofold. The one, we look at your open rate of these different sort of notifications and how you respond to them and what kind of actions you are taking and this helps the system infer whether it’s correct or incorrect with these sort of smart notifications. But then in addition to that we also do things where inside of your calendar then, I’ll give you an example.
Let’s say you created a calendar event where you just said, “Call Raj” and you didn’t invite Raj. People are lazy, it’s work, to fill out a whole founder event to invite people and sometimes it’s kind of formal and it’s weird and you don’t want to invite that type of person or whatever it is.
And so, Tempo will actually try to infer who Raj is. So, it will look at your address book and it will not only look at maybe five Rajs in your address book, but it might say, “You know I think it’s this one of the five, I don’t think it’s the other four, because of things that I’ve learned about you over time and who I think is important to you right now.” And so then it will suggest that contact there and it makes it a very quick sort of one time, a very popular experience within Tempo is how we automatically will match contacts for you. [Crosstalk]. So let me just give you some examples of how we use natural language and classification of calendar to effectively learn about the user to provide some of these assistant experiences. I think the really cool stuff is all the other things you could potentially do by having that kind of psychographic data.
Eric: Got it. So it’s actually much more than just the apps that send me a reminder to give me a little insight on who I’m talking with. It’s more like…it seems like it has, I’ll just call it personal analytics, there’s that aspect to it as well. It seems super valuable to anyone that wants to improve aspects of their life, which sounds incredible to me, so I’m going to have to get a copy of that.
Raj: [laugh]
Eric: Cool. So, you’ve been in the mobile space for a while. How many years has it been?
Raj: Ah, geez. What is it? Fourteen, fifteen years.
Eric: Okay. So, fifteen years. What do you think our next big thing is in mobile?
Raj: laugh] Yeah, interesting. I think…I’m excited for a number of things. So, one of the things I challenge people to think about, which is an interesting sort of thought challenge is there’s sort of three constraints when you build mobile apps. There’s CPU, so like, is the device fast enough. There’s battery life and there’s bandwidth. And I sometimes ask people, I say, “What would you build if you had unlimited bandwidth? Your phone was Google Fiber, what would you build?” And it’s interesting, it’s a product experiment. Would you do like 3D, you know, telepresence of video calls, where just, you know, ahh, same question, “What would you do if you had infinite battery life?” Or I’d tell you the entire quantified self-world and everybody’s focused on health and wearables, would love infinite battery life.
It’s the number one reason wearable’s don’t take off is people don’t like recharging them. What would you do if you have infinite battery life? You could run all your cloud computation on your phone, twenty-four hours a day. You don’t need to run to the cloud…And then what would you do if you had infinite CPU? So, when you think about things like that and you look at sort of, you know, how things are evolving over the last fifteen years, from 2003 when I used to work with Product Mobile I was building stuff on the first camera phone where we only had 64 kilobytes and we had a three-twenty by two-forty VGA photo and people were telling us that nobody would take photos on their phone and a lot of people believed that.
A lot of smart people believed that. It’s fascinating how your combination of things, those three things; battery life, CPU, and bandwidth, are approaching the point where you can almost have infinite amounts of it and then you couple that with other interesting things. You have miniaturization, things are getting smaller and smaller and so the device is effectively packing in more and more sensors. And so I think there’s a phenomenal number of other ideas or disruptions that are going to happen and it is because these three or four trends are not slowing down.
Eric: Wow! Okay. Cool. So, let’s move into user acquisition for a little bit. I mean, Tempo, how did you acquire your first…Do you guys have over a thousand users right now? Less/More?
Raj: Yeah, now, we’re over thou[sand]…We’re close to a million.
Eric: Wow! Okay. Let’s start with the beginning. How did you guys acquire your first thousand customers?
Raj: You know, interestingly, and I’m not necessarily advocating this as a model, but we pre-launched…we sort of curated a set of influencers; a set of advisors, friends, and others and invited them into an alpha group. And the benefit of that…what was interesting was, there’s sort of a perception that if you invite somebody into your own beta group at a personal level, and it’s not like a big list, it was maybe a hundred people, people that I knew, they feel special. It’s like, “Hey your part of something.” and they want to contribute and give feedback and by definition, if they had nothing positive to say, they’re more likely not say anything then say something negative, which is very, very sort of important. So, they’re a combination of…So, we sort of started with that, sort of influencer list.
