The following interview is a conversation we had with Daniel Erickson, CEO of Viable, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $9 Million Raised to Build the Future of Customer Feedback Analysis
Brett
Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Daniel Erickson, Founder and CEO of Viable, a customer feedback analysis platform that’s raised 9 million in funding. Daniel, thanks for chatting with me today.
Daniel Erickson
Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Daniel Erickson
Sure. I’m Dan. I’m CEO and Founder at Viable. I’ve been in the tech industry for about 15 years now. I’m an engineer by trade and had been in engineering leadership roles for the past few years. So prior to this, I was the VP of Engineering at Ease, CTO at Gettable, and an early engineer at Yammer.
Brett
What was that like? Working at ease? My mom listens to this. I will have to pretend that I have no idea what Ease is, but tell us what it was like working at a company like that.
Daniel Erickson
Yeah, the cannabis industry was quite a ride to be in. It is both exhilarating and chaotic. When I joined Ease, it was very early on, so it was before Prop 64 even passed in California. So it was medical use only, and I got to see Prop 64 pass more states pass it expanding into other states. It was a ton of work and the first time that I got to really watch that sort of regulatory battle happen. And it was just a lot of fun to navigate.
Brett
Yeah. Was that the period of time where a lot of crazy stuff happened at Ease? I believe there were indictments and things like that.
Daniel Erickson
Is that correct? I can’t talk too much about that, but yes, I was there for some of that.
Brett
Okay, perfect. We can switch gears. Let’s move to a few questions just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. So is there a specific CEO and team that you’ve really studied and learned the most from?
Daniel Erickson
So I really admire Ravul Vora over at Superhuman. He’s actually an investor in Viable as well, but I love his focus on extremely good user experience and not just from a sort of UI design and interaction standpoint, but even from a sort of workflow design standpoint and really pushing like a superhuman they really push inbox zero as the thing that they’re trying to get you to do. And they use really amazing game tactics, actually, to help you get there in a way that doesn’t feel like they’re just like gamifying it for you. So I think the biggest thing that I’ve taken away from him is that studying games is actually a really great way to understand how to build the right processes, workflows and habits into your product.
Brett
Nice, I love that. What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you? This can be business book or it can be a personal book that’s just influenced how you think.
Daniel Erickson
Yeah, definitely. And this one kind of actually stretches between both of those but might be lean a little bit more towards personal. It is James Clear’s Atomic Habits, probably the most actionable nonfiction book that I have read in my life. There are just so many little strategies to help you shed the habits that you don’t want to have and pick up the habits that you do want there. And I think the key takeaway is to really focus on the smallest thing to start building the habit. So finding the right queue, finding the right response to that, cue the action that you take, and then the reward that you give yourself afterward as well.
Brett
Yeah, that’s up there for me in books that really transformed my life. Which sounds cheesy to say, but I’d read a few other books on habits in the past and I read that one and it just nailed it. And then I’ve been following his Thursday newsletters, his blog posts. He’s just so good and I really admire that. He hasn’t really tried to do anything else besides just sticking with Atomic Habits. He hasn’t branched off and written like five other books, at least from what I’ve seen so far. He seems like laser focused on just making this one book incredibly successful.
Daniel Erickson
Yeah, I love how laser focused he is on the habits thing. Specifically. Watching him actually build up the following around that movement has been really interesting to watch.
Brett
There has to be such a tough space to break through as well. I feel like the habit space. There were like 1000 books already. Everyone was talking about it. It’s really amazing he was able to rise above all that noise.
Daniel Erickson
Yeah, absolutely.
Brett
Now let’s talk about what you’re building at Viable. So can you tell us the origin story behind the company and then just give us the high level pitch? What are you offering to customers?
Daniel Erickson
Yeah, definitely. So I’ll start with the origin story and then we can get into what we offer now because we actually have a little bit of a winding path to get to where we are. We started as something slightly different than what we do now. And we called ourselves Viable Fit and were actually building a turnkey product to help other startups find product market fit using a survey and then analyzing the responses to that survey to help them guide their roadmap. It actually, if that sounds familiar, came from an article that Rahol voro wrote over at Superhuman about how Superhuman measures and improves their Product Market Fit. They send out a survey with a few questions. They then gather all of those responses, tag them with things like features and pain points that people were having, and then grouping those into themes that could help them understand how they needed to change their product in order to increase their Product Market Fit.
