🎧🍌 Startup Marketing Masterclass: How OpenPhone Grew to 100k+ Customers with Co-founder Daryna Kulya
Tactics for acquiring early customers in Facebook Groups + Reddit, using customer feedback to inform your ICP + product roadmap, and why SEO and founder-led content is so powerful.
Daryna Kulya is the Co-founder of OpenPhone, the world’s best business phone.
This episode is a masterclass on startup marketing, chronicling the first six years of OpenPhone, how they acquired their first customers, and inside all the different channels they used to scale the business to over 100k customers, including FB Groups, Reddit, SEO, and cold outbound.
We also get into why founder-led content is so important today, and why design is a crucial core competency.
Timestamps to jump in:
2:10 OpenPhone’s new API launch
6:41 Why a better business phone is a big deal
13:18 Immigrating from Ukraine to the US and building OpenPhone
15:39 Hacking a custom business phone
25:29 How OpenPhone got its first customers from Facebook Groups
33:02 Tricks for unlocking word of mouth
39:11 Transitioning from free to paid users
43:05 How OpenPhone cracked word of mouth on Reddit
46:29 OpenPhone’s YC experience
49:01 Why the Seed round was hard to raise
53:49 Using Slack to aggregate all customer feedback across the internet
57:38 How YC helped redefine their ICP
1:01:33 Tactics for sending cold emails
1:06:24 How to get and benefit from press
1:12:18 Daryna’s “behind the scenes” approach to founder-led content
1:16:26 Using long-tail keywords to kickstart an SEO strategy in 2020
1:23:05 When to do founder-led content vs SEO
1:28:38 How your customers should pull you up-market
1:30:18 Why OpenPhone cares about design
Referenced:
Find Daryna on Twitter / X and LinkedIn.
👉 Find on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube
Transcript - (read on Rev)
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Daryna, welcome to the show.
Daryna Kulya:
Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I'm excited. We're going to talk about some stuff you just launched, the early days of OpenPhone, your company. A lot of learnings. But can you really quick, what is OpenPhone? Just to set the stage for people.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, for sure. Look, at the very core, we are a business phone solution for startups and small businesses. Pretty straightforward, we give you business phone numbers for you and your team. So calling, texting, contacts, a lot of things you expect from a phone. But we do so much more on top of it. We allow you and your team to collaborate in responding to customers. If you get a lot of texts from customers, you can collaborate, and get backs to folks quickly. We have integrations and automations to really allow you to be more efficient as you talk to customers.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. This is instead of your personal number, like your iPhone, you can respond on your computer? You have an OpenPhone app too, right?
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Okay, interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. For a lot of businesses, there are folks who are early stage who use a personal phone number for their company.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
I can tell you many reasons why that's a bad idea. One of the things is as you grow, of course you're getting customers, you want to grow, you want to get more customers. But if it's you as the founder who gives people the cellphone number, as much as it's great, what ends up happen is you're going to have a lot of calls, a lot of messages, and you're not going to be able to get back to everyone. We allow you to have a separate phone number that supports calling, messages, messaging, the whole thing. You can have your team help you out.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
And there's visibility across the board.
Turner Novak:
And a little bit more scalable.
Daryna Kulya:
100%. We in the space with a lot of established solutions for bigger companies. The idea of a business phone isn't necessarily novel. But the way we've executed on it, and what we are doing, because hey, we're in this new world where the way businesses communicate these days is completely different than what it was like years ago. We have companies that are remote. The idea of a desk phone is-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, the Cisco phone.
Daryna Kulya:
Right.
Turner Novak:
Everyone knows what I'm talking about whose over 30.
Daryna Kulya:
Even the emoji when you're sending someone the emoji of a phone, it's this red phone.
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah, it's the pick-up phone with the cord, it's the wire. Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Right. Well, maybe we in startups think that that's hilarious, no one has that, but you'd be surprised also how many companies still have desk phones. For some of our larger clients, we are replacing those.
Turner Novak:
Gotcha.
Daryna Kulya:
And giving everyone on their team just an app that they can use instead.
Turner Novak:
That's, I guess, a pretty big deal, then? A game changer for some companies. Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
I had someone actually, the other day ... I always obviously talk about what we do at OpenPhone. But I had someone who was just like, "Oh my God." This person told me that they don't need to ask their team members to drive into the office when it's a snowstorm to respond to calls.
Turner Novak:
Because they had a landline?
Daryna Kulya:
I just, for a second, I'm here talking about AI, automation, all these million things that we do in the product.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
But at the end of the day, someone is like, "Oh, I don't have to have my employees drive into the office to use a landline."
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. I also want to give a shout-out to one of your investors, Brian Murray at Craft. He gave us a bunch of topics to talk about.
Daryna Kulya:
He's amazing.
Turner Novak:
Shout-out to him for the help, yeah. You recently did a big launch where, I think the way you described it, you went from "closed" phone to actually open phone. What was the launch?
Daryna Kulya:
Totally. We're finally OpenPhone. I feel like we've earned the name now. We opened up our API. Essentially, what we've learned over the years of building OpenPhone is that we have a very diverse customer base, and every business out there is very particular about the way that they want to communicate with their customers. It's impossible for us to create something that every business will be able to adopt.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
What we find is important for us to do is give people the building blocks to create the workflows that make sense for us. We've launched a really amazing visual call flow builder. Whatever kind of company you are, if you do phone support, for example, instead of us guessing what kind of routing you want, you can build your own perfect workflow in terms of how calls get distributed. Also, very soon we're going to do that for text messages, too.
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
There's going to be more.
Turner Novak:
Why is that a big deal, routing the call?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. On that specifically, if you're a team, if you're doing inbound sales, if you're doing customer support over the phone, it's actually really important that the call that comes in, for example, you have an enterprise client, that call should be going to a very different person than you have a prospect calling from the website.
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah. Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
As companies grow, they really want to have more control over who gets the calls and how that happens. I think it's a classy example, your enterprise prospect should be connected with a person on your team who is dealing with enterprise deals, doing enterprise deals.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
That's an example, yeah.
Turner Novak:
A way to think about it is it's almost like a better Google Voice. Hopefully that's not a derogatory description, but it's just a better custom phone. Office phone, obviously.
Daryna Kulya:
We're 100 times better.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. I think there is a lot ... Hey, I'm okay when people say that. I think, again, we've built so much on top of it. We really are building it for business. Because what we are seeing is that, when you're a scaling company especially, and again, you have teams doing support on the phone. Again, it's voice and SMS. You have your sales team, texting prospects. That's a big deal these days. There are a lot of things that people are doing that our competitors haven't really caught up with. We are just bringing this category into the new world.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
That's the way I think about it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And actually, a couple episodes ago, it was just all about sales, basically. It was how to be really good at sales. One of the big tips was get your customers on a text basis as fast as possible.
Daryna Kulya:
Totally.
Turner Novak:
Because it turns into less of a corporate, trying to sell you something, versus just, "Hey, Daryna, happy birthday," or just more informal.
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Versus it feels like you're selling them something.
Daryna Kulya:
It's all about relationships. Also, I think if you think about someone's inbox, I don't know, I know my inbox is a hot mess. It's impossible to stand out.
I think the way you're actually talking about it is great because when people think about using SMS in sales, sometimes they just immediately think about cold texting. Which is actually illegal, don't do that.
Turner Novak:
It's illegal?
Daryna Kulya:
It is illegal, yeah. Cold texting is illegal.
Turner Novak:
What? I text people when I don't ... Wait. How does that work?
Daryna Kulya:
Okay. I'm here, not a lawyer, no legal advice. If you're a business texting folks, your customers, and if you don't have consent, meaning you're never going to have consent if it's a cold message.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
That is, in fact, illegal.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
Daryna Kulya:
Some people may not get caught. Again, I'm not a lawyer here. Use your own, also, judgement.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
From a perspective of if you're a business entity, let's say you go and tell your sales reps to cold text a bunch of leads, that's a great way to get a bunch of fines.
Turner Novak:
Wow. You can do this with email? Email's totally cool to just be like, "Hey, check out my product."
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. I think the thing here is that, when it comes to a phone a channel, when it comes to SMS, the thing you would also imagine is, as a consumer, who wants to get any promotional texts in their messages? It's so much more personal, it's your phone number. I think most people treat their SMS inbox as a sacred place.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
If you're there, sending unsolicited SMS marketing, I think that's ... Again, the key is consent. If you said, "Hey, I want to receive text messages from this brand," that's fine. But if you were just getting them without consent, that's where it's both a really bad customer experience, but it's also illegal.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
You can get fined.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
The fines are really high too, by the way.
Turner Novak:
What's the fine? What's the amount?
Daryna Kulya:
We're talking ... I don't know on top of my head, there's a lot of nuances. We're talking hundreds, and potentially even some fines I saw, $1000 or more.
