Hannah Chaplin de Receptive

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Jeroen: Hola Hannah, me alegro de tenerte en Founder Coffee.

Hannah: Thank you. I’ve actually got a cup of coffee. So we’re doing this right, aren’t we?

Jeroen: Sí, yo también por mi parte.

Hannah: Perfecto.

Jeroen: It’s almost finished but maybe we can stop half way and I’ll get another one.

Sí, ¿podrías poner un poco de música a mitad de camino? ¿Así la gente podría escucharla mientras preparamos la bebida?

Jeroen: Well, don’t tell the people, but I edit it.

Hannah: Secret’s out.

Jeroen: You are the Founder of Receptive. There are a lot of people in our network who are not in SaaS, don’t know about the awesome tools to manage products or make their product management more efficient. For those who don’t know about Receptive, what does the product do?

Hannah: If you want to be super precise, we’re specifically for B2B SaaS companies. Product feedback is a huge problem, so we’ve got a system that helps these companies collect the feedback from customers, their internal teams and the market. The tool offers lots of reporting and analytics, that can help them understand all the data and make sure everybody is working on things that really count — product wise. We help them when they start to scale or reach an enterprise level.

Jeroen: Básicamente, recibes comentarios, los organizas, los relacionas con las funciones y estableces las prioridades de la futura hoja de ruta. ¿Es correcto?

Hannah: Yeah, exactly. So all the feedback’s highly prioritized. We’ve got a really nice dashboard that offers a lovely customer experience. They can basically go in at any time and see how things are looking for their product and change the priorities. People need to change product roadmaps all the time!

Nos aseguramos de que la gente esté al día y entienda en qué punto están las cosas, y los informes lo son todo. Con un solo clic puedes ver lo que quieren los clientes de empresa en Alemania frente a los usuarios de prueba gratuita. Por ejemplo, se pueden ver datos muy precisos que ayudan a decidir qué se incluye en la hoja de ruta del producto.

Jeroen: ¿Y está conectado de algún modo con otras herramientas?

Hannah: Yeah, we’ve got a few integrations actually.

Obviously a lot of the feedback process runs through systems like Salesforce, and Zendesk. So we’ve connected with tools that customer facing teams use to receive feedback on feature requests.

Por otro lado, también nos integramos con herramientas como JIRA. Así, en Receptive, si estás de acuerdo en seguir adelante con la construcción de una de las características que sugiere un feedback, crea automáticamente la tarea para el equipo de desarrollo.

También funciona a la inversa. Así que Receptive siempre está al día.

Jeroen: Based on the tools you mentioned, it’s more aimed at bigger companies I guess?

Hannah: Definitivamente.

I think when you’re smaller, you can get away with a spreadsheet or just getting your feedback on Trello. That’s what even we used before Receptive days.

But at one point, you have a lot of feedback coming in to all the different teams. For example, your sales teams will have hundreds of discussions every day and some feedback would definitely come out of it. It’s really a scale that feedback is a huge problem. But if you do it right, it’s a massive opportunity. It’s just getting those processes right and in place.

Jeroen: Sí. Has dicho que antes organizabas algunas cosas en Trello, ¿era en otra empresa?

Hannah: Yes. So this is actually the fourth business I’ve had and the second SaaS company. I actually started off as a project manager. So we used Basecamp, Trello and a few other tools like them.

Jeroen: ¿Puede explicarnos las distintas empresas que ha puesto en marcha?

Hannah: Sure. I won’t make it too long, don’t worry.

Jeroen: ¡Oh, no, adelante!

Hannah: The first one I started was when I was 21. I’d left school and got a job on the reception desk of a software company, and then I got really fascinated by it all and got into it completely.

Así que fundé una agencia de desarrollo y formamos equipos técnicos para trabajar con grandes agencias de branding de Londres. Desarrollábamos e implementábamos la parte técnica de sus proyectos.

Luego tuvimos una empresa de sistemas de control de existencias, que era como un producto SaaS. De ahí surgieron muchas ideas para Receptive. Entre esas dos cosas, trabajé mucho en comercio electrónico. Dirigía una empresa dedicada al desarrollo de comercio electrónico, con grandes plataformas Gentoo.

La verdad es que es una mezcla de cosas. Aunque todo es software.

Jeroen: Todo lo relacionado con el software, vale.

Sí.