Daniel Erickson
When I started to talk to them and other companies, I realized that there was a huge time suck in the manual analysis side of that process. In fact, Superhuman themselves were spending about 12 hours a week just analyzing that data. So tagging the data, going through it to find all the similar things, and analyzing from there, and then from there. We basically realized that 80% of the companies that were attempting to use this thing were actually struggling with that manual step. They just didn’t have the time to do it. We also realized, however, that NLP Natural Language Processing was starting to get to the point where it could rival humans at that task. So we decided to actually build that as a sort of turnkey solution to help people do that analysis without sacrificing their time to it.
Brett
And I see you have GP Three on your homepage, so has your inbox just been blowing up with investor contacts in the last week?
Daniel Erickson
Yes, definitely. Every time we get a new sort of wave in AI, so like the image generation models or chat GPT, all of those end up bringing people out of the woodwork and wanting to chat with us. But after sort of building up that initial product, getting some funding from Craft Ventures and actually a handful of angels as well, we built up that product, launched it on Product hunt, had over 500 companies sign up to use us. But we quickly realized that calling them companies is a bit of a stretch. There’s actually not a whole lot of money to extract from pre Product Market Fit startups, so in hindsight, that’s pretty clear. But at the same time, we started to get usage from really large companies as well that clearly already had Product Market Fit. So we needed to figure out what exactly was driving their usage, why did they need help?
Daniel Erickson
So we dug in and we realized 80% of data that is collected by companies today is unstructured text. It’s things like survey responses and App store reviews and social media mentions and call transcripts and help desk tickets and all of those kinds of things. Basically, customers that are writing to you and about you all over the web and across a bunch of different data silos. So we quickly realized what the market really needed here was not something to help them understand Product Market Fit, but something to help them understand their customers needs. So we moved away from product, market, fit and upmarket into the Enterprise and built an aggregation engine and analysis engine that can actually aggregate data from all of those different sources that I talked about earlier, structure it in a way that enables analysis and then actually do true analysis on top of that data set in two different ways.
Daniel Erickson
One, we allow you to ask a question and get answer from the data set. So you can ask something as vague as what do customers love about our product? Or something as very specific as which video chat services should we integrate with our calendar invites? And all of that will be backed up by the data that you’ve collected from your customers. On top of that, we also offer a report. So if you know what you’re looking for, question and answer is a really great way to get it. But oftentimes you actually don’t know what’s in that data set and you just need a good bird’s eye view. So we built the report. What that does is it takes a look at the entire picture of your data and does a thematic analysis on top of it. So it basically clusters your data into multiple themes.
Daniel Erickson
Each one of those themes then has deep analysis that is built up for that specific theme. The theme could be something along the lines of customers upset with customer support, or it could be something along the lines of customers love the onboarding videos, right? So it can be specific about some specific feature or it can be about some process and it’s actually organically discovered from the data set itself. We don’t have any sort of taxonomy we’re trying to hit. All of that is actually unsupervised and learned from the data itself.
Brett
And what’s that sales cycle look like then? Is that still product led growth or is this top down enterprise sales?
Daniel Erickson
So right now we’re mostly top down enterprise sales. We do have a few people at the low end who have mostly sort of self served in, but we’re talking large amounts of data here and fairly high contract sizes. So generally speaking, we’re actually mostly doing enterprise sales at this point. Got it.
Brett
And what’s that process been like. I see you have some pretty amazing logos and you even have a quote from Stuart Butterfield on the site. How did you manage to pull that off?
Daniel Erickson
Well, to be clear, that quote from Stewart is just a quote that he has out there and were able to sort of pull it in and go from there. I think that as far as the customers there go, we are working with a lot of those on there. Not all of those are paying customers of ours at this point, but some of them are. And generally speaking, most of our leads have come in through three different channels. The earliest ones came through our investor network. So we really did use our connections within our network in order to pull in the earliest deals, which is I think probably the best way to sort of get your flywheel going. Now once that started to get going, our next thing that we did was warm and cold outreach. So that was specifically looking at the companies that were working already with us and then trying to figure out like, okay, who is the actual buyer here, who are the users, what’s our best way in?
Daniel Erickson
And then actually coming up with personalized outreach for each person that were reaching out to pull them in. And then lastly, and this is the thing that’s actually been working the best for us recently is content. We are now pumping out a lot of content on both Twitter and LinkedIn and we are posting content on the blog as well. That is highly SEO at this point. I think we’re seeing about 50% month over month increase in website traffic just from our content initiatives.