Turner Novak:
Per customer that you did it to?
Daryna Kulya:
Potentially, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Wow, that's crazy. That will drive up your CAC really quick.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. This is why, when people talk to me, I'm like, "Please, just whatever you do, don't tell your sales reps to send cold texts." Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Wow. Okay. Well, good to know, I guess. The strategy then is actually get people to opt in to getting messages from you?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Or you're on a call with a customer, or you give them your number and they can text you, or something.
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely. Look, I think, going back to the example you provided, it is all about building relationships, and it's all about the customer. If the customer isn't comfortable, they won't do this. Some customers may be like, "No, sorry. Let's stick to email." But I think what people do is they just say, "Hey, here's my number. Text me if you have any questions." I think that's a much better way to do it. It allows the customer to decide if they want to do that, and also you're on the right side here.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like too, depending on the customer and what you're doing, it might be a more comfortable channel. I think of a 17-year-old kid trying to figure out how to email, or something. They need to register, and create an email address. It might just be easier to text.
Daryna Kulya:
Totally.
Turner Novak:
For certain people, certain demos or preferences. Somebody might not work in an office and they just don't use email, so text might actually be better.
Daryna Kulya:
It's faster. I think it's faster. It's such a powerful channel. Also, of course, because I think about it all the time given the nature of our product, I think about texting and calling all the time.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Maybe I'm a little too close to it. But to me, it's such a perfect channel because a phone number, every single person has a phone number.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
It's a lot of responsibility, but also there's a lot of ... It's both power and responsibility.
Turner Novak:
Going back to the very early days of OpenPhone, what's the story? You can start this wherever you want.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, man. Yeah. It depends on much time you have.
Turner Novak:
We've got a while.
Daryna Kulya:
We have time, yeah.
Turner Novak:
You're from the Ukraine originally.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. My story goes back ... Then we really need time. I was born and raised in Ukraine, and came initially to the US as an exchange student.
Turner Novak:
This was in high school?
Daryna Kulya:
In high school. My last year of high school was an exchange program that I did in Texas, actually.
Turner Novak:
Wow. That's a big difference from Ukraine.
Daryna Kulya:
Huge difference. I was actually crying when I landed because I couldn't understand people.
Turner Novak:
Did you know English? Or the accents were just different?
Daryna Kulya:
Well, I thought I knew English, but clearly it was a whole new game. I could probably read and understand.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
I studied English. It was such a humbling moment because I think it was just understanding the language. Of course, I think people in Texas, there is a special flavor to it as well. I just had such a hard time understanding people. That was a moment.
I got there on an exchange program, and I immediately fell in love with the US. With the culture, I felt like, "Oh, man, I want to grow here." I felt like I didn't know anything, and I had this desire to grow, and learn, and study, and maybe even get into an American college. But the rules of the program were that I had to go back home after the exchange program, so I did that.
But then, the rules of the program did not say that I cannot go to another country after. Instead of staying in Ukraine too long, I thought, "Hey, I can't go to the US yet. I've been there. I have to wait it out." I thought I would go to Canada.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
I ended up going to university in Canada. Basically, from that point on, building my life, my career in Canada. Funny enough, when we started OpenPhone and got into YC, we moved to San Francisco for the batch and we ended up staying here. It's interesting for me to be back in the US now.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Then when you started the company, was that 2017? Or '18, technically?
Daryna Kulya:
'18. '17 is when we started working on it.
Turner Novak:
Okay. How did it all get started?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
What was the initial insight?
Daryna Kulya:
Look, the idea came from my co-founder Mahyar, who is also, by the way, my husband. At the time, we were in a relationship, we were together. The idea came from him, and I was the person who observed it, and was like, "Oh, man, this is too cool. I can help."
The insight was the fact that Mahyar's former coworker ported his phone number from a traditional carrier to a virtual solution. I think engineers do these kind of things. A regular consumer is probably never going to do this.
Turner Novak:
An insane lift for something that just seems-
Daryna Kulya:
Just imagine whatever carrier you have, I don't know if it's AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon.
Turner Novak:
I don't know, I'm not going to say publicly so I don't get hacked.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's one of those.
Daryna Kulya:
Right. Let's say you basically ditch your SIM card, and you go from one of the top carriers ... In Canada, people usually do-
Turner Novak:
Oh, Canada has insane monopoly telecom practices, basically.
Daryna Kulya:
Which also is one of the things, because a lot of people in Canada actually, this is a common thing I've seen, is a lot of Canadians actually try to find ways to save money on their cellphone bill.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, because Canadians pay potentially the highest in the world for cellphone. Because the country is so big, and there's not enough people, and it is a crazy monopoly.
Turner Novak:
Oh. So they have a lot of infrastructure to support 10 times fewer people than live in the US, but it's the same area?
Daryna Kulya:
It's 10 times fewer people.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
But the country, from a size-
Turner Novak:
They need to spread their capex over a larger area.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
You got to cover Saskatchewan, which is not that many people but a pretty big area.
Daryna Kulya:
I would suppose so. I know a lot of people who were thinking about solutions to the problem of just how expensive it is.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Essentially, Mahyar's coworker was like, "Hey, do you want to port your phone number from Rogers, or something, to this unknown scrappy app that allows you to have your calls and messages routed through the internet?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
He just said, "Sure. Why not?" As an engineer, I think he had this-
Turner Novak:
Oh, he wanted to try it. He's like, "Oh, cool." Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
He wanted to try it. I think it was some sort of a fun experiment. He did that, and I saw him basically give up his SIM card, his real SIM card, and use this app he was using, together with a data-only SIM card he got.
Turner Novak:
Now this became his personal phone?
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
You were texting him, calling him on it because you were dating.
Daryna Kulya:
We were talking, yeah. We were talking. We also were, at the time, long distance. We were talking on the phone all the time. I'm like, "Oh, interesting, you're going to do that." He went and did this.
What was so apparent is that when he did this, the quality of his calls was actually so much better because he had super high speed internet.
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
His carrier coverage wasn't as good as the speed, essentially of his wifi connection.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
He had better call quality. He had ability to control everything about his phone number. He could travel and not pay roaming fees. All these advantages.
But there was one thing which was so annoying, is that this app that he ended using was just terrible. Him being a product person ... I'm a product person, too. But I think him specifically being an engineer, and a designer, and a product person, he said, "Oh, cool. I'll build something a lot better."
Initially, he was essentially building it for himself.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
But very quickly, it was apparent to both of us that it was something bigger here. What I did was, I'm more of coming into this from a sales and marketing perspective. I just thought, "Hey, this is so cool you're building this."
Turner Novak:
We can get other people to pay us for this. Or use it, yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
I just thought, "Hey, let me get you some customers."
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
So we're from that perspective. That's what we did. It all grew from there.
Turner Novak:
Was there the closest thing that existed at the time that you could have used instead of OpenPhone? Was there other options? Or it was just not even really a thing that people did?
Daryna Kulya:
There were some options. I guess, I'm also now trying to remember because this was 2017.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I guess we're going back.
Daryna Kulya:
We're going back. The one thing in Canada as well. In the US, there's been Google Voice. Google Voice, at the time, did not work in Canada.
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting. Okay. There really wasn't options?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. There were potentially some smaller solutions, but there was really nothing that had any sort of traction. It just felt like you either have to use one of the more established solutions, like RingCentral for example. They're a public company. They're really more for larger companies.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's a boomer tech. You go to their website and you're like, "Oh, man, I don't even want to know what the product looks like."
Daryna Kulya:
Hey, you said it. I did not say it. I am just sitting here.
Turner Novak:
I never used it. I've seen a screenshot.
It always amazes me. You'll go to Salesforce, it's a $300 billion, 200, or $100 billion company, I don't know what the stock price is at. But you're like, "Fascinating."
Daryna Kulya:
The biggest frustration is you can't even ... The truth is they are really optimized for enterprise, and optimized for the sales-led motion.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
If you want to sign up for just yourself-
Turner Novak:
Not even worth it for that.
Daryna Kulya:
I don't even know how it's going to go.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
We really saw this really big gap on the market. Frankly, for me also at this time, going back to this moment of having this beta version of OpenPhone, putting it in front of people.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
I, myself, honestly was surprised just how much demand there was. Even when the product was not even beta, alpha. Super alpha. It was just that this need on the market for something that was easy to use, simple, that just worked for smaller businesses. That's how we got our in. That was our wedge into the market.
Turner Novak:
Okay. You did not have this open ecosystem initially. Is that because it was you didn't need to? The initial ICP didn't care enough, it just wasn't worth it for them? This actually probably solved the problem pretty well, right?