And then what we did is we kind of took an approach, launching Tempo, like with a big launch, and I’m not necessarily advocating this as a model and I probably would do it differently going forward, but this was kind of the old way things used to happen. And so we have these set of influencers. We also reached out to a number of friendly press and we had seated them with the app. And one of the interesting things that happened at Tempo was, first of all; it was probably the first calendar, first sort of calendar Dato launched on the iPhone, and so we were kind of first to market, and that gave us some advantages. And second of all, the natural target user, almost by definition, like the best target user is probably an influencer because they’re busy people.
So, when these people were using it, the press or what not, they were loving it. They really, really liked the whole sort of experience. And so what happened on the day of the launch we had a very significant amount of press and a very, very significant amount of demand. We hit the first thousand downloads in the first minute of launch. And it actually caused us different problems. The system we had built…so one of the things we had done was; we had actually launched under a different name in Canada as sort of a test and the metrics were terrible.
People were not downloading it and we realized later it’s because we didn’t learn…announce it, so we were kind of buying traffic to our calendar using ads that were probably being run on games, that were being delivered to kids, who don’t use their calendar. And so, we didn’t really put the two together, so we didn’t realize how bad the audience that we were acquiring was. But in any case we looked at these metrics and we put together our core facts and we said, “You know what? We would be very happy if we could get ten-thousand installed from day one.” right?
We obviously blew through those numbers and so what happened was, this system that we had built, because the system kind of infrastructure, it’s not necessarily expensive, but it’s computationally heavy. And so the classified data and it’s the first time we were hitting exchange in such a large segment of users etcetera that we…Basically, the system stopped working.
We couldn’t handle any more users so, if we probably designed for scale and it wasn’t a truly an elastic system which was part of the problem and so we couldn’t handle it. And so we immediately run into a mode like, “Oh my God! Let’s start spitting up word servers, I don’t know what’s going on.” writing code, fixing things, etcetera. But here we are getting a one star like crazy in the app store. Just, I think we accumulated five-hundred one stars in the first two-weeks…
Eric: Wow!
Raj: [laugh] …because people were saying that it stalled, they can’t register because it just wouldn’t work. And so, we didn’t know what to do. And we could pull the app from the App store and…You know, these things are very, when you look back in time, everything seems to sort of make sense, but when you’re living in the moment, it’s very hard to make these decisions.
You’re stressed out, you’re tired, and it’s like, you know, there’s just not a lot of comps for these kind of things. And so, we looked at another application called Mailbox and Mailbox had a reservation line and we said, “That’s interesting. Maybe we can just put together a line and that’ll help sort of mitigate this pain because we have no way to service these users.” And so, we spent the next two days building a reservation line, submitted it for an emergency Apple push release, so you could circumvent their one week normal wait period. And they put it live and they threw people in the reservation line. That created a whole other level of buzz. It probably was a little bit premature, to be honest, which was everybody’s like, “Oh wow! There’s a scarcity here or exclusivity here.” And so, next thing you know everybody wants to jump in the line.
And the line climbed into the hundreds of thousands. And again, we just launched U.S. only and it was just iPhone. And, we’re thinking to ourselves, “This is nuts!” because our firm velocity we can’t even get these people in for three months, and this is crazy and I don’t believe in reservation lines. I think it’s a terrible idea and I think you should try to make your user as happy as you can. We basically cranked for twenty-four hours a day for probably five, six, seven weeks to get the system to a place where we could scale and we slowly got all of them in and we’re kind of way past that now.
But it was…There’s a lot of interesting lessons learned with our launch. What it had done is it had created a lot of awareness of Tempo, but not necessarily a lot of people that had played with it, because many people had not gotten in. And then the problem with a lot of these things that we realized and just sort of looking at other things that we’ve been involved in is; there is a window you sort of want to acquire your users when there’s this heightened awareness, but if you miss this sort of window, then, you know, like, “Yeah, I remember Tempo, but I haven’t actually played with it yet.”