Brett
And what team is primarily using this? Is that customer success? Is it the product team? Is it marketing? Who’s using it primarily?
Daniel Erickson
So, generally speaking, the first team that we end up working with is Product. And that is because Product tends to be the team that needs these insights from those other teams, right? So generally speaking, a product manager will go to the head of customer support and say, hey, what are the big things people are complaining about right now? Or they’ll go over to the sales team and they’ll say, hey Salespeople, what are the biggest objections you’re seeing in your sales conversations right now? Or they’ll go over to marketing and they’ll be like, hey, I know you run the NBS system. What insights are you seeing from that? And they have to go to each one of these and they go talk to people about this and inevitably what happens is these people are like, it’s not their job to distill all of this stuff down into something that’s easy for the product team to consume.
Daniel Erickson
So what happens is they end up talking about the most recent thing or the loudest thing and they don’t really see the full picture. They’re just looking at whatever anchor they have most recently. So we basically solve that problem for the product team. We plug directly into the data sources that those other teams use to generate those insights for them.
Brett
Makes sense. And I saw on your site that you save hundreds of hours. So that’s for product teams, product people, they’re not cheap. So I’m guessing that really saves a lot of money in the end for these teams as well, right?
Daniel Erickson
It does indeed. Latch, for example, one of our customers, they were doing roughly 18 hours a week of manual analysis on this stuff before using Viable. Now they spend just a few minutes going through our analysis each week.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. That’s very cool. And what about market categories? How do you think about your market category is Customer Feedback Analysis. The category is that established or what are your views there?
Daniel Erickson
I would say that our category is fairly new, actually, because prior to us, you couldn’t do true analysis in an automated way. You needed a human to go in and read through everything and summarize it and make the mental leaps that you need to make in order to give good analysis. So text analytics has been around for a while now. It’s been around since probably the mid two thousand s and has mostly focused on sentiment analysis and some topic discovery. These are companies like Clara Bridge, like Thematic or Idiomatic, and a few newer ones like Interpret or Artifact. These are all focused on building dashboards around textual analytics. These are tools for analysts to use to help them analyze this data set. What’s different about us is that we are actually building analyst. We’re not building tools for analysts. Our end user is the business user who would normally be going to analyst to get this information.
Daniel Erickson
So what we’ve been calling ourselves recently, and who knows, this may change in the future, is experience analysis. So we are an experience analysis platform. We also are tossing around the idea of calling this generative analysis. So kind of the next step in generative AI.
Brett
And when you say experience analysis, do customers know what you’re talking about? Or does that require just a huge amount of education and explanation to try to get them up to speed?
Daniel Erickson
So oftentimes they do. And this is because experience management is a thing, right? So Qualtrics, for example, coined the term experience management. That’s kind of their category. There’s a bunch of people who are sort of following in on that one, but they have struggled on the analysis end. And so we’re kind of piggybacking off of that for the analysis side.
Brett
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And going back to you personally, what’s your journey been like going from being an engineer to a Founder? I have spoken with a lot of founders who have had that same journey, and they’ve said it’s pretty tough. You have totally switch mindsets, different skill sets. So what’s that been like for you and how have you transitioned successfully to be CEO from being an engineer or VP of engineering?
Daniel Erickson
Yeah, definitely. So luckily I did have sort of that transitory period from being an individual contributor engineer coding all the time to being a Founder. Right. There was that period in between that was in executive positions at other companies. And I think that those really prepared me quite well for the CEO role, especially my time at ease as the VP of engineering there.
Brett
What’s been your biggest surprise, do you think, that you didn’t expect as you moved into the CEO role?
Daniel Erickson
Oh man. So there’s a lie that I think all founders tell themselves early on, and that is I don’t have a boss. And it’s like I have this company so I can do what I want. And really what happens there is you can’t really do what you want. Your customers are your boss, right? You actually end up not having quite as much freedom as you actually think you will because there’s just so many obvious things that you just have to do, whether or not you want to do them or not. And so that was probably the biggest thing for me, was just the breadth of different things that I had to do as a Founder that I didn’t have to do in any of my previous roles. So as CEO, I kind of view it as my job to be a little bit of everything.
