hi everybody today I chat with Zach Hof co-founder and CEO of tightnit a platform that takes Community Building inside slack to a whole new level we cover how he got started in the exciting world of B2B and the various path he took towards becoming an entrepreneur now this really great chat that touches upon community building it's one of those topics that is happening during a time when online communities are either too fragmented or too siloed behind wall Gardens or in some cases just made obsolete because of AI so this a really fun chat and it covers a lot of interesting topics so let's get started Zach it's great to chat with you you know for those of you watching or listening Zach and I cross paths at

Salesforce many years ago and you know and Zach has been do a lot of interesting things around the community since then and that's partly why I wanted to pick his brains and just chat about all kinds of fun stuff that is going on so thank you Zach for joining and yeah and as always I like to start by asking what do you do who are you

yeah no thanks groupa um thank you for having me it's exciting to you know catch up with you um so yeah my name is Zach Hawtof I am the CEO co-founder and Community manager for a company called Titan it uh and I we help build a community platform for slack so we primarily serve B2B companies that want to build customer communities inside of slack whether it's gamification events forums SEO AI agents all the things one needs to build a great unified Community experience so that it's a long story of how I got that right and I think we'll cover a little bit of that but you know K and I met when I was at Salesforce years ago uh I was started as engineer left as director product of what was

called The Experience Cloud before that it was called the community Cloud so I've been in the community space for a very long time um and yeah I'm excited to chat more about that and as well as like anything going on in your world too yeah now definitely want to touch about the community angl b a bit because

that's something that I care about a lot and have like had to fight all the various systems that make community building so difficult in this new world of where you have limited tension you a lot of products that are competing for it and then people also just you know the definition of community has shifted greatly from back then as well but before that though you like to always go with the very beginning Z you know you're working in Tech you're working in community building all that what was the motivate you know how did you get started what was your first time where you're like you know what I want to work with computers I want to work with tech

do all these things yeah uh I mean so I was very lucky that my dad uh worked at HP as his first like real job so my dad was in uh Tech sales he started as like an electrical engineer kind of missed that computer science wave of like where that was going to go but he jumped into Tech sales at HP and you know always worked at like kind of tech adjacent businesses funny enough Kupa my dad did go to a dream Force like way back in the day like well before you and I probably would have been able to go to one of those so um but you know we had a computer at home uh I was always on the computer I know like one of those 90s

kids that just kind of like saw it and was like wow there's so much going on and the internet was just kind of getting started and all of that um and you know I can still make all those jokes about like reading through incarta like just being able to get content at scale and like search for things uh was a huge thing for me and then I ended up you know getting excited about websites the first like what I can remember the first time I like tried to get into building websites was with Dream Weaver I don't know if you ever used Dream Weaver back in the day I still used

Dream Weaver by the way dream waver I

love to hear that I don't even know what dream waver looks like now but yeah back then it they haven't updated you know it

still says 2021 or something so every New Year I'm going like you know the core part of my tech tack is going to be you know going away at some point in the future from like an OS update or something that changes but yeah it's a as you'll find out later Zach I live a very dangerous life where all my danger is on the tech tools I buil my

everything on wait you're telling me that you have sites still built on

Dreamweaver today yeah absolutely it started off using you know the free versions of the browser tools n composer front page Express which came with like in Explorer andscape you know and I started off using that and then I switched over to front page because they had this thing called server extensions which meant that on your server they could automatically do before PHP and you know CGI was part of it but you know you didn't it was all abstract away I could just build things without really having any idea how it worked but it basically locked you into any kind of a sering server plan that had the front page server extensions as a part of it and so that went on Happily for a very

long time and there were things like serers side includes which front page called include page components I was able to templatized off yeah and so for me every new page I create is a file save as of an existing page and I changed the title and things like that and so except for like the header and footer and common elements the entire thing is a like a lital duplicate copy of all these things and I created way too much content over the years where I can't go back and recreate all of this and and modernize it and so on and when front page was killed off and then expression web became it replacement and I was on the expression team at Microsoft where I was right next

to the team that built all this I'm like okay you know I'm right in the middle of like working on something that is core to what I'm you know always interested in and then that of course went away as well and Dream Weaver is the only one left at this point and I'm also you know knowing full well that the the road for that is not you know is not never ending it's I I can see a cliff at the edge of it I just don't know where it is but yeah it does terrify me every now and

then that's amazing I truly think you're one of the like only people I know that still actually probably has touched dream wever in a decade like that's the I'm impress I'm impressed it's still even running on the operating system so

that's I mean it it barely runs I'll tell you that because you know that same at least like inserting images Now doesn't work as usually used to be least used to be like I'm going to make a relative path now it's like hardcoded to my full hard drive I a good manually tweak these kind of things all the modern support for like CSS variables and so on not supported so when I open up a document I created I have to like actually paste in some like actual hardcoded values so it knows how to render it it's not even using like a modern browser still trying to figure out if flash is installed you're like it probably is exactly it's probably trying to figure out let me get a pre-loader

set up for you so if you're on like ie4 you'll get this active X object and if you're not you'll get like you know this

JavaScript object I mean I love this tangent like that is an amazing thing to learn that you are still on Dreamweaver and I am terrified for you uh and you're

going to have pay for a web host I I pay for a server you know I pay like $8 a month now because all I need is FTP access and Apache installed for server side includes and that's it I don't need anything else like if I need something I have a PHP dat a PHP and a myal database that I need but all that stuff is like no longer needed and and so I will say yeah you were probably far more technical as a young person than I was I was still trapped in the HTML and CSS of it all which kind of worked out because I ended up being primarily a front-end engineer uh right after that but like that was the I was not I wish I could go

back and you know after you've read you know Malcolm gladwell's 10,000 hours you're like dang if only I had actually gone back and worked a little harder on just not no no I think you focused on

all the right things here so I think you're you're just fine

iy I I wouldn't be using like Dream Weaver and front page and using server extensions and like they include page component which is basically a Microsoft Centric wrapper on the server that includes in Apache so they could have said like just use Apache makes it portable of course Microsoft Clan was like let not make it portable how you always be tied into this and it wasn't until my web host media Temple emailed me saying like you know of all of our customers are the only one that's using this front server extension thing that we have for Unix is there any way you can get off of it so you can like you know save time and migrating I'm like I didn't know that but absolutely let me