You know, it’s like yeah, six months go by and you have to reacquire that user and then…It’s very similar, my analog here has been networking, which is kind of a weird analog, but let me give you the analog. It’s…In networking it’s a lot easier to make a new introduction, like meet a new person, than it is to maintain a relationship. Maintaining a relationship is a lot more work. And when somebody pings me five years later and says, “Hey Raj, can you help me with apps?” and I’m like, “Dude, you haven’t seen me for five years and we met five years ago?” I’m like, “Okay, I’ll help you but why have you been so quiet for five years.” But if somebody new emailed me, “Can you help me with this?”, “Yeah, Yeah, you’re a new person, I’ll help you out.” because I want to pay it forward.
Eric: Yeah.
Raj: So, it’s very similar with apps. When you acquire a user you have your one shot to sort of impress upon that experience, but it’s a lot of work to go back to the same user and say, give it a shot again, give it a shot again, and I’m really am envious when I think of things like Evernote where they give these examples where, their greatest sort of conversion of a user is after their third use after eighteen months, which means they’re very good at sort of re-marketing to audience that may not have liked it the first time or may not have adopted the work for the first time, and this is sort of important when you think about the productivity category, because you are dealing with personal work flow, and people do have personal work processes in how they handle things, etcetera. Anyways. That’s how we got our first thousand users.
Eric: No, that’s good. Sounds like you did the scarcity thing twice, but you don’t recommend it, right?
Raj: What’s twice? I did it once.
Eric: Once? Okay, I thought I heard it twice. But…
Raj: Once was with the beta group?
Eric: Yeah.
Raj: Yeah, with the beta group, to be honest, the objective wasn’t scarcity. The objective was really feedback.
Eric: Okay.
Raj: But it happened to be that a lot of the members of the beta group were also influencers and so it created its own sort of scarcity affect.
Eric: Got it. Cool.
Raj: I would definitely recommend the first. The second I wouldn’t recommend is doing a reservation line.
Eric: Okay. Got it. No reservation line.
Raj: Always just curate a set of fans, followers, influencers. There’s something about, it doesn’t matter if they’re an influencer or not, but there’s something about being part of the beta group, that makes you feel special. It makes you feel like, “You know what? I’m going to give them a free pass if things crash because they made me a part of the beta group and they’re trusting me to give them feedback.”
Eric: Got it. Okay. That makes total sense. So, how about…why don’t you tell us a little like one big struggle you face while growing Tempo. And I heard the scaling issue, what’s like another big struggle that you face?
Raj: This is a good question. We have a real challenge around what was the right product market fit. And so, let me give you what we were torn with. When we launched Tempo the thesis was really bringing an assistant for the professional, but when we were naming Tempo we didn’t know what to call it. Should we call it Tempo Assistant or should we call it Tempo Calendar and the only reason we considered Calendar is because we thought calendar was a great UI metaphor for an assistant. The other more common UI metaphor is like Google Now or other assistant sorts of apps; basically “Streams of things”.
So you swipe your card, you swipe your stream. So, anyway, so here comes launch. We do this launch. Everyone thinks of us as a calendar. They don’t think of us as an assistant and that was because through use of the name Calendar we were acquiring a user base that was outside of the target [?][tab]. The target [?][tab] was sort of the professional, but we were getting students, and we were getting soccer moms, and we were getting folks with ‘just stuff to do’ users, let’s have birthdays and let’s do Facebook events, all over the map. And that posed an interesting challenge because, all of a sudden, we sort of acquired a user base that isn’t necessarily consistent with what your original product objective was.
And we had to effectively make a choice. We had sort of two options. One option was; we could push further on Calendar and try to weave in the assistant experience. I’m a big believer that AI and smart experiences are underneath the hood. You don’t need to force it upon the user [if you are] then you’re not doing it correctly. Or we could actually completely change the UI to look less like a calendar and therefor fix the problem. And that was an interesting debate internally because we were thinking about, we’re like, “Wow!” we got pigeonholed there on the calendar and we were really thinking about completely eliminating some of the calendar views and switching it to more of a card kind of metaphor, which ironically was the UI we had in September, several months before we launched, which was in February.