Daryna Kulya:
100%. It's interesting, because you were asking me about our launch. We just announced our open API, so now people can take OpenPhone, and do a lot of things with it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
But you're right, we started out being a very simple, "Here's everything you need and nothing more," type of product. Because again, it was just the two of us working on it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
We started out as a very everything you need is in here. You're right, for a while, we did not really have the need of opening our API and offering all these customization options, because the need we were solving was that for small businesses, they wanted something that just works.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
They wanted to sign up for the product, spend no more than five minutes. There is this metric of if it's more than five minutes, it's too complicated.
Turner Novak:
It's magic moment, I think some people call it.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
How fast you get that magic moment.
Daryna Kulya:
Especially for small business owners, because they don't have a massive team. They're busy growing their business and trying to figure our their business. They don't want to be dealing with your tools, and whatever. They just want something that works.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
That was our initial ICP, and we really needed to be simple, easy, and everything just works out of the box.
Turner Novak:
Then how did you decide, "Let's start a company around this?" Was there a moment when you're like, "Okay, fun. Cool project that we hacked together." It's like "Oh, shit, let's start selling it."
Daryna Kulya:
Right. I think the start selling it too, for me ... That's such a good question because I'm trying to remember if there was a single moment. Frankly, it was very natural. I think at some point, I realized that I'm just so obsessed with the problem we're solving. I think for me, at some point, it was ... I think for Mahyar, he left his job, basically as he was exploring this. He was looking for something to build and something to grow.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
For me, I was like, "Okay, interesting. This is pretty cool." But the moment that I realized that I'm fully in is that I just could see the impact we were having on our customers. I could see that, even though the product is just so incredibly early, and we don't have nearly all the features people need. I could just see how people are so engaged and so excited. And for me, the more I was talking to customers, the more excited I got. And at some point it was like, okay, we're both all in. We're doing it. I wish there was one moment, but it just kind of happened. Or maybe it's my memory, to be honest. I'm like-
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Maybe it's like, there's a lot. I mean, a lot's happened since then.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So how did you get the first people to start using it? Like I don't know, first thousand customers. You've written a blog post about this. So you went from zero, I think it was zero to a hundred, the first couple people. What was the strategy to just get it out there and get people to start using it?
Daryna Kulya:
For sure. So for our type of product, we know that the idea of a business phone, people know they need a business phone usually.
Turner Novak:
Every business, every employee or desk worker probably has a phone of some kind.
Daryna Kulya:
Right. And also I think even for us initially thinking about business owners and going after them, because we couldn't initially with our product serve a bigger company, we were basically going after very, very tiny micro businesses. Really the question in my mind was never, like I didn't really feel we needed a ton of validation for the idea. We already had those validation points. It was more about how do we, without having a single dollar to spend on marketing, how can we for free basically get in front of people who we think could use our product? So for me, I just immediately sought Facebook groups. Maybe now I'm aging myself, but at the time that felt like-
Turner Novak:
People maybe still used it in 2017. People still do. I mean, it's still two billion users or whatever. People still use it.
Daryna Kulya:
Thank you. Thank you. You're making me feel better. But I just had this idea of Facebook groups because I realized that there is a Facebook group out there for everyone and everything. So it was crazy for me not to try it because I could just see all these groups for all kinds of business owners, for all kinds of entrepreneurs. So I joined over 60 of them and basically I'm still in those groups. Like real estate agents of North Carolina, guess what? I'm in that group. That's just an example. All kinds of groups that I'm in.
Turner Novak:
So what did you, did you go like, "Hey guys, try OpenPhone?" What's a good approach to tactfully insert yourself and make the marketing in the Facebook group work?
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely. Look, so I joined a bunch of groups and I think initially it was like I didn't really know what I was doing. I just joined a whole bunch. And the first thing I did was I would first listen to and observe what's happening in the group. And the one thing I saw is that in some groups there was already discussion sort of related to the problem we're solving. There were people in some groups talking about Google Voice. I was like, oh, cool, good to know.
And other discussions, people were talking about the problem of, "Hey, I have a business. I'm using my personal phone number. I get calls all the time. What do I do?" So I could see in some groups that were those discussions, and I thought, okay, I, will join these discussions. But then also I thought, how do I post about OpenPhone and just try to get some feedback in a sort of classy hopefully way. And what I learned really is that, of course I did some posts where I was like, "Hey, I'm working on OpenPhone. Do you want to check it out?" Link. I got banned a couple of times. That was not working, but-
Turner Novak:
It was too obvious basically?
Daryna Kulya:
Well, it was obvious, but it was also like if you are, some of these groups have a moderator, and a moderator doesn't want people, if they allow me to do it, they have to allow everyone to do it and it's just not fair. So really the idea was can't be the spammy sort of link. I can't be dropping links, I should be kind of contributing to the conversations.
So what I ended up doing in some of these groups, I would post and I would say, "Hey, here's the problem I'm working. I've noticed in my own family, I know that when you have a small business, here's the issue that people deal with in terms of calls. Do you have the same problem? Hey, is this a problem you've run into? How have you solved it?" So instead of me necessarily immediately dropping OpenPhone, I'm just being like, "Hey, here's the problem I'm solving. Do you have this problem? And if so, how are you solving it?" And I just got a conversation going basically.
So then when you look at that thread, it looks more of like an organic conversation between people versus dropping OpenPhone. And then when I did drop OpenPhone somewhere there, there were people who were like, "Oh, hey, I want to help you out. Let me sign up. Let me join your beta." There were people who said, "Hey, I'm interested." Essentially there were people who are willing to provide that feedback. But it took a lot of trial and error.
So I wish there was an easy answer. It took trialing a bunch of things, it took being in a lot of different groups, but what we were able to do, to be honest, is very simple. You don't really need, at this stage of the company, you don't need anything scalable. You also don't need, it would be crazy if every single sort of tactic I tried worked. That's not how life works. A couple of posts and a couple of groups did really well. I had posts in groups that had 40 plus, 50 comments.
Turner Novak:
So it was like power law, where some are just duds and then some got you a hundred customers.
Daryna Kulya:
A hundred percent. There were some groups where there are still customers who we met and who I met through those who are still customers now, what, seven years later? So it's absolutely the power law. You don't need all 60 to work. A couple of those worked and that was enough because then we could get the signal and then we could work with those customers and we had our beta users.
So then it's a whole new game to scale from there. But I just feel like sometimes founders are looking for something so perfect in the early days. Again, maybe I didn't really have any marketing experience going into this. Maybe there is something a lot better I could have done. But there is no need to have this perfect channel from day one. You just need a couple of things to work because if you're starting from zero, you just need a couple of channels-
Turner Novak:
Going from zero to one or from one to two, that's a hundred percent growth. To your point, you just need to make sure people need the problem solved and your solution is working in some capacity and people want to pay you for it. I don't think you can really be, you can't go out and be like, all right, we have limited budget, features, et cetera. I'm just going to spend a bunch of money on scalable ads. That's a later problem that you figure out.
Daryna Kulya:
A hundred percent, much, much later problem. I think it's really kind of when you're seeking product market fit, it's more about asking questions than necessarily, and this is why I actually think some of the things we did at that point were a lot of conversations. The goal for me was actually talking to people, whether it's async, on Facebook, I was on Facebook all the time, to be honest. I don't really go there anymore, but I was spending so much time on Facebook because I had all these groups and people, I was messaging people everywhere. I was just probably too much on Facebook.
But the goal was having conversations because conversations allow you to learn and then iterate and be closer to finding your channel. That's the goal. And you can't get to conversations if you're just spamming people with your link.
Turner Novak:
Did word of mouth work pretty well for you guys? Was that a channel? How did that go? Are people hanging out with their other entrepreneur friends, like, "Oh, here's this thing that I use." How did you really crack that?
Daryna Kulya:
Honestly, word of mouth took so much longer. It just took way, way longer. To me, that first phase of getting our beta customers, even our first paying customers, we definitely had some word of mouth. But now that I look back, word of mouth really only started happening for us when ... I think there's two things. Word of mouth happens when you exceed customer expectations. So with some customers who are coming in from using a personal phone number or using something really terrible, we could exceed their expectations fairly easily. But word of mouth really works when you have that differentiated product, incredible customer service. You've got to have things that you are doing that blow people away.
Turner Novak:
To make them want to talk about it.
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely. I mean, when you're asking about it, going back to those days, it just took longer than I expected to get to real word of mouth. Of course, we had people talking about it here and there, but true word of mouth happens when you are really exceeding those expectations.
And maybe one thing that we did, I'll tell you that helped us, it takes a while for the product to exceed expectations. There's a lot of building involved. But the one thing that we did to really, really compensate, which I think more founders should do, is just incredible customer service. I was the customer service rep for a while, for a long time, and I used our own product. I used OpenPhone to text-
Turner Novak:
To do customer support in the phone with the customers.
Daryna Kulya:
To do customer support. And it makes so much sense, using our own product, being in our own product with our customers.
Turner Novak:
You were taking the point of view of your customers, giving support to their customers to support your customers.