see what it's going to take to be able to do this well that's I'm gonna have to

yeah I'll go look at the your the code on your site later and just see uh yeah

I have a video and and an article on exactly like what I how I an article gets published on the website because people keep asking me this all the time they're like what do you do here you know but I will say that in a world of CDN that kind of like you know make it easy to not have a more powerful server and my forums are part of by Discord it's an entirely different instance altogether so that is running on like a more modern stack when was on V bulletin it was like PHP my squel and and all of that but so I there are parts of it that are more modern but the core thing that I you know all the content I create

though it's all very much old school

fascinating I mean I'm excited to see What Becomes of the next transition for you so yeah anyway Your Dream Weaver was different than mine I was building like a let's see at the time I think I was building like an alt music site um and uh you know that was like what I was trying to focus on was like oh I could build a oh can you still hear me kba

well I can hear you just fine just

talking to my daughter oh no worries uh yeah and then I mean I had no plans to be in computer science like I actually got so I went to Berkeley um I was headed as an econ major but you know you're already hearing the word Berkeley and you're like how did that guy not go into computer science well that was obviously what happened right like I got into Berkeley and I was like all right clearly these kids know something that I don't um and I just kind of like saw all of these incredible Engineers that were so like thinking about like the future and I was like all right I got hooked so I basically swapped day one from being an econ major into a computer science

major and you know it kicked my ass it's a very hard program um but you know it's funny because after like a year at Berkeley you learn enough that you can be pretty dangerous on on the web so um you know through a lot of the internships I worked on uh first one was a a company called Cloud Elements which later got acquired by uipath uh and then I worked at another company in San Francisco called um at the time it was called The Practice Fusion ended up getting acquired later on for other stories is EHR system and then after that was Salesforce right and actually that was like really the start of my career uh was learning like I I was one of the few kids that prior to 18

had heard of Salesforce only because of his own dad like I actually had some understanding of it um and I I had an offer from Salesforce in apple and I didn't want to live in the peninsula that was actually like one of the biggest reasons I went with Salesforce was I was like well if I could choose Salesforce I living in the city is so much easier I don't have to commute and really looking back on it I'm like I love that because we now live in a world where a community over an hour and a half is just like that's the thing that we're all trying to avoid so um really worked out in in that's kind of like how I ended up at Souls first

and working with you I mean it's not

just the you know the geographic version of like you know I I want to live here or not there that's your decision between it somewhere along the way you were like I want to work in Enterprise B2B like that's what my future looks like I look ahead you know I'm like what's going to happen that's where I want to be not consumers not Hardware not cool Tech I want to work where hard

problems with real money is you you know how I actually describe it and it's kind of a you would almost think it's the opposite but I actually think of consumer Tech as more lonely if that makes any sense because your job is to create technology for potentially millions of people there's no ability for you to really connect with those individuals the same way you can with like B2B technology where some businesses have less than a 100 customers like you know you can connect with your customer in a way that you you cannot with B Toc Tech and like I'm a I'm very much a people person and like the idea of building technology where you know you're like Mark Zuckerberg and two billion people are using your

product like that's not exactly what I wanted to go do I wanted to actually like meet people and I think B2B is like one of those ironically you're like oh it's it's boring B2B but I actually think it's so much more people driven than B to C Tech which is where I where I

thrive that's actually a great way of describing it you're right the the high touch connection is great if you're a people person which you are and B2B is

the place for that yeah if you're an analytics brain which I am not that person go b2c like that's I like I one of my pieces of advice to a lot of like B to cpms versus B2 BPM PM I'm like bet the cpms you got to be good at data you have to understand analytics you have to understand AB testing you have to kind of understand experimentation like you are making decisions based on massive numbers of individuals and understanding experimentation will be kind of part of that play be to B it's kind of funny you can talk to if you just go out and talk to 25 30 of your customers you end up discovering a majority of the problems with the business just by going and

speaking to them so I tell like a lot of people if you want to be a B2B PM you have to be speaking to your customers all of the time uh because especially nowadays right with you think of like the whole growth of what AI is going to do the product management space but I'm like you have to be thinking about marketing you have to be thinking about like problems sales all of that as a product manager because you either go that direction or you're developing more Tech faster uh or both because realistically we're we're running into this world where we're all getting squeezed and squeezed because we can all scale now

10x so how did you make that decision to go down this path you know a part of me is like you're graduating from Berkeley and you already have it all well defined you know exactly what you're going to do you have the exact same articulated point of view of why you want to do

these things yeah I mean one some advice I got which is I always knew I was going to join a startup and you'd say oh why would guy who wants to join a startup join Salesforce a clearly not a startup um and I think what some really interesting piece of advice that I got was uh you have this opportunity to join like a bigname business that has done it right for so long and it's a great logo to have on your resume and you're saying you know I say that and it actually is so meaningful nowadays so like the one of the things that I can always back to is say look I helped build the communities for Google Disney and Home Depot how many of my like fellow

Community leaders can say that they were part of those platforms right like that is I have seen the the peak of what an Enterprise Community platform looks like so now in our current space as a small business delivering Community platforms it nothing scares me as they get bigger and larger we're we're now sock 2 type 2 compliant earlier than most of our competitors because we understood that that was going to be a requirement so early on and I think that's something you can really only learn in a big business is how things end up if that makes sense it's not a startup right you're not pushing at the same scale but you can see how things end up and when you go to a startup you

don't get to to get in that Rhythm there's not a strong rhythm in startups you don't have a Cadence you don't have a day-to-day I I I don't know if you guys cuss on this this platform but I yeah you can cuss all right is changing every frecking day like you are constantly dealing with fires it is just part of the lifestyle and it's exciting for sure but it's something that I think if you're if you're trying to figure out what fits you it's good to do both there it's not not like one is more virtuous or moral than the other they're both just they're both good jobs in different ways and I think that helped me as I went from a I went from you know a

massive B2B company I jumped to a series B and now I'm in a you know a small business where I'm at the top of the point here and that's a total different landscape change and I think I've gotten to see how each of these businesses operate at each scale and it really does Teach You How to Build a Better Business from the ground