But then we move it into more of a Calendar because some of the feedback we got from users was, “Well, I’m swiping between cards, but each card is basically about the next event.” You know, “Just move it into…” So, really interesting sort of debate. And what we ultimately decided was; we felt that the audience of people interested in a better calendar experience was larger and we felt that the assistant kind of experience that we were building would enable us to monetize, because they were sort of the higher value user.
So, we stayed true to building sort of a full calendar and then we continued to build these assistant sort of experiences because those users that use a lot of those experiences in Tempo they were chained forever. We’re locking them in. And so, what that did was, which was sort of not what our original product plan was and the reality of these things, and there’s a lesson that I learned which is an anecdotal thing that ah, “The larger your user base the more you’ll learn”. So, when you test with fifty people you learn small things and when you test with five-hundred people you’ll learn bigger things and when you test five-thousand people you learn even bigger things, because you can see things at different scale. And so you see different kinds of trends that you’re not necessarily exposed to.
What this basically forced us to do with our product growth map was we spent the next four months just building calendar features. For example we didn’t have an invitation tray. There’s a number of features we didn’t support with an ad event like setting a recurrence; all these sorts of things; search; and users were demanding it. And so the full calendar experience they’re sort of demanding it. And that detracted from what our original product was which was really about building more assistant type of experiences: EG, generate an expense report for you out of your calendar automatically…
Eric: That’d be cool.
Raj: …things like that, because we could tell these things semantically. So we spent the next four, five months all the way through February, loosely, from Feb to about May we were just trying to scale and get the user going. And then from May to August we were just doing calendar features and then from August to effectively February of this year we were back on our assistant roadmap. It’s really sort of fascinating how the roadmap was influenced and looking back at how everything, do things maybe a little bit differently, as a result of a very simple thing, what we call the app, whether we call it calendar or if we called it temporary assistant it would have been a very different tone.
Eric: Wow! Naming drives a huge impact.
Raj: It’s very significant, in fact, yeah it’s unbelievable how the name can really influence, especially at first launch, and especially if you’re not doing a slow launch, if you’re actually launching it, it really, whatever you call it initially and how you message it initially it’s very difficult to ever detract from that. I mean, that sort of locks you in. For a startup, pretty much perpetually. I mean, even a Foursquare; that’s a great example.
Here’s a Foursquare, they’re struggling to still break out of the check it. No matter how much they’re trying to re-message it, that they want to be a discovery experience, they still struggle to break out of check in. They’re struggling so much that they say, “You know what, I give up. I’m going to take the “check it out” course and see what happens.” And that’s what they’re doing right? They’re moving it to swarm which is another route. And that’s going to be a really interesting fact because that has the potential of having huge sort of attrition, of people balancing out, saying, “You know, I think it works with the check in companies.”
Eric: Yup. Got it. Cool. Switching gears a little bit, I know in one of your interviews on…there’s a little talk about recruiting. So, you said, previously you spent 25 to 35 percent of your time recruiting through LinkedIn. I just want to know what your process was.
Raj: Yeah. Certainly I’m not spending 25 to 35 percent of my time recruiting all year. But definitely at different times of the year when that becomes my priority that’s what I’m doing. I think of recruiting like a sales process and that’s kind of treating it a little bit too…this is in no way a me sort of thinking the people I’m trying to recruit as just [?][tags], but what I mean by that is you meet people and you’re like, “Wow! This is a cool person, or this is an interesting person. I would love to work with this person.” You need to maintain a relationship with that person. You need to see them on a regular basis.
You need to kind of check with them every six months or whatever it is, because ultimately you want to make sure you are there at the opportunity that that person may want to jump ship or may want to jump into something new. And so, you may have a large company, you know we have thirty job requisitions and we need to fill it to the next month. It doesn’t work like that. In my opinion you’re always recruiting and you’re always hiring and it’s serendipitous. Sometimes a bunch of people become available this particular month and sometimes they become available once every six months. It doesn’t necessarily work with your timeline, but you need to invest that sort of energy.