Daryna Kulya:
All the time. Absolutely. I was on a texting, going back to, we talked a little bit about SMS and sort of getting on a texting basis, I was on a texting basis with every single customer. So from a word of mouth point of view, maybe our product couldn't immediately blow people away, but what we did was even from those early days, every single person who signed up for OpenPhone got a text message from me saying, "Hey, welcome to OpenPhone. I'm Daryna. I'm here to help you. Text me whenever," because guess what? I responded around the clock.
But I was there with our customers texting back and forth, learning, helping. A lot of it was like, "Hey, I'm having an issue with this." And I would help them out. But then I would ask, "I'm curious, what brought you to OpenPhone?" So I was the support agent, but I was also trying to use that as an opportunity to learn about both the customers and their pain points and also what we can do better, both from a product standpoint and from the marketing standpoint.
Turner Novak:
Did you tell people I'm the founder of OpenPhone, or how did you position it, or what would you do today if you could change what you did?
Daryna Kulya:
I'm trying to remember, to be honest, because there was this message, this automated message that we would send to every person who signed up from the app. That was, again, coming from me. And I'm trying to remember if I said that I'm one of the founders. Possibly. I have to check. I actually don't remember.
But I was pretty, to be honest, we were so, in some cases, the truth is that in some cases I was very honest. I was like, "Hey, I'm one of the founders." But then there were other cases, frankly, when people would call this number and it's really just me and I kind of felt uncomfortable just being like, "Hi, this is Daryna." I thought we needed to portray to a, be more professional-
Turner Novak:
Like a corporate type of, like we're a massive company.
Daryna Kulya:
Even we are a company. So I would just respond, be like, "Hi, OpenPhone support, Daryna speaking." And it was so funny because, and people were like, "Oh, you have such great support. I always get routed to the same agent." And I was like, there's no other agent here.
But I think it depends. Look, if I, frankly, if I went back in time, I would probably lean into that more. I think I was a little bit maybe shy about the fact that we are just two people working on this. And the truth is that the people who would've been using us in those days, they're early. They're the most early adopters you can find because only early adopters will trust a new product at that phase. And early adopters actually think appreciate being like, "Hey, I'm user number five. I'm user number one."
Turner Novak:
I'm talking to the person who built this product, the founders of the company.
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
I think there's something to be said. I guess being in Silicon Valley, you meet founders all the time, but just if you're running a random business, like a plumbing company in Nebraska, and you're like, oh man, I'm talking to the founders of this. This is pretty cool. Sergey Brin or Sam Altman doesn't respond in ChatGPT when you talk to it, right? You're talking to the founder of the company. That can be a powerful thing, I feel like.
Daryna Kulya:
That could be, yeah. I think I was very much shying away from this, and I only later realized to lean into it more and be like, "Hey, yes, I know we are a very small team, but here's what we can do for you." So yeah, maybe something to be said about leaning into that more.
Turner Novak:
The beginning of the product, the first couple months or the first couple hundred or a thousand users, it was all free, right? No one paid anything.
Daryna Kulya:
Yep.
Turner Novak:
How did you then roll out paid product for the first time?
Daryna Kulya:
Yes. So that's right.
Turner Novak:
Did you add new features? What was the plan and the successful rollout of this thing?
Daryna Kulya:
Totally. So here's what happened. We knew we were going to start charging also. I mean, yeah, we knew there was going to be a point when we start charging, but we were, as most founders, I think uncomfortable doing that because I think there's a level of-
Turner Novak:
It's hard to ask people for money sometimes.
Daryna Kulya:
It is. You need to have, maybe you know founders who aren't like this, but a lot of people I know, they're all kind of just as a founder, sometimes you see your product in the worst possible way because you know too much about it.
But we actually did, so this was spring 2018, and we were considering applying for YC. We were in Toronto, and there was this event where we could do YC office hours with a YC partner. And we got matched to do office hours with Yuri Sagalov. And again, we were not a YC company, we were just working on OpenPhone and considering applying.
So we went through this, we applied for these office hours and we got a chance to talk to, I remember we talked to Yuri and he asked us, he was like, "Hey, when are you going to start charging?" And we're like, "Yeah, eventually." And he's like, "Well, why don't you just do it now? What is stopping you from doing it now?" And we realized it was really just our confidence in the product. But the truth is the product already at the time, we made it a lot better. We added a bunch of things. So it was really just us internally being like, are we ready for people to pay?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because if you try to charge and no one pays, that would not be the best feeling in the world.
Daryna Kulya:
That's right. And the earlier you know, the better, because of course, right? So we just said, okay, we're going to do it. So after those office hours, I actually remember we said, "Okay, we're going to give everyone a lot of notice and we're going to tell people that the product is going to be, you need to start paying," I think after 30 days or something.
And a lot of people, in fact, I remember about 60 people started paying us, and that was such an amazing moment because suddenly they're in, they're really in. And we then started getting, so anyone from that point on who would sign up would have a short trial and then would have to pay, and it just felt so amazing.
Turner Novak:
Why did you do a trial versus pay right up front?
Daryna Kulya:
That's a great point. PLG, I think we're PLG in our core. The philosophy has always been, we always want people to experience some of it before paying.
Turner Novak:
Before they're paying.
Daryna Kulya:
We've always wanted to really give you a chance to try it out. I think in some ways it's like a new concept for people. And even now, we do so much more on top of this idea of a phone number. We have collaboration, we have automations, we have AI, we have so much magic in the product. I think this has not changed. We've always wanted for people to experience it first.
Turner Novak:
You still do a free trial?
Daryna Kulya:
There is a free trial.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Even though now you've got APIs and it's all open and anyone can build on top of it.
Daryna Kulya:
There is a lot more you can experience in the trial. I think back in the day, the trial was like, there's maybe less you can do, but I think we just philosophically wanted people to experience it before making that decision.
Turner Novak:
And then so people started paying, I know you started using Reddit and that has kind of worked pretty well for you guys over time. Is that a true statement?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh my God, yes. Reddit has been amazing for us. I think that essentially around this time that we started, the product became essentially, there's now ability for people to pay, and the free trial and the Facebook groups. I think at some point I realized we've probably done I think everything I could have done in terms of getting those early people signed up through Facebook groups.
And I think I just stumbled upon Reddit as a potential place to talk about OpenPhone. I will tell you this, I think the only reason why I even came across this and started doing it is because of constraints. We did not have any money. We didn't raise any money. We were still essentially bootstrapping OpenPhone.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you mentioned YC. Were you in YC yet, or no?
Daryna Kulya:
So we started experimenting with Reddit right around the time that we did our YC interview. So we still did not have any-
Turner Novak:
You just didn't have a lot of money to work with. Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly. So when you don't have much money to work with, you have to be creative. So I thought, okay, Facebook groups work to a degree. I can probably do something similar on Reddit.
Turner Novak:
Similar playbook.
Daryna Kulya:
Similar playbook. However, going back to this idea that what I really learned is that, again, you can't be spammy, can't be salesy. And on Reddit, the bar is so much higher. I mean, if you even have the vibe of a marketer on Reddit, get ready to be kicked out and banned forever.
Turner Novak:
They'll [inaudible 00:44:47] and you'll get banned from the subreddit.
Daryna Kulya:
And people can be so mean too, by the way.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really?
Daryna Kulya:
Really mean. Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Is this Hacker News level mean or worse? Similar?
Daryna Kulya:
I think similar. I know Hacker News can be pretty mean. It was. It was actually brutal because I also was like, oh my God, I don't know if I have the stomach for this. But what essentially I started doing is, look, I joined some subreddits and going back to, I think what works is people like to help other people and people want to hear stories. I just joined some subreddits and posted, just talking about our experience, talking about, hey, at the time I left my job, I left my full-time job to work on this, on OpenPhone.
And I was just very honest about it and asked people, "Hey, is this a problem? Hopefully it's a problem, it's worth solving." But I just asked like, "Hey, is this a problem you have? What tools are you using? What can we do to solve this problem for you?" And I think if you are honest and very much like, "Hey, I'm here. I would love your help, I would love your feedback," in most places, people will be very helpful back. Some of these posts did super well and ended up getting us, Reddit really helped us tip over into the hundred plus customer range.
Turner Novak:
Those are the people that were paying. And then you did YC, you got in.
Daryna Kulya:
And then around this time, this was all kind of happening around the same time. And then we got into YC. And when we got into YC, I think we were interviewing when we had about maybe 60 or something customers, something like that. And then we crossed our hundred customer mark our first month of YC.
Turner Novak:
Okay. What was YC like? Good experience?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, it was amazing. I think I can't even, yeah, it was kind of life-changing, frankly, mainly because we were surrounded. I think obviously it's the partners, the advice, and all the things, but I think it was so much just being around peers.
Turner Novak:
You were in Canada at the time?