up the you you're running a startup right now and in some ways do you feel like the the kind of description you used of like startups is being you know very spontaneous not a little bit of like unpredictable and all of that does it also apply to you or do you think that in this case because you have all this experience having worked at companies and seeing like how well-run organizations are typically operating that you're able to kind of balance out some of the usual high-speed chaos that

starts bring with them I think we have a strong understanding of what's next and that's that's lucky right like I think you know if you you're if you start at a startup and you never get to see what's next you're guessing the whole time right but like we know where we're going to be in five years like I can see what's going to happen right we are going to be the number one Enterprise B2B Community platform on the market I know what that looks like I know what we need to build to get there and I know who I need to hire in order to make that happen because I've been there before and I know what I need to do in order to do it and I know where the problems were

in the previous job I know where where we went wrong I know where like you know we got distracted uh we even have built things Kupa like where we had solved this problem at Salesforce and we had to later change it because it didn't match the needs so we knew upfront what what and how we should build it so that we wouldn't have to migrate in the future right and like that comes with experience right like not like a lot of new companies there's no previous example of those companies so it's like very hard for me to imagine some of these AI companies are truly Innovative uh that is one of the hardest companies to build is a truly innovative business where there's no like incumbent

that you're beating you're basically creating a market that did not pro like previously exist and it's hard I mean that's a really hard space to be in because no one can really give you guidance you're the first you're the first mover into that but we are not a true and I say this I say this actually proudly right we're not a true AI company we're an applied AI company we solve a human problem and I'm definitely going to use AI to do it but AI is not how I pitch our company we are we are building with AI to solve a problem that could not be solved I do not care and neither do my customers care if I'm an AI company if I can solve the problem

better than they had it before so you

know what exactly does your company do

yeah great question um so let me first describe the problem I think that's a good way to start so uh slack is a very popular Community platform and it has been almost since the beginning but if you ask anyone on the slack team or anyone who's on like you using slack as a community platform they'll tell you slack is not a community platform and yet it is the most popular Community platform in the market today so 25% of all communities are built on slack and so when we said all right we want to go build the next generation of a community platform we realized instead of trying to rip people out of where their members want to be where they actually want to collaborate what if we could bring the

community platform to you so we built Titan it inside of slack it's a it's a native slack application and a n and a web platform powered by versel that allows you to build forums events gamification uh onboarding you know AI agents all inside of slack and so now you know as a community you don't have to sacrifice leaving slack in order to actually build your space and I think that that's the really big win is being able to see customers finally go like that deep breath of oh I don't have to leave slack now I now can bring the community to me rather than try to rip all of my 2500 Plus members into a new system that they've never used before and hope for the best that things are

going to work

out that is very cool so are you an app inside slack or are you taking the slack data and users and building a layer on

top of it both uh so we are both an app in slack and uh a essentially like you've mentioned almost like an oem layer we take slack and turn it into a community platform so some examples for us so if you go to community. clay.com or community. miix panel.com you'll actually see tightnit operating for those communities and those are some of our fastest growing communities on the platform because what they've been able to do is take all this incredible content and Del deliver it into a customized forum and so it's it's really a new layer of thinking about slack less as a a both literal and metaphorical black box and turning it into a fullon almost like a slack CMS a digital layer that can sit outside of slack and power

the growth and marketing tools for your

business yeah very cool and I just went to commun dec.com and me he join the commun and joined the slack group and then from there it all so s of Truth is still going to be slack and the permissions and whatever the organization might have specified for who is allowed and not allowed but once you're in you now have the option of interfacing with the content in a nice way through this more Community focused user experience as opposed to the slacks more chat-based real time experience

yeah I mean we we do say we're the first modern conversational Forum if that makes any sense right so like you've got you know your old school forums you know the ones that you've got like on discourse where it's like you come in you post you wait four hours you get an email you come back you post again right that's that's how forums have existed since you've been on Dream Weaver

like even today today even today I have a discourse for them it's exactly how it

operates right and then there was this new generation of communities that kind of came out almost around when like slack and IRC channels just started to form is you could create these conversational communities right these spaces where where you could actually collaborate with others in real time and so you have your slacks your discords your whatsapps those are all you know large community platforms and what we've realized is you need to have both it's not like you should only have one or the other what you do need is a conversational space which is truly Best Built For This future AI world right we want to have it where you can collaborate with agents and humans and solve problems and you can also meet people in personalized new

ways in real time great great answer to kind of the future world we live in where 24hour slas are just not what we need to promise for our customers anymore so that's one side and then the other side digital forums are amazing for Discovery and no matter what people are saying Google is not going away anytime soon the last you know it is still growing massively from a Google search perspective and not only that AI llms like actually do learn from scraping the internet and so all of that content needs to be discoverable somehow so if you have all this amazing content locked away in your chat systems how do you expand that in this future AI world where you like the the how do I put this

the the value of a business in the future is how much awareness and Discovery is out there right you want to be part of these llm answers you want to have your content and your information out on the web and you know whether whether we like it or not right llms still work on Web 2.0 that is how they train that is how they discover that is how they grow that is how they'll continue to grow until there's some new layer that allows human Discovery to advance so anyway that's my long- winded story of how those two things are all

connected no that makes a lot of sense to me because you know because I do run a forum and I've seen the ups and downs of it over the years you know I can see that the current model of forms run is definitely not for new users you know it's like you if you're kind nostalgic for the old world of doing things you're probably going to do this otherwise you're going to join a Discord Community or a slack Community or Reddit or something like that where there real ESS is almost like expected as a part of it you know people are probably less patient now than they were back then and so for them there's an opportunity to like get an answer quickly as opposed to

waiting for a peri of time you're not going to take the less shorter longer path and also the idea back then was forums were great because they were community in their own ways you know people with different interests kind of came in they con a common topic and they just had fun this is before there was Twitter LinkedIn you know Facebook wasn't really a big thing all these like isolated communities are on specific interest didn't quite exist whereas before when I look at my Forum specifically you know it has about 20,000 members and you know not as active as it used to be but people still post on a regular basis the kind of things that people post about now are very transactional whereas before it was