My process was: I heavily use my network so I’ve invested in LinkedIn to a some degree very early and I’ve got a large network on LinkedIn and one thing that plays to my advantage is I’ve been an engineer by trade so I’ve worked in engineering for five years and so I’ve a number of contacts within that life that lets me be able to touch those people as well. So that’s definitely been one advantage in terms of using my network. I do have strategies. We’re open to re-locating people. I often look at developers who develop …the one, two, three developer teams [inaudible 0:32:29.6] top two-hundred to see if…and many of them are often outside of the Bay area.
I recruit aggressively from where I’m an alumni at, which is a school which I think is grossly, not underrated, but grossly under-approached, I guess, I’m looking for the right word there, which is Cal-Poly, San Francisco. I think Berkley and Stanford, I think those are the hyper access engineers, but there’s universities outside of them and there’re smart people everywhere, I firmly believe, that are equally talented. So I think there’s a range of different things that I do. I track them in the spreadsheets, that’s the kind of time…the key thing for me is I’ve got to meet all these people, so it’s not so much, “Hey can you join me tomorrow?” It’s more like, “Let’s get to know each other” and ultimately when they come in and meet the Tempo team and go through the Tempo interview process what I mostly found is that’s your opportunity to earn your credibility and so they’ll go through the process and they’ll say, “Wow! This is a really smart team. That was a really hard interview process.”
And we do some very interesting things around our interview process, which I could talk to you about or not. They go through it and it kind of earns them creditability and sometimes you earn respect just by not getting the job. And it’s like, “Sorry, even though you’ve been an iPhone developer for five years, you know, not the right guy.” And so it’s been interesting and we’ve been adapting it and we’ve been learning, but it’s always a challenge especially because we try very hard to keep…wanting to keep everybody sort of local here in the Bay area and the Bay area, no matter what, people are saying, there’s just a gross shortage of talent everywhere.
Eric: Got it. Yup. So, let’s talk about, you alluded to some interesting things that you did when recruiting so, so what’s one interesting thing you guys do?
Raj: So ah – Interns. So, we set up a relationship with one of our former professors and we actually will try to recruit top kids through the professor and give them part-time jobs during the school year. And what that does is during the school year…now that’s not that’s not the most effective, but they’re really smart people, they’re top performers, [as they can] be, but it’s only like 10, 15 hours a week, just find the people, but that’s okay, but what that enables us; here comes graduation and wherever they go when they think about the first place they want to join they think about Tempo. So, that’s been sort of a great channel for us and that’s kind of unique and different in terms of something that we do.
Eric: Got it. So, let’s say… I went to UCC San Diego, but I want to recruit people from UCLA because that’s near me right? So, how do I, say for me, how do I go about building that relationship with professors so I can build this internship network?
Raj: So, you know what we do is we…the challenge here is the folks are remote, whether UCC San Diego or UCLA, and so what we’ve done in our office is we actually have hangouts perched up on a shelf and it’s always on and it’s always running and it’s a two way open mic and we have three rooms, small little offices, but then we have four or five people crammed in each room, and the Google hangouts machine is in every single room and it’s always on. And so our remote folks, I think when the interns, when they’re working they sign on the hangout and it feels like they’re in the office because the video is on, you’re in the room, you can hear everything, you can see everything, it’s very awesome. [Inaudible 0:36:23.4] so it doesn’t matter in our opinion whether they’re from or UCLA San Diego or UCLA.
At the time they graduate, that’s ultimately up to them where they ultimately want to live, but it’s unusual that we meet people that don’t want to come out to the Bay area, just given our location. How we built a relationship with the professor, personally I think it’s really, really, hard if it’s not one of your own former professors. Going to UCLA if anyone’s from San Diego and your kind of approaching, it’s not going work.
Second, I think it’s really hard if you weren’t one of the top kids that the professor remembers. Both Cory and I, my co-founder and I, are Cal-Poly alumni and one of the top professors at Cal-Poly he remembers both of us. And so we created this sort of relationship and that’s been great. It’s been really, really helpful and it’s not a lot of work and I think there’s a lot of this that definitely happens in the Bay area between Berkley and Stanford, but I don’t think a lot of it happens with some of these, I’m not going to say longer tail schools, but just schools that are outside the Bay area.