Jeroen: Si te dedicabas a este tipo de cosas, ¿por qué empezaste como recepcionista?

Hannah: I don’t know. I just literally left school and was like, “I need a job.”

Jeroen: ¿Qué estudiaste?

Hannah: ¿En la escuela? De todo.

Me interesaba la música, la economía, la política, los negocios y también el deporte. Así que no tenía ni idea de lo que quería hacer en aquel momento. ¿Sabías que querías crear una empresa?

Jeroen: Algo así, sí. En realidad supe que iba a ser ingeniero cuando tenía 10 años o así, supongo.

Hannah: ¿En serio?

Jeroen: Sí, y eso fue porque mis padres, especialmente mi padre. Era un ingeniero empedernido, siempre ha dirigido departamentos de I+D. Así que sabía que iba a ser ingeniero, y de alguna manera también sabía que quería tener mi propia empresa.

A los 15 años, más o menos, empecé a crear sitios web, y entonces ya soñaba con tener mi propia agencia web. Nunca lo dudé. Siempre odié la idea de ir a trabajar a una gran empresa. De hecho, lo hice.

Hannah: ¿Lo hiciste?

Sí.

Hannah: ¿Cómo fue eso? ¿Fue horrible?

Jeroen: Fue horrible. Lo hice durante 10 meses, pero lo odié desde el principio. Tuve otro trabajo después de ocho, y lo dejé también a los diez meses. Empecé en Baxter, si conoces esa empresa.

Hannah: No. ¿Era una empresa que montaste después de trabajar 10 meses para una gran organización?

Jeroen: No. Esos fueron los 10 meses. Los 10 meses fueron en Baxter.

Hannah: Oh bien, está bien.

Jeroen: It’s a pharma company.

Hannah: ¿Qué te disgustó?

Jeroen: The corporate way of doing things, and the limited aspect of your job. The lack of feeling of responsibility and the way you cannot set the culture yourself — a combination of all these things, actually.

Hannah: Sí, sólo hace que la vida laboral sea difícil.

Sí.

Hannah: Some people are really suited for that though. Aren’t they?

And I think we must be quite similar in that sense. I always knew I wanted to start a business. I don’t know why, I just did. I also would have struggled in a big corporate environment.

Sí.

Hannah: I guess every big company’s different, just like every small one is.

Jeroen: They’re different.

Actually, in the job after I was in an agency and I was doing projects for companies, but also sometimes onsite. I’ve worked with five companies and the differences are huge. In terms of how the culture can make you feel different, as a person even, is amazing. Just the way people treat you, the way people communicate, had a huge impact on my emotional life.

Hannah: Yeah, that’s not good.

Jeroen: En cualquier caso, parece que sus intereses son muy amplios. Entonces, ¿combinó todos estos estudios o cómo lo hizo?

Hannah: I don’t really know what happened. But while I was doing my first job at the software agency, I decided to take up a degree in my spare time.

I basically didn’t have a weekend or an evening for four years. I don’t know why I did that, but it was fun. So I actually did my degree in social science and economics.

Vale.

Hannah: But I really like economics. It’s funny, isn’t it?

Jeroen: ¿Quizá el aspecto empresarial?

Hannah: Yeah, or maybe all of it. I just really enjoyed that sort of thing. So I did that while I was working. I think I’d just finished my degree when I set up the first business.

Jeroen: ¿Tiene varios títulos?

Hannah: Sólo uno. Dios mío, no estudiar más.

You learn so much as a founder, don’t you? You feel like you’re constantly learning and changing, and feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing. So you have to go away and just always be on top of that stuff.

For now, I wouldn’t undertake a formal qualification for a good while. Would you?

¿Qué ha estudiado?

Jeroen: En realidad empecé como ingeniero electrónico. Luego, en el máster, ingeniería biomédica. Después hice la escuela de negocios.

Hannah: Muy bien. Así que como usted ha dicho, con entrar en la ingeniería, queriendo hacer eso desde tan temprano, supongo que era obvio para iniciar su propia empresa?

Jeroen: Yeah, but then I figured I didn’t really want to be an engineer. I wanted to bring things to people. Engineering things, perhaps, but to people at least. That’s why I did business school, and then I figured I wanted to start my own company.

Me imaginé que la mejor manera de hacerlo era ser director de producto en una empresa. Como estudié ingeniería biomédica, pensé que en una empresa farmacéutica. Y me equivoqué.