kind of like hey just got back from school and like I'm doing I'm playing this video game what's going on that kind of a conversation now either happens with your real life friends on Facebook or it happens on a very specific gamer specific Forum so what has happened is like the the you know used to be broad communities were like Broad in like topics and interest all those individual topics now go deep into very specific silos LinkedIn for your career and you know profile dribble for like all your design kind of focused content and so what has happened is like you've seen this bifurcation in some ways where Community is no longer one thing it's many things and how do you kind of collect you know connect the

dots across all of your community

profiles yeah and I I mean the even the word Community can be a struggle for a lot of people right like it can mean so many different things depending on who you're speaking to and you know I think what we have seen with social networks is that it's much more focused on audience building than connection and Community right it's more about and you can see this right like Tik Tok is a great example of a social network that bypassed the groups concept it just said you know what we're going to connect People to People they have never met before and create these massive audiences at scale that people can actually grow their business on and I'm not saying an audience is not valuable it's just different than a community

right and what we used to have I remember like the golden day of Facebook groups that was amazing right it was like finally you had a space where you could create these Niche kind of communities and actually facilitate and participate in them and then you know I don't I don't know what happened right they had the momentum I don't think there are still Facebook groups and they still exist today and they're still very much leverage but they're not at the same capacity that they were you know at the time that I was using them and then uh I'll make this argument LinkedIn groups never got it right I think that was a a Miss still today and the fact they still even have it there is odd to me but

Reddit I think got this right so Reddit ended up creating a space where you know you could essentially find these hyper Niche groups and collaborate and comments and talk about problems and the trust building of the internet we'll talk a little I think we should talk a little bit about the future of SEO because I think it actually is important let's do that yeah um but Reddit uh ended up getting this really right and you've seen the growth of Reddit as like a trusted source for content and for people but what I am finding is one of the downsides of Reddit is you as a business you as a community do not own content right it is not wh labeled it is on reddit.com and the reddits reddit's

goal is not to keep you on one Community its goal is to expand you into many different ways um and so I think that is that's something that we're starting to see this next generation of how do I take and own my community as a white labeled platform how do I bring it back into our ecosystem and try to build build a business where Community is at the center of it because one of the things that I tell people is look technology is clearly no longer remote I have found we all talk about it now right the fact that these apps allow you to build Tech so much faster last night I was at a versel vzero Meetup and we're watching it build the entire app during

the call right like what's that going to look like in a year what's that going to look like in two years it's very clear that technology and and application development is just going to go from these small hobbyist apps and continue to expand and expand and expand so your distribution moat is actually going to be the big thing can you build a community as strong as Kupa can right can you have people that have communities where for 27 years they've been relying you on you because the future of businesses is thinking is there a story involved is the brand itself something I trust is it something I know is going to survive and is it something where even if they're not the first one to build the tool or the app

they're listening to me as the customer and they are going to get there and I'm willing to work and wait with them because I so strongly connect with their story and what they're going to help me do as a business that I want to stay with that company and that is what you should be thinking about like when starting a company is less about your Tech because Tech clearly is going to get swapped out left and right but can you build a platform can you build a place where people feel connected to actually sustaining a long-term business model with

agree we also about stickiness you know what is going to create sticky users in your world it's you know number one is like a personal connection you know they know you they know the company and all that the second one is a personal connection with other people that are also going to be a part of it because you can always replicate teching replicated look and feel of it we can't the people along so whenever you talk about like acquiring companies and someone is like you can acquire the technology great but is the technology the reason why people are staying or is the ecosystem it enables you if you have a platform of you know integration so have platform of like communities that's really what the value is you know you

look at like stack Overflow being acquired by you know the private Equity Firm like you know several years ago I'm pretty sure they didn't buy it for like basically discourse their free you know open source software that you can use for it is really the network effects of like this large community of people that are like you know pretty much like invested so much of themselves into it that they're going to keep coming back because the sun cost is huge even something brand new comes up it's like the center of gravity is already here unless it's something drastically game-changing I'm not going to change and I'm already happy being a part of this group and being part of this community so I think that's very valid

you talked about you know why did Facebook groups and like forums and all these things kind of kind of decrease I think it's a little bit of a world where back in the day to create a forum or a place for someone needs to go you need to have a little bit of more Tech savviness you know it wasn't a case where you can just go click a button have it working you kind of need to like understand like how to configure some server get some database password and and things like that wasn't a lot but for the average person it was more so it was kind of like like you had walled Gardens where a handful of people created communities and often times it

was in their particular style and how it needed to needed to go and so that's was like a i' say like the world you know early days of like forums and what made it work then he has in like Myspace where it's like you know what it doesn't matter what a central Authority says think should be I can actually make it look like my own personality my own personal is going to shine through in all these things and then you had like then forums evolved a bit to have like theming and like even customize look and feel for their own purposes but were all just like you know it's like yeah it's cool but it's not truly mine but it was still hard to build your own forum and

even if you built your own how do you get people to actually start using it so you always had to go to places where you know large population centers you know popular websites popular destinations where people are going to be there and then you try to create these things for yourself but I think what we've seen with like Twitter and Linkedin and so on is that it's no longer about a central Authority having the visibility each individual can now be a you know an authority of their own like they have their own Persona their own profile so instead of the them being a small part of a bigger Community they're a big part of many different communities and you have your personal brand you're carrying

around with you you know everyone talks about what's how many Twitter followers do you have you know what's your LinkedIn you know profile there's a company called I forget the name of it you know they they gave you a social media score based on how it must crop or maybe not crop but some it was a very short name but it scan all your social media profiles and so on and give you a number that talked about like you know know how influential you were and and those were all things that people cared about and that cannot be done when you're contributing everything to a community run by someone else or in some other organization and I think that's where we saw this shift from like you

know centralized communities to this decentralized world where I'm going to be a you know a top follower on LinkedIn or on Pinterest or in all these areas where the idea of like me building my own audience I cannot do it on my own I don't need someone else to like help me along the way and what I find fascinating about what you're doing here is that the hardest part of many communities oftentimes is like okay what does day zero look like you know how do I get the first person to post how do I get people to sign up and so on whereas slack is pretty much a community's own way people have been using it for a long time inside organizations that's a large