Daniel Erickson
Basically, if there’s something that needs to be done in the company and I don’t have somebody who specifically like it’s their job to do it, either I need to delegate that to somebody to make it their job or I need to do it myself.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And in terms of going to market, what would you say has been the greatest challenge you’ve experienced so far?
Daniel Erickson
So it’s actually the sort of new category thing. So generally speaking, when you’re going out and you’re selling a product, if you’ve got a category you’re selling into already, then oftentimes your customers are going to have like a budget line item for that. You’re going to go in and kick out a competitor or you’re going to go head to head with somebody and you’re going to sort of have this bucket that you can just kind of fill yourself into when you’re creating something new and you’re on sort of the forefront of what’s possible. You don’t have all of that sort of framework built out for you within your target customers. And so there’s a lot more education that has to happen during that sales cycle in order for them to understand what it is that you’re actually doing. So that’s been our biggest challenge, actually, is basically showing exactly how we can help them in a way that makes it sort of obvious that they need to create a new budget line for this.
Brett
And I think today every Founder wants to be a category creator. That seems to be the Aspiration, at least that a lot of founders have that I speak to. I think the downside of that, of course, as you just mentioned, is it’s hard and then it’s expensive and it take a note time. So when you were speaking with investors about this idea of category creation, was it difficult to get their buy in and support or did they get it right away?
Daniel Erickson
So it entirely depends on the investor. There are certain investors out there that are looking for category creators because category creators tend to be, if not winner take all, winner take most for these things. So if you’re a very early stage investor, then you actually should be looking for those category creators because those are the ones that are going to get huge. However, there’s a lot of companies, there’s a lot of funds out there that are looking for more, what I would call sort of tried and true go to market. And if that’s the case, then as a category creator you’re going to have headwinds talking to that specific subset of investors. But for example, like Craft Ventures and David Sachs, david is all about category creation. So there are definitely investors out there that are very much for it. You just have to figure out which ones of those you’re going to resonate with.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And last question here for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for Viable?
Daniel Erickson
Definitely. So I hinted at this concept of generative analysis and as you’re seeing with Chat, GPT and all of that, there’s this sort of explosion of interactability with these sorts of technology and we’re looking at adding a lot more interactivity into our system as well. So allowing our customers to guide analysis of the analysis that we’re doing for them. So if I’m the PM in charge of calendars for my product, I could maybe get directed analysis that just has to do with exactly my goal for calendars. Or if I’m the customer support lead, I might want to, my goal might be increase my CSAT score. And so we’ll help you do analysis that will help you figure out what you can do to do those things. It’s basically tying company goals back to customer feedback and helping you use customer feedback to achieve those company goals.
Brett
What do you think is going to be your biggest challenge as you execute on that vision? Or what do you have to overcome that’s going to really get in the way? Is it the category issue still or do you think that problem changes?
Daniel Erickson
So the biggest thing is going to be the category issue at first, which is basically convincing the market that this is something that is better than their status quo. And to be clear, their status quo is spending tens of thousands of hours on doing this reporting manually. So it’s a fairly obvious one, but it is something that they hadn’t even considered as a possibility. So that is still the number one thing. The next thing is actually it’s getting enough of the right kind of training data and building the data sets in order to achieve that interactivity. So with any sort of AI startup, I believe that your biggest moat is always going to be your data moat, specifically around training data. And that’s building up that corpus of sort of directed analysis, training data is going to be the biggest challenge for us for there.
Brett
And how do you go about building a moat like that? Is it just getting as many users onboarded to the product as possible or.
Daniel Erickson
What do you do? So there’s a couple of ways of doing it. If you can get user generated content and user ratings around those things, you can get the highest rated stuff and use that as your training set. So, for example, for answers that we have for our question and answer system, there’s a thumbs up and a thumbs down. When you thumbs something up, it actually tells us that was a good answer, and so we can use that as training data going forward. However, if you’re trying to do something new that your product doesn’t do yet, then you have to build up that data yourself, which usually means hiring a team of annotators to manually create a data set, which we have built out some amazing systems to pump out new training data sets very quickly. Over here.
Brett
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Very cool. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Daniel Erickson
You can follow me on Twitter at techraith or@twitter.com techraith or you can visit our website@askviable.com.
Brett
Amazing. Dan, thanks so much for taking the time to chat and share your vision. This is all super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Daniel Erickson
Thanks for having me. It was fun.
Brett
Keep in touch. Bye.
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