Hannah: Yeah, I guess. It’s a learning thing though, isn’t it? It might have felt wrong at the time, but like you said, you brought a lot of what was wrong with that to making things right and building a company out in a way that you’re happy with?

Jeroen: Exactamente. ¿Te influyó tu familia de alguna manera?

Hannah: I don’t know. My dad works at the university as director of facilities and estates, so he’s into property management. I don’t really understand what he does, but he does a lot. My mum was in nursing and became a receptionist, and my brother and sister both went down the medical route. Well, my sister’s a vet and my brother’s a doctor.

So I was the one who didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was the one just making it up.

Jeroen: It was not really your family, maybe your dad a bit. Or let’s just say, your friends?

Hannah: I honestly have no idea. It’s funny isn’t it?

I kind of feel like I fell into a lot of things, but figured things out by just getting there and trying stuff. I started to work on what I enjoyed doing and that helped. I’ve always loved computers since I got an Atari.

¿Te acuerdas del Atari? Me regalaron un Atari cuando tenía seis años.

Jeroen: Yo también tuve un Atari.

Hannah: ¿Tuviste uno? Sí.

Jeroen: Bueno, mi padre tenía una. Pero al final se quedó en mi habitación.

Hannah: Well, it would be rude not to play on it then if it’s there. Wouldn’t it?

Jeroen: Sí. Incluso cuando era muy pequeño, siempre me advertían de las cosas. Mi padre construía estos ordenadores que aún empezaban con un reproductor de casetes.

Hannah: Wow.

Sí.

Hannah: That’s really cool though.

Jeroen: So I’ve seen computers since I was really, really small.

Hannah: That’s brilliant. Yeah, I think it does help. Doesn’t it?

Having that sort of thing around. Like both my kids are really interested in computers too. We do Scratch, which is a really nice programming language for kids to learn, and we’ve got Raspberry Pi knocking about the house. So they both enjoy making things.

Pero nunca se sabe. Como he dicho, crecí sin pensar demasiado en lo que quería hacer.

Jeroen: ¿Cuántos años tienen ya?

Hannah: They’re just about to turn eight and six.

Jeroen: Vuelta ocho y seis, ¿y ya programan?

Hannah: Bueno, sólo con Scratch. Pero se aprenden los fundamentos de la informática creando pequeños juegos. ¿Has usado Scratch?

No, no.

Hannah: It’s fun, it’s good for the basics.

Jeroen: Right. I don’t know what was the first thing I started on. I think hacking some scripts in game to cheat or something.

Hannah: Oh querido.

Jeroen: I don’t remember. At some point, I started doing HTML, Flash and stuff.

Hannah: Yeah, HTML is a good place to start. Isn’t it?

Jeroen: Yeah, it’s easy.

Sí.

Jeroen: ¿Conoce a otros fundadores de startups a los que admire de alguna manera, y por qué?

Hannah: That’s a good question. I think a lot of the time it isn’t the usual suspects, or the people with a big profile. I’ve always really enjoyed meeting other founders, and a lot of them fly underneath the radar.

I’ll give you some good examples. Matt Lanham at Gecko Labs for instance. That’s a brilliant SaaS company. He’s based in Scotland, is doing a lot of business over in the States though at the moment. He’s just really down to earth, and really easy to talk to. I think some people put up a bit of a front, and it’s nice to just get honest advice and he’s definitely one of those people.

Jeroen: Sin duda.

Hannah: And I look up to Kevin Beals, who’s the CEO at Refract. He builds this training software that SaaS teams use. It’s brilliant!

He was one of my angel investors actually. Again, he’s just so easy to talk to, really practical, really down to earth and he’s building a business just like we are. I think it’s more people like that, I guess.

¿Y usted? ¿Tienes una estrecha red de personas a tu alrededor con las que también hablas?

Jeroen: Yeah. I like to talk to different people that I think are really doing a good job. It’s often inspiring.

Hannah: It helps, doesn’t it?

Jeroen: Yes, it does. Also, with these Founder Coffees, I get to talk to a lot of really cool people, and we also write about iconic products that have been made — like Trello, Slack, Intercom. They are really inspiring in the sense that these guys really maintain a vision in a very nice and consistent way, and build a product that’s just outstanding. That’s not as easy as it seems.

Hannah: Oh my gosh, yeah. It’s definitely not easy.