Daryna Kulya:
So we moved. So that also probably ... Yeah, we moved for YC.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Had you applied to different accelerators and tried to get funding at different places before this?
Daryna Kulya:
Well, I did some pitch competitions and we did some grant applications. Nothing really worked, to be honest.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think we were probably not good at that. We applied to some programs, but again, nothing worked. As we were working on OpenPhone in the early days, we were a part of this sort of student accelerator in Waterloo outside of Toronto, Velocity, which is amazing. And that was great.
Turner Novak:
Oh, I've heard of it. Yeah. I feel like [inaudible 00:47:40].
Daryna Kulya:
Velocity is amazing. Yeah, we were there and then we applied to YC and we moved to San Francisco, but we just didn't really have much luck with any other kind of programs. But now that I think back, it was probably a good thing because look, I still think that a lot of the things that we were able to do and all these, again, Reddit Facebook groups, I think if we had even $5,000 or $10,000 available in the bank, that would not make me as hungry as I was, knowing that I had to figure out how to get customers.
Turner Novak:
Like you would have just bought Google Ads or something, or hired a marketer full time and you would've done other stuff or something?
Daryna Kulya:
I just think that it's, I don't know, constraints, I really believe that constraints are a blessing because they make you more creative. And yeah, again, I'm not saying I necessarily would've taken the money and would've put it all into ads, but just not having that makes you really think outside of the box and be like, okay, I have to figure it out without anything.
Turner Novak:
But you did end up raising money, right?
Daryna Kulya:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
So you did YC and basically there's a demo day, investors line up, and then I'm seeing people just threw money at you, right? Because it was going really well.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
What was the experience like raising that seed round?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh man, look, so YC was really great for us and we've grown a ton through YC and I think during YC there was almost the feeling of being just on this amazing ride of getting customers, feeling so great, and the numbers are just going up into the right, and incredible. We had more demand than we knew what to do with. It was all just amazing.
In terms of raising our seed round, so maybe my expectation, maybe this is where expectations are different. I don't know why, but I did think that we'd present at demo day and we literally just-
Turner Novak:
People just wire you money.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, people wire money immediately. That did not happen. Spoiler alert, that did not happen.
Turner Novak:
So what happened?
Daryna Kulya:
What happened was we had conversations, we were talking to folks, and this being our first fundraise, it felt like things were going well because we were having a meeting after meeting after meeting, but in retrospective, that is not a good sign. But I think maybe as founders going through this for the first time, it was thinking, "Oh, great, they want to meet with us again. Oh, they want to meet with us again." But actually, that should have been a sign that no, they're not going to be investing. This is a seed investment. We were not raising that much money. Basically, if people didn't feel strong about what we are doing and about us as a team immediately, I don't know if 10 meetings... You don't need 10 meetings to make a small seed investment.
So ultimately, I think that looking back, I think we just learned the hard way that your job as a founder is to build your business and to not be fundraising. Your job is really not this process of fundraising. Your job is growing your company, and I think we maybe lost track of that a bit. So we ultimately raised an amazing seed round, we have great investors, but I certainly felt those rejections that we were getting over the course of I think a month or two after YC, I took them personally as I think a lot of founders do. But-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, especially when there's probably a really big bet on the team, there's not a lot of traction or data to go on. It's just like, can they build this?
Daryna Kulya:
And you know, in our space?
Turner Novak:
And you're basically saying no.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, look, and I know it's so tough, and the other thing is we are building in a very established space. I think we really struggled with this how are you different from these companies question. We struggled with it because we are in the space where we actually need to build a lot to get to the baseline, and then we have the vision for how we want to innovate. But for you to innovate, you actually need to make the core experience really, really good, and there is a lot to be built for a product like ours.
Turner Novak:
Was building workflows, opening up the app, was that in the initial pitch to people?
Daryna Kulya:
It was for sure in the vision, and also by the way, this is why we called the company OpenPhone, right? We always saw it as a platform, not just as an app. We always saw it as something that allows folks to really build powerful workflows, to integrate it into their tooling. We always saw it like that, and we talked about variations of this in the early days, but now with every year, we were getting closer and closer to it, and just now, we finally I think were able to do it. But yeah, it was just tough I think for us as a very young company dealing with... I think it's just dealing with rejection and believing, you have to believe in yourself.
And what helped frankly, and what I'm so grateful for, is that throughout this time, we've had very direct connection to our customers and we've had customers who are just supporting us, giving us a lot of feedback. We have still all these Slack channels with customer feedback coming in, and for me, I always believed that what we are building is so valuable to our customers, and that feeling, that got us through all those moments.
Turner Novak:
So you mentioned feedback coming in from customers in Slack, but were they talking to you in OpenPhone? Were you somehow piping it into Slack?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, we have an-
Turner Novak:
What's your stack for doing that? How did you guys structure it all?
Daryna Kulya:
By the way, what I'm talking about that too is reviews. We now have feedback. So we have so many sources of feedback. As much as of course it's OpenPhone, we have App Store reviews, Play Store reviews. There are so many review sites these days.
Turner Novak:
YouTube, et cetera.
Daryna Kulya:
Everything, so even then, we had all of these... I actually forgot the exact tools, but there are all these tools that pipe reviews from all over the internet, and you can just instantly know what customers feel about what you're putting out.
Turner Novak:
And you had a Slack channel specifically that just aggregated it all?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, yeah. I mean, we have even several. Maybe this is the part that... Our Slack is a little crazy because not only do we do that, but we also have every single survey, we send a lot of surveys to people throughout their experience asking obviously the NPS question and all kinds of questions, like would you recommend OpenPhone to your friends? And we ask a bunch of things. So every single survey since then and still gets piped to its own channel in Slack, so sometimes I can just open Slack and forever be reading that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, interesting. Well, so you mentioned using the customer feedback to drill down on specific ICPs. How do you recommend doing that? Anything specifically that worked for you guys? Like, "Oh, real estate agents love OpenPhone," or was there certain things you were able to figure out and ICPs you were able to really drill down on based on feedback?
Daryna Kulya:
That's a great question. I think that one thing we were able... So maybe this is the piece we've had a slightly different approach to. So we have always from the beginning known that we are building something that's applicable to a lot of different kinds of businesses, and we always tried to look at it beyond an industry or a job. The one thing that we have learned is that our product, and one of the ICPs that has emerged is really teams that rely on phone and voice and SMS as their number one channel of communication.
Turner Novak:
With a customer?
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly, where that's their primary channel, or their secondary, not tertiary channel, so those teams have emerged. That is a little bit broader than a specific industry. I think for us, the thing that we've found throughout the years is that when people talk about ICPs, at least I always fear that it's a little bit too narrow, but in reality, we see it's more about jobs to be done. What is the exact job that they're hiring our product to do? And when you think of it from that perspective, that helps us a lot in terms of finding these pockets of customers. So that's the approach that we've taken.
Turner Novak:
Well, so then another thing I know, that you said that around this time, after YC, you started doing cold emails, and cold emailing was something that worked and I think you were surprised how well it worked or something.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Is this true? So you started leaning into cold email at this time too?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, so really from a perspective of our customer acquisition, cold email is actually was something we started doing during YC. And we started doing cold email during YC, and there was actually an interesting story about it because when we joined YC, we had our first office hours with Michael Seibel, and the first question he asked was, "How much of the batch have you signed up?" And we were like, "What do you mean?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's a thing you can do, is [inaudible 00:57:55].
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly, why don't you sign up everyone in YC? So we immediately started doing that. But this is maybe a little bit interesting about ICP and when you're an early stage company trying to find your ideal customers. The thing is that we joined YC with our early customer base that was very much traditional small businesses, folks that are realtors, property managers, we had massage therapists. The customer base we joined YC with felt super different than startup founders, because YC, it's all founders. And during our first office hours, Michael was like, "Hey, you have to go sell your product to all of these folks. Why aren't you doing that?"
And while from the ICP perspective, it may seem very different, in many cases, the problems they're looking to solve are actually the same. So we actually had great success serving a lot of YC, our batch mates and other YC founders in companies. And we found at the time that it was like, hey, it would be crazy for us to be in YC among all these folks and not leaning into that as a competitive advantage to sell to other startup founders.
And in fact, it was almost easier because you see from a cold email perspective, it's so much easier for me as a startup founder to email another founder, because I know what it's like to be in their shoes. I can send an email that is probably a lot more effective because I know what that person, I hopefully know what they might be going through. I don't know, because I can relate to them. So cold email from that sense worked really well.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, okay. It's interesting with the ICP too, one of the more recent guests of the show, Gokul Rajaram, I don't know if you've ever met him or talked to him but one of his big topics in the episodes was you have to drill down your ICP and make it super, super narrow, which is not what you just said. But specifically, you're saying the job to be done needs to be narrowed down.