Eric: Got it. Cool. That’s really helpful. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to your twenty-five year old self?
Raj: Focus. So, really fascinating. I used to, when I was…So, I dropped out of masters to start a company in 2000. Since then I’ve been doing a number of things, testing and trying different ideas and changing, and [?][tuning] and it’s really fascinating how many years it took me to, in my opinion, and I had some successful things, by the way, and even before coming to this realization, but how many years it took me to really understand what focus meant. And so, the way I learned what focus meant ironically was nothing to do with the company. It was in one of my former lives I was moved from a business development role into sales and…Most people have never really worked in sales.
Maybe they think they worked in sales, and they’re always telling you whether you are fundraising, or selling, but when you truly work in sales and you work in a sales organization where there is a VP of sales, there’s other sales reps, there’s a process, one of the things you very quickly become attuned to is what it’s like to work in an organization where there are targets, there are goals, your compensation is tied to those goals and your competing against your peers and if you don’t get those metrics you lose your job. And that’s a very different way for how engineering and product organizations are run.
Having worked in engineering and product it’s not so measured. Although, certainly there’s been some changes in this sort of new org chart where product teams are broken up into growth engaged in to money as opposed to stats. But it’s certainly different and the reality from that side of the world there’s an absolute shortage of talent, but there isn’t on the sales side of the world. And so working in that role I remember I would invest heavily in just sort of connecting with people that weren’t necessarily contributing to the sale and spending time on things, understanding competitive market. That wasn’t necessarily contributing to sales. And some of these things you should do and you’re taught to do and I remember the SVP of sales sort of saying, “Well, Okay, so let me see how your spending your time.” because they’re very sort of critical in sales. They value everything.
And they’d point and say “So what was this meeting for? What was this called for? And why did you meet this person for lunch?” And I couldn’t give quick ROIs on any of these things and they’d be like, “Well, why are you doing that? You don’t need to. Don’t do this and go call this person five more times.” And I’m thinking to myself, “Wow, it’s fascinating how he’s prioritizing everything against the goals.” And I think that was really fascinating in terms of learning about focus. And I’m really excited about how a lot of these two dollar companies, even like LinkedIn, and how they organize internally, they’ve moved away from organizing engineering teams by staff and moving them to full stock teams and organize them by growth, money, and engagement, which is fascinating because it’s a great way to communicate your top level objectives down to the bottom and everyone knows what the goals are.
And so that’s really awesome how some of those processes that have come from sales have been able to translate themselves, to some degree, into other parts of the organization, which I think is very, very cool. I strongly believe, after having worked in sales, and I’ve worked in many parts of the company, in small and medium sized companies that the processes in sales and how they execute and do things is the most developed within a company because there’s very little…The 360s are done in public. They are not behind the scenes. People are getting ripped apart in public so you quickly can see and learn so fast, just given the nature of sales, everyone is very, very sort of fixed in.
Eric: Got it. Couldn’t agree more. I guess the key take away; maybe everyone should join a sales organization. [crosstalk]
Raj: Funny. I was talking with somebody, I was like…You know, I have a baby. He’s twenty months and I was like “At some point I want him to go work as a car sales rep for three or four months because learning how to sell and read people and knowing what it’s like to have a target is a fascinating, fascinating, changing experience, for one, even though I want him to become a computer science major, a person can control their destiny, he can do whatever he wants, but just sort of, just thinking about things I would want him to do.
Eric: That’s awesome. You know, I actually heard…this is a side note; I was in Turkey like two weeks ago and there’s a rug salesman and I hear rugs salesmen make snake oil sales…I mean, they make car salesmen look like kids from child’s play, so maybe rug sales will be better, huh?
Raj: I think those famous Angel investors are hedgeman, wasn’t he a rug sales or carpet salesman?
Eric: I don’t know. I’ll look into that. Maybe I’ll want to make my future kid do that too. But, final two questions from my end. What’s one productivity hack you can share with the audience?