We were talking about Intercom yesterday, actually. We were one of the very first users of Intercom, so we’ve followed them all the way through. With the series D that was announced earlier in the week, it’s going to be really cool to watch where they go next. I’m excited to see what they do actually.

Jeroen: Yeah, I’m really wondering what they need all this money for. I can imagine somehow, but still I’m like, “Really? $125 million?”

Hannah: Yeah. You don’t know how much these press releases that go out around raises and stuff are true. A lot of them are nonsense, right? But I was reading that they were looking at getting into artificial intelligence. That’s a lot of money. So I guess, we’ll just have to see.

Jeroen: Yeah, we’ll see I guess. My guess is a lot of money will go into convincing the enterprises, pushing Zendesk out of the market, and Service Cloud or Salesforce.

Hannah: Yeah, they said that they want to be the next Salesforce or as big as that. So good luck to them I think, we’ll see what they do.

Jeroen: People have said that about us in the newspaper already. So it doesn’t mean anything.

Hannah: Wow. Bueno, ¡ahí lo tienes!

Jeroen: También en Bélgica.

Hannah: ¡A por ello! ¿Por qué no?

Jeroen: Yeah, why not. Maybe at some point. For now, we’re taking a very different position from Salesforce. They’re going after the big enterprises, and we’re going after the small companies. It’s a totally different solution.

Hannah: Yeah, it’s a big difference I guess.

Jeroen: ¿Cuáles son tus ambiciones para Receptive? ¿Hacia dónde cree que se dirige?

Hannah: It’s just getting really exciting. We’re closing more and more enterprise SaaS customers. So, last year we had to learn a lot around legals and the onboarding of when you’ve got hundreds or thousands of employees, what that onboarding looks like, and what the customer’s success journey is like.

While we’re getting a lot of really good traction, it also feels like we’re just getting started, which is a really exciting position to be in, I guess. So I’d just like to keep going.

We’ve found a really nice rhythm. We’ve worked out how to sell and who to sell to, because you don’t know that stuff when you start out.

No.

Hannah: It’s an evolution along the way, isn’t it? You’re learning all the time. So yeah, I just want to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep going, and keep developing the product and see what we can do.

Jeroen: Pero a largo plazo, ¿qué haces?

Hannah: Es una buena pregunta.

Jeroen: ¿Cuál es en realidad su visión o misión?

Hannah: Like I mentioned at the start, feedback is such a big opportunity and SaaS companies are just starting to get their heads around it. So it feels like they’re still at the stage where there’s a lot of early adopters going with Receptive and that’s why it is exciting for us.

But really, I think having a product feedback solution in place, should be so core to building a SaaS product that people should not have to think about it. In the same way as you need hosting and support. Product feedback is forgotten and it’s managed badly in a lot of ways, and our biggest competitor is the spreadsheet. So there’s a better way to do things, and I would like everyone using Receptive. But we’ll see.

Jeroen: Yeah. What are the things you’re working on lately?

Hannah: ¿En el producto o de otro modo?

Jeroen: No, en general. ¿A qué te dedicas en realidad?

Hannah: Cambia cada día. Acabo haciendo todo tipo de cosas.

Sí.

Hannah: So quite recently I’ve been overseeing the GDPR stuff quite closely. Have you got everything that needs in place?

Jeroen: Yeah, actually after this call, I will continue on GDPR stuff. It’s one of our priorities right now, and it followed me. All the others get to do the fun stuff.

Hannah: Oh.

Sí, lo sé.

Hannah: That’s being a founder though, isn’t it? Everybody thinks you get to do what you want, and it’s actually, no, you get all the terrible jobs.

Jeroen: Yeah, but it’s a super interesting exercise as well. It’s not something that gives me tons of energy, but just organizing all this in a more thoughtful way, what in the end GDPR is about, is nice. I can see the positive aspects.

Hannah: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of positive things. Other people have been doing the hard work,but being involved in the lawyers and just overseeing the GDPR thing is on me. So there’s been a bit of that going on, and then apart from day to day, to talk broadly because things do change a lot, I’m mainly involved in overseeing the marketing and working closely with sales. There’s a lot of the co-marketing actually, a lot of the partnership type of things and events or speaking engagements.

But then I stay really close to customer success as well. I don’t ever want to lose sight of that. I still talk to customers a lot. I still will pick up the phone and will do a demo now and again, because I think it’s really important for me, right now, in terms of how we develop the company and how we develop the product to stay close to the people and the problems that we’re solving.

