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🍦 AMA 🍦- Ivo from Collato - Your product team’s collective brain!
Hi everyone,
Ivo here from Collato.com, the AI search engine across all your apps.
We launched today: https://www.producthunt.com/post... and
have a crazy 3-year ride behind us. Happy to share all details with you. Why crazy?
😱 3 pivots (we started with “creative collaboration”…)
🌍 3 major shifts in macro environment (pre-Covid, rise of remote, tech winter)
💸 $6 mn in funding (some from my former Zalando bosses)
👥 18 people team (which went through thick and thin - many since day 1)
Today I know: it had to be that way, as it made us iterate towards the new Collato, which we launched on product hunt today. And I don’t regret anything as it was and still is very rewarding every single day.
Ask me anything about guiding a team through uncertainty, searching for product market fit, taking hard decisions, fundraising or work/life balance 😅. I promise to give honest answer!
22
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Elin Mattsson
Congrats on the launch to the whole team! 🚀 What's been your biggest learning over the years in your GTM strategy?
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@elin_mattsson Learning: It's so easy to confirm your bias and see interest from people, which actually doesn't go beyond simply being polite. We were falling into so many "false validation" traps. Getting out of those costs a lot of time and effort (and wastes a lot of tech resources for re-adapting our product). Does this help?
I've always wondered how you motivate yourself to get up after every setback - it's inspiring! 🤩
@irina_haupt I honestly don't know. Trying to control my mind and caring about things I still can change going forward... Really happy though that this attitude is noted and appreciated by you!! Thanks a lot
So proud to be part of this exciting day! I feel so lucky to be led by such a thoughtful, passionate, and forward-thinking leader as you!
@catherine_norris wow. Thanks so much! That feels as good as appearing on #1 product of the day today. It's a pleasure working with you!
From what channels did you manage to get Collato's traffic and users (other than PH)?
@hosseinyazdi we do google ads on very specific use cases (e.g. product documentation, product discovery). We are writing a lot of relevant content for the PM community which brought us a lot of organic traffic (with a time delay of several months...). We are active in a lot of Reddit communities trying to be helpful (not spamming!). And we are starting to leverage Twitter (als Twitter influencers) more and more. Does this help?!
@ivo_scherkamp Yes indeed! Thank you so much for taking your time and sharing your insights. Wish you the best for your launch 🚀
@gracehur when we had to drop our initial idea of "creative collaboration"... It made so much sense to us to streamline the whole process of briefing, feedback and approval for all these assets. But the edge towards Airtable, Notion, etc wasn't big enough...
Oh wow, if you put it like that, we have really been through it all 🎢. All I can say is you did an amazing job through it all 🙏.
So people if you have questions be sure to ask @ivo_scherkamp
Food for thought! 💭
There is no "continuous" collaboration tool!
Most tools in the productivity space empower coordination, where team members know what to do, when to do it, and who should do what, in order to pull towards a shared goal.
While collaboration tools like Miro and FigJam are treated as the kick off space for collaborative processes (e.g. OKRs, user journey), the knowledge derived from them are not easily dispersible nor consumable for non-participating parties.
If collaboration requires 1) timely communication and 2) shared knowledge, today's multi-tool environment is NOT conducive for continuous collaboration.
Until now 😉
Hi Ivo! What would you say was the toughest lesson for you to learn during these 3 years working on Collato?
@heleana I am not sure that lesson has yet ended but I find it extremely hard to balance a founders' "reality distortion field" (following through despite all concerns...) against the healthy doubt of being on the wrong path. In short: Making decisions to change direction is difficult but sometimes necessary. I hope we took the right ones!
@mycelebs_elle no! far from it. When you feel that you are on to something for the first time after 3 years, an exit ist the last thing you are thinking off...