Daryna Kulya:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
So maybe it's like you can narrow it down to a specific type of customer maybe, but really what that means is the thing that they need you for is a very certain specific thing. So maybe that's really the way to think about it, is that's what's narrow.
Daryna Kulya:
A hundred percent.
Turner Novak:
Is the thing that you're solving for someone.
Daryna Kulya:
I'll give you an example. I think this probably would be better with an example. Here's an example. I've found that if I'm on your website and you are a small startup or a small business and you have a phone number on your website, that is a signal to me that you care enough about phone as a support or a channel. And that to me is a much better signal that, hey, you are actually getting inbound calls and maybe messages from your customers. So for me, that is a much better signal than what industry you're in. So one thing that we learned, for example, in those times is if you are, let's say, a startup or again, a small business with a phone number on your site, you likely offer support through phone and there's a chance you may be unhappy with your existing solution, or you may be... There's a million things there. So that was a better signal for us. That's something that we used versus saying, "Oh, we're going to email people in this industry but not this industry."
Turner Novak:
That makes sense. And then I think with emails too, another prior guest of the show, his biggest hack for good cold emails is lowercase subject lines. And I noticed in some of your blog posts, when you were showing screenshots of what would work for you, you also sometimes use lowercase subject lines. Was that an accident or did you actually do that on purpose?
Daryna Kulya:
So I did that on purpose.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
And by the way, fun fact, I just recently realized, as the time has gone by, I used to be a person who was so proper in all my communications. I'm always like... As time has gone by-
Turner Novak:
Like, "Dear Turner, I'm very excited to record this podcast today. See attached my whatever," yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
As time goes, I just write less and I'm like, "Let me know, LMK," or something. Yeah, I've become a lot more of a lowercase person, but at that point, I think I know what you're referring to. When we were doing a very intentional called email, it was lowercase and I did see that perform better. I think sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't. The truth is that I think what's most important is just relevance, so the truth is if I email you and what I'm talking about is not relevant at all, it doesn't matter that it was lowercase or uppercase. What really matters is that it's the right time, it's the right angle, so that was more important. And this is what I mentioned about for us, it was easier to say because, oh, you have a phone number on your website so you must be getting inbound calls, so you probably care about it, versus if you don't have a phone number on your website.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So it's like you still need to intercept them or get in front of them at the right time, but then there's also an element of like, is there an 80% chance they see it? Is there a 1% chance? You want to make sure that number is as high as possible to then have a high conversion rate if you're actually hitting what they need.
Daryna Kulya:
But I also will mention that this whole lowercase, uppercase thing, it's actually more about people. I don't know about you, but I tune out anything that's clearly a marketing email.
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah, that's fair, yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
So if you see something in your inbox that really feels like it was sent to a ton of people, you are likely to just skip and archive or whatever. The idea of whether it is doing lowercase or just being more casual, and I love plain text emails generally for everything, the idea is really how can I show you that this was very much... If I actually spend time writing an email, I need it to show up as a personal email versus as a marketing campaign. For me, there's nothing worse than trying to do cold email and people being like, "Oh, take me off your..."
Turner Novak:
Mailing list.
Daryna Kulya:
Mailing list. And I'm like, oh, this came in as a campaign. This should come across as a very one-on-one message.
Turner Novak:
So do you feel like people mess that up a lot? They're too campaign-y or marketing-y?
Daryna Kulya:
Hundred percent, I think so. Well, I'll tell you this. I always think about what kind of... Also, it's worth mentioning, in this day and age, I think it's just so much harder to break through your inbox. Google filtering out a bunch of emails, you are now maybe showing up in Gmail and the promotions tab. It's just a lot harder, I think, than it was 2018, 2019. But in my mind, the best shot you have is trying to come across as much as possible as a human, so I always think about how do I write an email to a friend versus emailing in this overly formal way that feels very proper and very sales-y.
Turner Novak:
Especially when you're probably selling. I know you guys have upgraded a little bit to enterprise. Maybe we'll talk about that a little bit, but when it's just SMB selling, it's like an individual. You're trying to make it a little bit more personable versus-
Daryna Kulya:
A hundred percent
Turner Novak:
Corporate B2B, whatever. I guess the rules, maybe they're the same, but maybe they're different.
Daryna Kulya:
Well, I actually think, to be honest, I think when it comes to this, just my take is that it's the same. It doesn't matter. I don't know anyone who is excited to reply to clearly a sales email. I think the best sales emails don't feel like sales emails.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. My most common reply to a sales email is, "Please remove me from the mailing list." That's 90% of the responses.
Daryna Kulya:
If you said that to me, by the way, a few times that I've received those, it's so soul crushing. I mean, of course I'll remove you, but I'm like, "Oh."
Turner Novak:
So talking about other channels outside of email, you guys did some press, you guys got some pretty good press coverage and I think you've gotten some coverage throughout the life of the company. Wordify works good for just getting press coverage. How do you approach those and get reporters to actually write about it versus just being like, also get out of my inbox, also, please remove me from the mailing list.
Daryna Kulya:
That's right, that's right. I can imagine if maybe... Actually for them, it's probably the worst. I can't even imagine what it's like to be in their inbox. Frankly, so for us, something that I've always heard from folks is this idea that press is not a channel, don't rely on press. This is the common advice.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I have some portfolio companies where they have said, "We literally got no clicks from TechCrunch or something like that, or from Product Hunt."
Daryna Kulya:
Really?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I know it's worked for you, so what do you think made it work?
Daryna Kulya:
Look, I think it probably just depends on ICP and who you're selling to. For us, for example, Product Hunt has been amazing, and it's also cool because we just did a launch just there for our API and all the new stuff.
Turner Novak:
Did you get traction from it?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh yeah, it was amazing. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Nice. Okay, cool
Daryna Kulya:
But you see, I think that it's because for a product like that, not only are we... So again, we are appealing to startups and then we just announced our API, and the kind of folks who hang out on Product Hunt, this is interesting to them. I think, first of all, if you're super enterprise-y, if you're selling to a large enterprise, and also maybe if you are a little bit more narrow of a focus in terms of verticals-
Turner Novak:
Like selling to veterinarians or something, they're not going to be on Product Hunt.
Daryna Kulya:
Sure. If your ICP is not on Product Hunt, no matter what you do, nothing's going to happen. Also, if your ICP does not read TechCrunch, nothing's going to happen. The thing about us is that we sell to startups and small businesses, and the one interesting thing is that the kinds of small businesses that love and use our product, they actually act like startups. I think the lines between tech startup and small business are very blurry.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
So for us, I think that when we did our TechCrunch launch, it was amazing. Literally, OpenPhone was ringing off the hook that day. It was amazing for us. Anytime we did that kind of press, it was great. And it's hard obviously to make it... It's not really a sustainable or scalable channel, but I think what people may want to think about too is that doing press isn't necessarily just to say, oh, it's a customer acquisition channel. It's something that can help your other channels. Because at the end of the day, if you are a company and you have at least a little bit of press coverage, it builds trust a little bit.
Turner Novak:
Because you can be like, "As seen on TechCrunch," or it's just-
Daryna Kulya:
Maybe it's as seen on TechCrunch, or maybe it's the fact that you are talking to buyers and they want to make sure you as a company-
Turner Novak:
You're legit.
Daryna Kulya:
You are legit and you're going to stick around. So if you raise funding, it's crazy for you to not go to press because that gives you a little bit more ability to build trust around you as a company, so I think that was really helpful for us. But yeah, I think generally, if your audience is not reading or hanging out in a certain place, no matter how good you make your launch there, it's not going to do much.
Turner Novak:
Okay. How have you historically gotten press coverage for things? Do you do a lot? Do you just work with an agency, PR stuff?
Daryna Kulya:
Frankly, yeah. Press coverage is one of those things. I think it's fairly straightforward. Not straightforward. I think obviously, funding announcements are great, and quite frankly, we haven't done too much outside of those, but I think for me, at least the way that we've approached it is anytime we have something special to share, we are getting into the habit of pitching press, and I think as a startup, as a founder, it's useful to have this as a muscle. I don't think we're necessarily the best example of it, but what I can tell you is it doesn't have to just be press in terms of TechCrunch, et cetera. It could be you as... Again, I believe, and I'm starting to do it more now, I believe that as a founder, you need to think about do you want to have your own brand? Do you want to lean on social? Do you want to build that into your-
Turner Novak:
Going direct, that's the current thing, the how you describe it, yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Right, going direct, because I think it's amazing when you can get press and you have something interesting for press, but just think of other things you can develop. Product Hunt is one, building a community for your own customer somewhere is another. I'll give you an example. We are hosting a really cool live event soon, and we actually did something like this, a really fun kind of launch, live celebration. We did this when we were a very young company too. When you build your own thing, you have full control over it and you have ability to just generate excitement with your customers. That is something that does not cost money. That is something that every company can develop, and over time, that can grow and turn into your sort of, I don't want to say media, but it is almost like that.