amount of content there the day Zero problem is in some ways in my opinion is solved it's like yeah all my existing slack members are now part of the community they're going to go about doing the things that they always have done it just so happens to now be viewed through another you know another ux layer of like the community lens of it so if someone fresh is coming in they're like oh this seems a very buzzing happening place as opposed to a typical Community where you're like okay I'm posting it seems like only one person's been posting for the last two years straight no there's been no real response except for it's like rare random spammer that they didn't know delete and so I think what you're doing

is that solves this problem very nicely by taking problems of the back in the day providing a nice modern spin on it but still connecting with the AL UL imate human desire to feel connected with the products in the community and

things like that yeah and I mean just elaborating more on what you're saying like you know a lot of people confus like oh you know this guy loves slack it's like slack is the thing that he cares about I'm like no no no no that's not what I'm after what I'm after is the lowest friction way to create a community slack is that answer I have a thesis that this is the this is our belief and this is why we're sticking to it and it's why we've built our business around SL if it wasn't slack I would have gone a different direction it's this this uh like as a especially as a product thinker or as even like a thinking customer first your job is like

what I tell everybody is like if you want to build a business especially in B2B good example if you want to build a business in B2B your job is to think how do I get my customer promoted how do I give my customer more time how do I get my customer to be a happier individual and then you go figure out what to build like do that first say if if there's nothing that you need to build in order to make that happen do not build anything go and solve the problem because I think people so often think they need to build the thing first in order to show that there's something viable here but if you can create a services company that does this better

if you can even just create documentation and courses that do does this better than a product ever could go do that because there is so much value to be created outside of products products are the last thing you should build it's the it's the final thing when you have no other options to go and build new tech and that's why so many products still are built is because there is this this larger and larger Circle and products sit on the outside but there's little dots of value all within this circle of kind of the life we live in and you find so many business opportunities creating courses and content to teach people about products that already exist new ways to use them and that is a value opportunity in

itself right and so I think that's where Community really comes in is it's it's a It's All About Learning and connection and I've had many many debates about which of those two things is more important I think it's a useless debate personally I think it is one of those where some are connection and some is learning right they solve different problems and different statements but that's where where Community kind of sits is your job is to not show someone like how cool your product is it is to show them how like your product can enhance their lives the way that is it has enhanced other people's lives and um if you want to start building a community a lot of people I run into think think incorrectly they're like how

do I get to a thousand people I'm like I don't care if you get to a thousand people get to one person solve one solve that first one person problem can you get one person to give a about what you do if you can do that you can get two people to give a about what you do and then three people and then eventually I run out of fingers on my hand and finally you've got a community that actually actively cares about what you're building and is going to recommend you to others and that is the growth model around community building that more people need to think about very often they think of it as if they're like building an audience they have to impress people they have to show off

they have to do all these things but the authen it of giving someone your time and and making a difference one step at a time is really how you build a strong

Network yeah that is 100% true and the nice about communities is that the network effects allten kick in so with each person you bring in who's like convinced of the value that you're bringing in they're going to bring in a handful of people of their own and that's is going to strengthen the community overall like the flywheel effect for Community is often found is probably much faster than like most other things you study about know products and and things like that so I think it's it's a great way of thinking about it so you know before we get to the topic of SEO I notice that now you live in New York so it seems like the the concern about you know between like you know downtown San Francisco and and

East Bay and on all of that or Peninsula no longer applies so what made you decide you know what I'm gonna shift and I'm gonna move to the other side of the

country I mean I think for me it was truly to try something new one of the like I'll say this as a tech guy right like one of the fun things about moving to New York is I got to say oh I used to work this company called Salesforce and more often than not I was getting people go what's that and I'm like oh oh my God I'm outside of the bubble right like I think that was that was just a more of a personal thing the other thing is I see New York vastly growing in the startup space and I do tell a lot of startup leaders there are some industries that I think are going to do better and the tech scene here than they will back in

San Francisco so obviously if you're building an AI Dev tools company you're probably going to end up being an SF there are a few in New York but obviously the center of gravity is still very much in sancisco but I'm building a community company that happens to use AI right yes we are a tech company we do serve B2B but the the number of individuals that I help are not sole like B2B providers right they are thinking about how to grow and New York is very much of that like growth mind mindset a lot of the businesses here are incredibly human first they're super Community Driven because the people of New York are just very much built like that you go out you go see people you go

to events you collaborate um and I do think that it is this new burgeoning tech scene for New York and I'm really excited about being here kind of in that growth cycle of it

no that's really cool you know like I had a hunch that was going to be your answer but I because we talked about your decision on where you want to know basically set the first step of your career on geography I just figured I'll bring it up one more time in this case

no I mean thank you for yeah I'm a big fan of New York I think if you're you know if you're a a Founder trying to decide between San Francisco and New York the it I love SF I'm not I actually have nothing against SF people that move to New York and leave SF they're like oh I hated SF I actually love San Francisco I love New York and I love San Francisco and they are both great times in my life the thing that I think New York has that just cannot be beat is that energy it's like the energy that you you even know about without even living here it is a nonstop energy uh if you like that kind of energy and you like to be around

those kind of people this is a great place to be if you like to you know be a little more chill it's probably best to stay in the Bay Area um and I think that's that's the way I see I mean the technology Market is going to constantly adapt and change right San Francisco will not be the Hub of everything forever for Tech it it will change and adapt and evolve and that's just the way things operate so I'm very bullish on the New York Tech scene is how you can

see it very very cool so let's talk about SEO let's talk about yes content

and SEO yeah I mean this is something I mean you know as someone who works at Google this is also something I love to to chat with you about what we have found and what others have found as well and you know no one person I've learned ever even I've spoken to many people like Google no one person knows the algorithm of how content is decided I think everyone thinks that like there's one person in Google who fully understands it all that is not the case there are hundreds of people that have their own algorithms running across all of Tech inside of Google search so what but the one very noticeable thing that we have started to see is the downfall of like the niche blog world and the

growth of the niche Community world and the reason that we have seen this start to happen is everybody in their grandmother can write a blog now it's like it's a 5-second activity of write me a Blog about X Y and Z and cover XY and Z topics and then it's built it's done and yes we want to add new content we want to add like that personal brand to it but even that is starting to get like pushed away into these AI systems that begin to learn and right like us so it's this very new landscape for Content that we've started to actually go back to that authentic content of you know who cares about pure grammar and I I'm sure people are freaking out right now