Raj: I’m not…so I…I’ve read all the books. I’ve read The Four Hour Work Week, I’ve read GPD, I’ve read Guy Kawasaki, whatever you name it. I read all the books, follow all the productivity blogs.
There’s two approaches when you look at productivity. One approach is you go one-hundred percent into a process even if it’s like a diet. You subscribe to a thesis, you follow it down to the metal, and you say, “Okay is it ultimately working for me?” And in some ways this is very similar if you work in a sales organization, your VP of sales or manager will pass a process on to you, and some VP of sales would say “No, I just need XYZ and you just need to manage your own process” Whatever it is, just like a diet.
The other way is you read all these books and you draw your own conclusions and see what works for you. And I’m definitely a subscriber to the latter, because I’ve tried different things and I’ve taught different things and so I’ll just give you an example. I’m a big believer in taking notes. Not just take notes, but how to action on them. And I do believe that when you remember things that you have to do, because your mind is always moving. You’re always thinking about things. You could even be at a recreational dinner with friends and you just realize something or you forgot something. You gotta write it down.
So I heavily use SIRI or my phone to voice record things that I remember when I’m driving or when I’m out and about and I don’t have time to type it in and I’ll just save and side note, “Go through these in the morning” and then translate them back down into my to do list. And that’s been very useful for me to be able to capture those to dos that I might remember in a shower, or in the car, because if you don’t write them down you’re ultimately going to forget them or it’s going to cause you stress because you’re going to try to remember them the whole drive and then you’re going to get back and then write it down. And so that’s just like one little trick in my list of things that I do that work for me.
Eric: Cool. I totally agree with writing things down. So, the SIRI command, what command do you tell them; to add a note? What are you telling her to do?
Raj: Auto-reminder.
Eric: Auto-reminder. Got it. Okay. So, auto-reminder guys. Final question what’s one must read book for the audience?
Raj: Geez, you know, I’ve read a lot of books. I am really enjoying right now “The Hard Things about Hard Things”.
Eric: You’re the fourth guy to say that on this show.
Raj: But, you know I will tell you that’s mostly because I’m reading it right now. And there’s another great book called “Lean Analytics” [inaudible 0:45:51.1] is fantastic. I probably…It’s more than just for the mind. I think “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” one of the tricky things in reading that book is some of those experiences you only feel at certain levels of scale, so if you’re an entrepreneur of two or three people you can’t identify with all these sort of different examples, but if you’re an entrepreneur with twenty, thirty people, or fifty, sixty people, or two-hundred people, you can sort of identify with different sorts of experiences. You can almost use it like a reference book. But funny that I’m the fourth person, so it must be a good book.
Eric: It’s fantastic. I’ve read it too and I’m actually considering sending it to all my employees too. I don’t know.
Raj: Another one that was very moving for me personally was Steve Job’s biography.
Eric: Mmhmm.
Raj: The reason why I think it’s a great business book is it; after you read that book and you start looking at user experiences in apps you become attuned to a whole other level of detail that you never noticed before. If you never really thought about the design of things to that sort of level of granularity and that was an eye-opener for me. Because when would look at things I would look at things and, “Yeah, this feels good.” And then after reading that book I was, “Wow! This doesn’t feel right. This doesn’t feel right.”
Not in a sort of egotistical way or an arrogant way, just more like…I just never noticed and my analog there is for those people who are watching this if they’re married; you have to plan a wedding and when you plan a wedding you start going into all these details and all of a sudden every wedding you attend after that wedding you notice everything. You’re like, “Wow!” what color napkin that was and why they put little sprinkles there, and all the weddings that you attended before that you never noticed. But you become attuned to these things when you go to the boxes of that planning and so, I think that book is very good at sort of getting your mind more design centric.
Eric: Yeah, I know. Fantastic book. You actually read through the whole thing or did you listen to the thing.
Raj: I read the whole thing.
Eric: Cool. Great. I think it’s actually been tough for me to get through. So I just had to audio book it through, but Raj thanks so much for joining us. I think a lot of good insight here and definitely hope to have you on the show again sometime soon.
Raj: Alright. Thank you so much
Eric: Thank you.
Raj: Bye.
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