Turner Novak:
Owned media.
Daryna Kulya:
Owned media, yes.
Turner Novak:
So you might be like, "Oh, we really want to talk about this thing. We need some reporter to cover it and it's just not interesting to anyone and no one wants to cover it." And you're like, "Fuck, I just need somebody to write about this." But if you have your own channel, it's every day. I think you've started tweeting a little bit more lately.
Daryna Kulya:
I have.
Turner Novak:
And you're sharing stories from the trenches of what I learned from my customers or feedback?
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely. Well, look, I started doing it. I'll tell you what happened. I actually used to do this in the early days a lot, because going back to this fact that when you don't really have any money, you're going to be creative and suddenly, you're going to see what's possible. So I did a lot of what now people say, I know it's trendy to say, building in public. I didn't realize it was building in public, but I was doing some of this when we were just starting out. And then I think at some point, I stopped doing it. I don't know, just of course, so many other problems, so many things to figure out. I got really focused on what we were doing internally.
But I later realized that those stories, me going out there and talking about the why behind the launch, or not just saying, "Hey, we have the new thing," but talking about why we're doing it and what's so special about it, the behind the scenes of a thing we're doing, that is what helped us get here. And I think that people are tired of marketing messages. People want to connect with other people, and that's going to be more impactful than maybe a very polished marketing message.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, one thing I really want to ask you, what was COVID like? Anything big like new adoption? Did people leave? Did customer behavior change at all during COVID?
Daryna Kulya:
COVID, well, I think for our company, it was great, but one thing I actually still don't know, to be honest, is how much of it was COVID and how much of it was us actually having the right product and being ready? Because you see, obviously, we didn't know what's going to happen. Leading up to COVID, we actually built a lot of the key things we needed to do, like we finally built the first version of a Teams product, and that was something that was important for us because we obviously wanted to grow with our customers. And we had this thing where a company would adopt OpenPhone, but then as they grow, hit certain roadblocks and we can't keep up with what they need. So we needed to have a Teams product, which we finally developed and we had. Also, we created our desktop app. Basically, we finally had the product that was the right product for our customers.
Turner Novak:
And it was just the right product for our customers.
Turner Novak:
It was just the perfect timing?
Daryna Kulya:
COVID hit.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
I sometimes wonder how much of it was COVID only, or was it just that we finally... You know when product market fit happens, it feels...
Turner Novak:
Was there a little bit of an inflection point?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Really? Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
Product market fit was, I know those moments really well, because when you hit it for the first time, your number one problem is customer support, because you just get so much, you get inundated with... You have people who are customer support/inbound sales. You basically have people who are trying to use the product, and you just need to make it possible for them.
I know we hit that during COVID, and maybe the one interesting thing that was very specific to COVID is that we had a lot of inbound from government offices and institutions that I think normally would not probably come to OpenPhone.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, they'd be using some Cisco legacy-
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah, because they would have people who have to work from home now, and they have these desk phones, so...
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Daryna Kulya:
We had that demand, which was, I think that demand was very COVID, I would attribute it to COVID, but the rest of it was really just honestly us having a product for the market.
Turner Novak:
Wow, okay. That's good. You also, in 2020, started really investing a little bit more in SEO.
Daryna Kulya:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
How did that go?
Daryna Kulya:
There was a bit of a-ha moment, realizing that, "Oh, my God, this can be a channel for us."
Turner Novak:
Why hadn't you done it? When you're talking about scalable channels, I'm like, Reddit, Facebook group doesn't seem to... SEO does. That's the tried and true.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, my God. I know, I know. Hey, in retrospective, but there is actually two things, though, and I know this is going to make, I'm going to sound so old now, but in 2017, 2018, there was still the concept of companies having a Medium blog.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Oh, yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
Do you remember that?
Turner Novak:
Sort of. Yeah. Now if you publish something on Medium, there's something wrong.
Daryna Kulya:
Well, I think that, you're publishing something, you want the authority, you go to your blog, to your domain. That's the whole point, right? You want to be ranking for things, and you want the traffic to go to your website.
Turner Novak:
You were still publishing in Medium?
Daryna Kulya:
I was publishing. You're asking me, yes, we did Reddit, we did all these things, but on top of that, I guess I don't talk about it much, maybe because I'm afraid of people thinking like, oh, my God, what were you thinking?
Turner Novak:
This whole time, you were also writing on Medium?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, I was also, oh, my God, I was writing on Medium. I also was doing, this was actually pretty smart, to be honest, I would pitch myself as a guest. I did some guest blogging. Essentially, what happened, I'll tell you what happened. What happened in 2020, early 2020, is we finally got everything set up to just have our WordPress, to have our blog.
I think I finally realized, frankly, that, okay, it's time for whatever content I have in my head, whatever content I'm putting on other people's blogs or on Medium, again, Medium, I know, or these forums where I am answering questions, and I'm maybe contributing content to Reddit or to this other forum, but I don't really own any of it at the end of the day, I realized, we should have our own blog. Should have done it sooner, 100%, but it happened in 2020. It was that beautiful moment when I could see, we're finally starting to rank for the terms that we wanted to rank for. Nothing crazy, no insane terms, but lower CPC-
Turner Novak:
Business phone?
Daryna Kulya:
Well, it took us a while to rank for that, by the way, but we started ranking for maybe, I don't know, Google Voice Alternatives in Canada, very long kind of...
Turner Novak:
That's specific. That's somebody who knows they want an alternative to Google.
Daryna Kulya:
It's very specific, but that's how you get your in, because obviously, when you are a smaller company, you're a new site, you're a newer brand, small team. At the time, I remember finally hiring one of our first freelance writers to help out. We just then, we had to have an angle and go for terms where we could compete, competing on something like business phone, it's very expensive, and you also have to have a lot of domain authority.
Turner Novak:
You used the esoteric keywords to build domain authority and then you can compete?
Daryna Kulya:
Correct.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
We wrote a lot of things, but I think the interesting thing is, by the way, we are talking about it 2024, there's AI results all over Google. It's a very different world out there. I think what helped us, frankly, with our content strategy at the time, what really worked for us, was that some of these things that we were doing, and I was writing some of this as well, it's like, I think we were going for terms.
Again, we were going for terms where the person searching for it is really in need of a solution like us. Also, I think we were just a little bit more open and a little bit more honest. We weren't very marketing or salesy, perhaps. We were just trying to meet the consumer demand. That was kind of our approach.
Turner Novak:
There's demand for certain keywords and finding solutions and you would create content to fill in and rank those words.
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, okay.
Daryna Kulya:
We were trying always to have useful content and provide a unique angle, but that is what worked. I know right now, if you were to do that today, it's a lot harder, because AI search, the whole world of Google looks different.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Content today, how do you think about the content approach you should use today in 2024? It's almost 2025.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, my God, we should just say that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Going forward, we'll say.
Daryna Kulya:
I think there are several things, and frankly, this is kind of what we are doing. The reason I am out there, ,tweeting and sort of sharing my story and the reason I'm doing sort of founder led content, now it's a thing, is because that's one of the things that kind of works. Google is going to keep eating up space in search, and there's going to be more AI results, but one thing that we do know is that you need to have other channels. Maybe the step one, have a portfolio of channels, don't rely on a single channel.
Turner Novak:
Don't you probably want a single channel early on?
Daryna Kulya:
Yes, but you see it, I think it kind of changes as you scale. Look, I think it's still possible to do, as an early stage company, to win doing SEO, but I think that you need to have your both unique point of view. Also, by the way, it has to actually make sense for your business model. Maybe I should go back a little bit. The thing is that the reason why we invested in content and started building out content is because there is already a ton of search on Google of people looking for a solution like ours.
If I'm a founder and I'm building something for a problem that you never think to search for, it makes no sense to invest in SEO. You need to do advocacy, you need to do customer education. If you are building something that no one really is searching for, you can't just be like, "All right, I'm going to go write for a bunch of keywords." For us, the reason why that worked and that still made sense is because of just that pure volume of demand. We could pick a weird long tail keyword and write about it, and still get a very meaningful number of trials and customers, but for a lot of companies, it does not make sense.
Turner Novak:
Any advice then on discovering, let's say, okay, you can go into Google, there's keyword ranking type, you can see what people are searching, you maybe go there. How would you decide then, "Oh, maybe I should do more founder led content," how would you decide that's the way to go?
Daryna Kulya:
Right. Oh, that's a great question. Yes, there are a lot of tools. I personally use Ahrefs, for example, it's this SEO tool that tells you-
Turner Novak:
Is this Ahrefs?
Daryna Kulya:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
Okay, well, we'll throw a link in the show notes for people to check out.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, yeah. It's amazing. I love it. I still love checking it out. You can see search demand, you can see both search demand and also difficulty. There is a lot of demand for something-
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah, like ability to compete?