about that but like that's kind of this new world we've moved into short little sentences comments replies hundred threads where we were actually exploring mult multiple viewpoints in real time right there's arguments there's agreements there's all sorts of elements of like a community conversation that it's not just a single Viewpoint it's multiple viewpoints so you can balance all of the content with ju opposing views and Google's noticed that people like that and they have started to move Reddit to the top Kora to the top even stack Overflow to the top of Google search as well as Niche blogs so we have a we have a someone got very excited about SEO and wanted to join us um yes yes pixel decided to make a oh I love that you're cat's name is

pixel um but that's what's happened right so like we are and you and I search the same way how often do you type in like a search space re e d d t enter right it's it's the new search forum and as a business you want to be able to own more of the conversations around your business to be able to generate more interest to be able to show people that you're not just a dis like a discussion form for answering questions you are also running advocacy programs and learning programs and you've got member directories to show off your partners and your ambassadors and all the different Community programs that are outside of customer support so like the fun thing about Community is that about 30% of the time it's in under

the marketing team about 30% of the time it's under the customer sport team and 40% is an other but that handshake deal is being done between Community marketing and customer support for building a great platform that handles both because I think that is how customers operate we solve our problem and then we want to learn about the next thing and then we solve that problem and then we want to learn about the next thing and I think I'm trying to make sure that department leaders do not like create this dichotomy of the goals there because bringing those two things together is so much more powerful than

leaving them apart yeah and also there an authenticity element as well in with Community specifically you know when I look at a blog post or some I'm like you know at this point I'm like if I I generate it or go through like eight rounds of reviews for all personalities tripped out of it there's always you know you have have an agenda and like how you write about it we worked at big companies so we know how like posts get put up there it's never the case of like I was going to be straight with my customers I'm going to be like you know give the real deal of what's Happening no it has to be like couched in like many layers of like you know some legal

e but also like various things of just I'm going to say PM art and like how do you say something without actually saying anything whereas if I go to Reddit or stack Overflow I'm just getting the exact unfiltered version of it yes grammatical errors and all because that just makes it seem more relevant and so yeah I do not work in the search area at Google and I know I'm I'm a beneficiary of the improvements they make but I have no idea how it all works out also but I do look if I look at my own personal bias like what I typically click on if there is a link for uh you know Community or something like that I'm like yeah I'm going to

trust a Reddit answer especially in the last couple of years more so than I am like a long complicated article you know pick any topic like what's the best light bulb to get I'm almost guaranteed that once I dig through like all the advertisement based links that the first Reddit post or a post from some Community where people are actively discussing light bulbs because they love light bulbs is going to give me the best answer over that of anybody else even a company created like bulb they have an agenda and so for me Community is just like one step closer to getting the real answer as opposed to it being abstracted

away by you know agendas and I think it goes back to also like what what is a transactional versus a non-transactional conversation right like if Kupa needs to you know figure out this problem and he does not care if it's a human that tells him the exact answer go for it but if it's like you said what's the best light bulb out there and a and a robot said this is the best light bulb you're like not sure I'm buying it as a robot who literally cannot see light that you are going to tell me what light bulb is the best right you want to actually hear it from a human being who has a shared experience from you and you want the best human being answer about what the

best light bulb is and that that's the thing about like these non-transactional conversations you want to be part of more of those and you want all of the transactional stuff in your life the day-to-day operations of like just solve this stupid problem so I can get on to the more interesting and creative elements that's the stuff I'm very excited about AI really taking away from us and on the non-transactional side I'm excited about AI connecting us faster to the answers that we want to see from other humans I think that is the the future of AI on the customer front is can we use AI to bring people closer together because we can unlock discoveries and give them upfront knowledge about the questions they should be asking and about like what is

the background of this individual that allows us to suddenly go oh my God you know the the it's those moments when you're like 30 or 40 minutes through your conversation and you realize you both went to a certain school or you both know that certain person yeah is AI going to bring us closer together faster because we can suddenly see like all of the things that we wouldn't have been able to surface that quickly yeah

imagine in some ways it's like a very powerful CRM as I'm like replying to you the a are just like oh by the way you know Zach went to Berkeley you know you might want to add I'm like okay that's actually cool to know like you know I can add these kind of details in but what is your take on AI itself mimicking human beings you know a common conversation happens especially among many forums is like you know what what why have a community that gets like maybe 10 posts a day want I make it 100 posts a day where 90 of them are by AI assistants chatting with other AI assistants and they are still adding valuable content it's not like they're basically just you know doing random

things they ask questions that are aligned with what your community is about so if it's a light bulb Community it's like you know which light bulb is better LED or you know what other kind of things and then other AIS come in and reply giving you the illusion of a lively environment so pretty much everyone I've met has a Hardline answer on this right they either say I'm so against it I can't believe people are you know impersonating others and then there's either the other side where it's like no no I can scale you know so much further and so much faster and I kind of

sit in the middle um I think there is there you know there are so many different views and takes on it I think the there are a few different ways to look at it um one is it's an incredible equalizing experience for a lot of people that did not come from opportunity like I am so lucky to have had gone to Berkeley I have many of the things that I do not worry about the same way others have to think about these problems and so suddenly if is an ability for someone to you know create an ad for instance where you know they aren't a super model and people are like trying to see a super modelesque person they can do that and it's you one would

say oh it's unfair but it also is an equalizing experience it gives you accessibility to these tools to go and accomplish kind of things that you weren't you didn't not have the cards to go do and that's pretty cool to see at the same time it depends on how you use it right I think the deception that can be created with these experiences uh the the number of abilities of actually H like do you want to be loved for something that is not you right I think that is something I I ask every influencer is if you could have a million more followers right now but it was not you that did this these people do not know you they do not understand you would you still do it and

I think that is a tough question to answer because it is it's you some people say yes and some people will say no and I'm not sure the people that say yes or the people will say no will be happy with those answers because the people who people want to be loved for the being themselves that is honestly what everyone wants right and at the same time you have to grow business you've got to grow you know you've got to move the needle and sometimes it's hard to get people to love you for being you and I I understand the the tension of the world that we have created right and so I sit somewhere in the middle there crew Ian that's that's the best case by case

yeah I I strug with this all the time as well because I like the authenticity of having real people post but then I'm also like you know wouldn't it be cool just have like an AI profile you know I'll make sure it's very clearly labeled as an AI profile so people are going to be like oh that's a real person I'm gonna like you know give a credit card to this individual but maybe like have that post like a question of the day like hey today question is you know so on so and that has existed for years I mean slack Bots you know pretty much do exactly like standup Bots for example like hey what you what do you accomplish today and so I think like there's a

world where we can gradually figure out what this going to happen but you know I do stand more in the line of like no I'd rather have an authentic Community than one where there's like artificialness in it but then like you mentioned though right my needs for doing that are very different than someone who's trying to like you know build up something very quickly to sell something and things like that like you know I'm just doing this for fun right day job is not running a community or it Success is Not hinge upon anything that that's going to affect me materially in my real life it just something I always enjoyed doing it keeps me closer to Tech and just allows me to chat with people that I've known

for decades and that's really the it's kind of like one those like old coffee shops you're like who goes there it's the same 10 people I'm like yeah those same 10 people are exactly why the coffee shop owner maintains that coffee shop not so that you know others will necessarily find it valuable so that those people can stick around and do it so I think there's a value to that one

yeah I you know I'll even just say like the way I use AI like everything I write is my voice but I use AI to edit a lot yeah it is a phenomenal voice to bounce things off of because it's not judgmental it jumps in it provides usually pretty useful feedback about things that you're writing and and has at times saved me from writing things that I just did not think about phrasing it that way and it it is getting surprisingly good good from an EQ perspective at doing those things um and it's helpful right like it helps me move faster in that sense but at the same time I it is always my voice right like I am always the one writing or creating

behind it uh because I like I said before I want you know like all of us I want to be loved for me it's like such a weird thing to say out loud on a podcast but you want to be loved for you right you want to be authentic and you want be who you want to be and uh it is it's so hard and I know there's so many people out there that are going to struggle with that because they will they will achieve a lot of success for not being themselves and I think that is very tough um to be in that kind of place because changing to yourself is very difficult you know you see it with celebrities all the time when celebrities try drop a Persona

essentially and try to be themselves there's a lot of push back uh people lose their original audience and they move to a new audience and it is a it is sometimes you know tumultuous yeah no I totally makes sense

there in that world so let me just GE us a little bit you know and talk about tighten it itself I love the design I love the design of your website I like to design of all the communities and so what's the what's the thinking behind

that yeah that's a good good question um you know it's I I'm very thankful that both me and and Stephen uh I would say like have generally decent taste you know neither of us are designers we have just truly worked with some of the best designers in the world and I would like to to attribute it to osmosis that like just by having them have shown us great design and great user experience and great accessible experiences that we have been able to pick up and understand it um of course we are are like always thinking about how to improve design but design is very much like at the center of it and yeah I mean you are also one of those people by the way K with all

the work you did on like design tokens we have done a lot of that work like that is a lot of how tightnit is built is with design tokens and thinking in that framing um but yeah I mean design is is really important and we think a lot about like accessibility even right you know we want to support a community should not prevent people from joining it because of the technology that is like that is at its core the one of our missions is to make sure that it's not the tech that's preventing you from joining the community I'm not saying you're getting in every Community right like you know sometimes you're just not supposed to be in certain communities and that's okay but it should not be the tech that

prevents you from getting in there and so uh that's been the approach we've wanted wanted to make it very friendly we want to make it um uh very accessible in terms of like its experience not flashy that is something we actively avoid is we do not want flashy experiences um we want to make it so that everybody feels like it is an Internet that they feel like they can belong

to yeah I mean you know I think you're understanding a little bit of it but yeah I look at the iconography look at the spacing of everything I look at how well the post are structured in response and so on that's a you know you did a very good job on this you know I love get kind of pixels like you no matter how much which one cat of course also named pixel is like for me you know I'm always like the technolog is really cool but how can also make it look really nice how you can make it aesthetically pleasing like kind of balancing all those things is something that you know in many ways does drive me even what I work on right

now you know we make sure that what we're building has a certain look and feel that is very unique and highly polished and so when look at Titan the logo I look at everything there I'm like I actually spent a little bit of time like just clicking around yesterday like you know is there any part of the experience that you know got kind of got you know that kind the second grade treatment as opposed to like the first class treatment no like everything was well done all the copy the words everything was like really well thought out so I thought was actually a very nice touch and I want to make sure you

knew that well thank you I mean it's probably because both Stephen and I are very pedantic and we have these tiny little details that we obsess over but at the same time and I'm going to make this like the whole center of it we listen to our community so when they have like hey could this be slightly better uh we listen to every little nitpick and we do write those down and we do try to improve them we try to learn from like what could make this incrementally more lovable and that is like if you have feedback please share it our way because that one of the it kind of goes back to like how do you build a great product and uh what most

people don't realize is that the hardest way to build a great product is you have 10 customers who are not telling you something and they're they're just not telling you it's even if go like you have to create the easiest possible Channel and ability for them to actually tell you what's wrong and you better listen to it and do not push it away I think that is something that another problem is just make sure they feel heard it does not mean you need to go do it that is a very different thing feeling heard and feeling understood is so important in this process and if you can even say we're not doing that and here's why that is also pretty valuable I don't ever I go to a lot of our

companies and our vendors and I give a ton of feedback because I know how hard it is to get get it and give it uh the best vendors that I work with hear me tell me why they're not going to do that and I go great I was just honestly throwing in an idea it just kind of flashed into my head but I still like the rest of the thing I was just tossing something in there that's that is community building it is it is a trust between you and your customer and making sure that they know when you are going to listen to them and go and do it and listen to them and not going to do it but the key thing there is you got to

listen yeah and yeah you know being a co-founder being a CEO being obsessed about details is important and different people have different things they obsess over so it's good that you have a balance of things that you're focusing on so that way the end result is highly detail oriented deliverables I will ask one thing because I saw this the other day and I thought it was fascinating someone posted on LinkedIn and said