Daryna Kulya:
100%.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Daryna Kulya:
Absolutely. The reason why we started out, going back to that question of, we started out writing content for topics and keywords where there was decent demand, but the ability to, there was not much of a barrier to entry. We picked easy keywords-
Turner Novak:
That weren't competitive?
Daryna Kulya:
Well, basically we tried to find those wedges, and we did a bunch of them. Now, if I'm a founder, and if I'm thinking, okay, what should I do? Well, first of all, I think that for SEO, like if there is already pre-existing demand for what you're building, you are entering a mature space, that's one factor. Another factor is looking at competitors. Do you see what your competitors are doing? Do you find angles that you can be unique?
At the end of the day, you need to be able to say something different than... You can't just say exactly what your competitors are saying. Those sites are going to get all the traffic. Do you have a unique point of view? Do you have an interesting story? Also, quite frankly, I don't know if every founder should be doing content, to be honest, because I think that it's hard, and if you don't enjoy it, and if you feel like it's not something that you actually genuinely like doing, I don't know if you're going to get the upside.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. A big thing in content creation in general is burnout. It is really hard to consistently put yourself out there, not even in a startup founder mindset, but also if you're like, if you create beauty content, or video game streaming content every day, years in a row, constantly going out there, if you don't enjoy it, super hard.
Daryna Kulya:
It's crazy. The burnout is crazy. I'll tell you this, going back to it's about your business model too. For example, for us, we have a large team. We have a lot of ground that we cover with a product, a lot of existing search. For our space, it makes sense that content is a key distribution channel. You might be a company that is selling to government, to enterprise, where every contract is worth, I don't know, millions.
Turner Novak:
$8 million or something.
Daryna Kulya:
Exactly, $8 million. You have like-
Turner Novak:
That's the steak dinner strategy.
Daryna Kulya:
... The whales, right? Yeah, the steak dinner strategy. You actually have to get really good at sales. For us, from a distribution perspective, we're more marketing led. We're like product led, of course, all these terms, product led, marketing led, we're much more product and marketing, and sales is there to assist and help out, versus companies that are sales led. If you're a founder of a sales led company, then you should actually be maybe ignoring all of this, and just get really good at sales, like true enterprise sales.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, and then there's also the interesting approach, if you just use Open AI and Sam Altman, so it's a consumer product, but it's also enterprise deals, what does he do? He goes on a bunch of podcasts, people know about him. It's like mass market, but it's also helpful for recruiting.
Daryna Kulya:
100%.
Turner Novak:
I don't think there's probably a single person in business, like the professional business setting, that hasn't heard of ChatGPT, and I would say a decent amount, [inaudible 01:26:54] on how close you are to tech, you know about Sam Altman. It's like, "Oh, I'd meet this guy. I see what he's selling," or whatever. I think there's definitely a benefit also to just, like with Elon, right? Similar type of thing.
That's probably actually more so where you're like, you might just actually, you might not want to buy the product, be like, "Sure, I'd take a meeting with Elon Musk, why not?" It just gets you in front of people too.
Daryna Kulya:
Totally.
Turner Novak:
I don't know. I think there's definitely a benefit. It's maybe threading the needle, though. You still do have to be able to sell.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. I think it's just kind of it's interesting, also, depends on the stage of your company. I think if content is the key, it goes back to what are your key distribution motions? If content, for us, content is a key distribution channel, so I spend too much time probably thinking or creating content, but it makes sense for us, because it's a key distribution channel. If we had maybe another channel that was the key distribution channel, perhaps I would be spending more time there.
Turner Novak:
You've recently, I don't know how recently, but you're trying to get some bigger enterprise customers?
Daryna Kulya:
Yep.
Turner Novak:
What have you learned throughout that, transitioning from literally SMB, one person, to now bigger enterprise deals?
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah. Well, I would say, look, I think, so first of all, the one interesting thing is that SMB is a really wide range. Everyone's definition of definition of SMB is different. Frankly, we are kind of more, we're selling to larger SMBs because a company with 500 employees, technically it's still considered a small business. Again, depends on your definition. We have some customers above that range, so to speak.
I think that the piece that I've kind of learned is that a lot of times, you shouldn't be pulled into a market by your existing customers. This is why it's so great to be serving startups and fast-growing small businesses is because they can actually show you what enterprise looks like before you go have a cold pitch meeting, and they kind of ease you into it.
What has really helped us is essentially by serving startups and these companies that are going to grow and add a bunch of licenses on OpenPhone, add a bunch of users, they're now "mid-market" or whatever, I guess, whatever label you want to give them, they're now much larger. We get to see what their product experience is, and we get to understand what they care about, but they've been with us this whole time, so we've developed a great relationship, of course, and we know what to expect.
Then when we go and talk to someone who is starting at that point, we know what to say. I think our experience has been more gradual and more have our customers guide us there, versus go out and start pitching to a whole new segment that we are not familiar with.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Yeah, it's almost like it's a much warmer enterprise.
Daryna Kulya:
We are growing with them.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah.
Daryna Kulya:
We are growing with them, and I think that's kind of, at least in our case, that's what's happening. I think it's easier because you get to, essentially, you get to know what to expect around the corner, versus going and having a bunch of cold meetings.
Turner Novak:
Not just all these different sales marketing motions, you also have always been very focused on design as a company. That probably helps convert all the things you're doing on the growth and the marketing side. Why focus on design? Why is this so important?
Daryna Kulya:
Frankly, so this goes back, this actually goes to starting OpenPhone, and both me and Mahyar kind of both being very UX obsessed and really having appreciation for design. It all starts there. Frankly, it's also building trust. I think that for us, as an example, we are building trust, and we are also entering a space that has been very under-loved from a perspective of design.
Beautiful design and kind of creating a product that people actually enjoy using is almost like a part of our value proposition, because we are in a busy space with a lot of clunky solutions, a lot of services that do all these different things. For us, design is the core part of our value prop. It's not an afterthought. It's not like an add-on, like, "Oh, we're going to do these features, but we are also going to do them nicely." No, no, no.
The whole idea of what we're doing is we are trying to make it easier for businesses to build stronger relationships with their customers through communication, and we just see that design is paramount to our ability to deliver this. For us, design is just a core component of the product. It's not something that we kind of added on top. Also, I have to say, a lot of times when founders talk to me about it, you just need to hire incredible designers. We have an amazing design team. If you think your product needs to be very functional, very beautiful, it also starts with just building a strong team around it.
Turner Novak:
If I do not have good design right now, I'm not a design led company, any advice on how to shift? You said it needs to be part of the DNA?
Daryna Kulya:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
Should I start from scratch, or how do you build it?
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, man. Yeah. This is tough, right?
Turner Novak:
Can you transition into being more of a design led company if you're not?
Daryna Kulya:
You can. I think you can definitely take steps towards it, but I think that maybe you need to, it really starts from design culture, and I think it almost is nurturing that culture, not just on the design team, but generally in the company, where if you are a founder, and if you kind of wake up one day, you're like, "Oh, man, we really need to do this." I think that it's possible.
It's going to be very tough, but if you are really committed to it, if you hire the right people and really champion design, not just in external things, but also in internal things, I think that's the interesting part. At OpenPhone, when you look at how we do design for internal comms, or we do all hands, our all hands deck is so beautiful, so incredible. I know I'm biased, of course, but we care about it, so we take the time to do it for internal things too.
You can't skip that part. If you're a founder, if you wake up again one day, thinking like, "Hey, we have to be design led, design driven," again, it's probably possible, but just probably have to go back several steps to do that.
Turner Novak:
Is design pretty buttons and colors, or is it like efficient, like routing the consumer in an efficient way of using intuitive button layout, all that stuff? Is that a key component of it?
Daryna Kulya:
I really think the design is about how something works. Of course, visually having something beautiful that is pleasing, that's great, but to me, it's about how something works. The thing about design as it relates to our product is that we are the kind of product that people live in, because you're calling and messaging customers all the time.
Turner Novak:
If you're a customer support, 40 hours a week, probably for the customer support employee...
Daryna Kulya:
100%, yeah. You are talking to customers. We are that product that connects you with your customers, so it's super high stakes, and you are spending a lot of hours in the product. For us, every interaction, every button, everything you do needs to be efficient and needs to be saving you time.
We think of what we do as we allow you to have stronger relationships with your customers through communication. We're not just giving you calling and messaging for the heck of it. We have to be helping you get closer to your ultimate goal versus just giving you kind of buttons, et cetera.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, a better phone.
Daryna Kulya:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Interesting. I feel like that is a good way to tie it all out, bringing it all back from the very beginning of making the phone better.
Daryna Kulya:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show.
Daryna Kulya:
Thank you so much for having me.
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