we're going to be a bugless company we're if there's a bug we're going to fix it and I was like my red alarm went off I'm like no no no no no no no no no that is a terrible way to build a business uh that is and I you know I've been an engineer I've been a product manager I'm now I'm a COO I I know what brain is thinking the engineer brain is very much built around Perfection and that is something I try to avoid too you want to build this perfect product it needs to have all the right things in it it should not have bugs it should be seamless the problem with that is it's not the Bugs you should be thinking

about it's your customer experience of the product they should always be optimizing if those bugs are minor little details in their world do not fix them because it might be so much work to fix it that you're ignoring you know the lack of features that they need to go and solve their problem it is that customer experience you should be optimizing for and not the bug so anyway I saw that the other day I feel like you've got got a great audience to hear that because do not focus on bugs focus on customer

experience 100% because people at end of the day they're not waking up going like I can't wait to go to a community and type like eight hours of messages or I can't wait to bring up a code editor so you can build an app for like eight hours no they're they're doing this because they want to sell a product to their customers they want to be able to get better insights into how they can better make their professional lives better or their DayDay lives better and things like that we just the tools that people are using in between it and yes there is a certain level of like a balance between like visual polish P3 P4 bugs be addressed but the P zos are the

ones that help them accomplish the task that they hired your product to do the classic jobs to be done kind of a mindset and I think that often gets lost you know small companies big companies they often lose that the bigger picture and you know and as you probably also noticed that you know the more people you start adding to something then your p2s now become their P Zer and now you're like spending time dealing with like how do we make sure their work is like going well even though you don't really care about it because it's like ah you know it's not the critical thing there but we hide this person or we have this like person with want to help and all these things and balancing all that

one of the hardest

parts definitely I it's balance is hard no matter what I think it goes back also even to like the big company that versus the little company yeah the big company is just a different balance than the little company problems right like you just there both sides are difficult for different reasons um you're constantly balancing at a big company that you're solving a problem in so much depth you know versus a little company where you're solving a problem and stressed because it's you have to scale it so fast and so wide and so far right like it's like you're trying to solve all of your customers problems because you're still in this growth phase where as a big company you're you are you have massive Tech debt right and

it's no business is without it because good decisions do not remain good forever umre things change businesses change AI is invented right generative AI suddenly comes up and that work you did on the like Five-Year Plan for natural language processing can now be done for a tenth of the cost and in one line of code yep tough that happens but you did it right the first time you

just gotta keep moving forward I mean that goes back to your point about you know bug free Perfection that often the biggest hindrance to making to itally releasing things getting feedback and so on you know one could be argument that was it worth spending 5 years on something if you didn't really know if even a single person would like it you I think big companies struggle this all the time you know it's like how do I solve something for a billion people when the reality is you haven't even solv it for like one person you know yet you're over engineering over architecting everything because big companies have distribution you know one of the big advantages I think companies have is that you know your Salesforce

and your Googles they have massive distribution because of just how long they B their name and all these things what they may miss is like how do I quickly react to something that is going to be good even if it means it's not going to be a 100 million $1 million business in two years but we got to start somewhere and be able to make this work and startups have that Advantage they have that nimbleness of being able to be like you know what I'm going to sell this very Niche problem it's going to be probably only profitable for like me and three other people to work on it but there's potential for that to become something big in the future and that's a risk that many big companies are scared

of taking yeah no I think

uh it's it is hard because the people that build technology are not the same people that have used to build distribution like the irony is that like you know you have your salesperson who can really hear the customer's problem and does not have the like clear mindset of always how to build a product and you've got your Builder who sometimes does not have that like customer relationship building technique uh I will say that's the other thing about like having worked at Salesforce right like going back to what we're talking like working at Salesforce I got to see that actually from the inside of what does it look like to build a relationship based company where AES would not just answer questions about like what Salesforce did they

would actually be able to help think about like digital experience problems um you know I think you can the Salesforce can get caught up like any business in overselling their own software but like the best AES that I've ever met are the ones that sell their software but they also sell other people's software they're trying to solve a customer's problem and they're building that trust relationship and you know that's direct sales right that's not a community but it is so important that's still that human to human connection and you can do that same thing at scale in a community we're solving people's problems in the community space and allowing I tell people like look you can let your partners and sometimes even some of your

competitors in your community because sometimes there are customers who are not right for you and those customers will bury you that is the thing that is so hard it's so hard to turn down a customer but some of those customers you have to send away you have to say we do not do that and send them to the right place uh and they will thank you for that even if it's a competitor I've sent many customers to competitors because they're not the right fit for us um it's just it's just how it goes but when I see a customer who I know is the right fit I am telling them the truth and then I can say look this is going to work really well because we're better than X

Y and Z because of this reason but when they're not I have to push them away because it's going to be bad for them and it's going to be really bad for

me yeah no there's so many horror cases you often read about you know the kind of clients that on Surface seem like they're fantastic clients but they end up becoming a huge pain even though you know they may be paying more but all it it'ss amortized in terms of stress and time and randomization they like you know what it wasn't worth it yeah and

you don't you won't know sometimes if it was worth it or not till after you're through it right this is just part of growing a business and it's part of early product Market fit is you don't you think you know but you don't know um you have to keep going and you have to kind of learn from your mistakes so I

think that's no you know there I I learned I actually one of I remember this from like orientation week at Salesforce and I really wish I could remember who said it so I am kind of attributing it to some Salesforce leader but one of my favorite lines was and I've kind of changed it to be my own but there are perfect companies and there are companies still in business those are the two types of companies that exist out there so true well Zach it was great catching up great talking about community and all the other things that we tendentially touched upon as well any final thoughts or closing words uh my

final thought is good luck with your dream migration I'm wishing you the best of luck Kupa no I think uh I just want to say yeah if anyone's interested in learning more about building communities uh go find us at community. tighten it. you'll be able to join our slack Community focused around community building and um yeah I'm excited about meeting whoever's kind of the next big Community leader out in the space because I really do think it's it is the future of building a business is and I we say it every 10 years being customer first still the case so it just changes

how we do it perfect Z and links to everything that you mentioned Zack will be in the description of all the videos and interviews so people can also click

there to find it as well and K by the way thank you so much for having me this has been a ton of fun to to jump on and

catch up yeah likewise likewise