So it’s quite broad. I guess because of that, I have to be really careful about planning my time — making sure I’m working on the right things, making sure that there’s time to check in with the leaders of other departments. So yeah, it’s really good fun though. It’s nice doing all sorts of things. What does your role span?

Jeroen: It’s very similar to yours. I think we’re in very similar stages.

I’m currently doing lots of marketing and am very involved with the customer relationships as well. Currently, the GDPR stuff. I mean I also still manage the products, so it’s very similar to yours, I would say.

I’m not in a stage where I’m spending all my time hiring or something. We are still looking at how we can make a growth machine, instead of just adding extra people to what we have already nailed.

Hannah: I guess the job evolves all the time as well, doesn’t it? Depending on the stage you’re at, or, like we were saying, something like GDPR comes in and it’s so important to the business functioning side. It does need you to do a good job.

Pero el papel cambia muchísimo.

Jeroen: Sí. Estaba mencionando cosas que me dan energía. ¿Qué es lo que te da energía para seguir adelante?

Hannah: Bueno, hay algunas cosas.

I think a big part of keeping the energy up and staying motivated, is you’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. I really love the problem that we’re solving and the team, and that’s a massive motivating factor for me.

If I wasn’t as into the product and what we’re doing, then that would be hard after a while. The second big thing is just getting out. I go out biking quite a lot — bike to work and back, and I find if I’ve biked into work it really sets you up for the day, and then biking back home, gives me time to get into that home mode.

I think it can be tempting to ignore everything else, when you’re really busy. So trying to fit exercise or something into your routine can be really, really helpful.

Jeroen: Sí, ¿a qué distancia vives del trabajo?

Hannah: It’s not too far. It’s just 10 miles a day on the bike, but then I get on for longer.

Jeroen: Oh, that’s far. 10 miles is like 16 kilometers. That’s pretty far, if you ask me.

Hannah: It’s good fun though. It’s nice, and when you get in, you’re all hyper for the rest of the day. What about you, do you find time for that sort of a thing?

Jeroen: I started making time for that again. For a long time I abandoned these kind of things, but then your body starts disliking it. Right now, I’m trying to work home most of the days, and I’m into sports now. I used to run but I went to biking now.

Hannah: Oh, genial.

Jeroen: Sí, entrenamientos muy activos. Controlo el ritmo cardíaco y todo eso para asegurarme de que hago ejercicio físico. Creo que también da mucha energía mental.

Hannah: Yeah, it’s good thinking time, isn’t it?

I’ll set myself up. While I’m on the bike, going into work, I’ll think through what I’ve got on and what’s important that day. I think having no distractions like the computer or the phone, is really helpful.

Jeroen: Yeah, if you don’t start listening to podcasts, of course.

Eso es peligroso, sí.

Jeroen: ¿Se queda con su marido y sus dos hijos?

Hannah: Yeah. He’s about the place as well, so it’s good having time with the family doing things nearby.

Jeroen: So is it basically like you work, you bike, and then you home and don’t work? Or how do you keep a balance?

Hannah: I tend to do a lot of reading in the evenings. I’ve got this weird thing, I can’t go to sleep unless I’ve read, I don’t know why. Since I was a child, I just have to read.

So I find it’s a good time for reading, and I do talk about work quite a lot at home as well. But apart from that, I do try to have that separation of, “I’m at home now.” When the kids are around, my phone’s in the top drawer and turned off and we’re just doing daft things, and I think that’s important as well. Like you mentioned the energy thing, having a good balance brings a lot of energy to your work. There’s no point being tired, is there?

If you get yourself exhausted, it’s very hard to recover from that.

Jeroen: Definitely. It’s always a danger, I guess. What does your husband do when you’re talking about work?

Hannah: Rolls his eyes! No, he doesn’t.

Jeroen: No, me refiero a qué hace como trabajo.

Hannah: Ah. Trabaja en energía y sostenibilidad para una gran empresa inmobiliaria. Hace todo tipo de cosas. De hecho, trabaja mucho en el ámbito de la tecnología, por lo que estudia las distintas tecnologías que se pueden aplicar a los edificios para hacerlos más eficientes energéticamente.

Genial.

Hannah: He was working on a project recently. He hooked a load of Raspberry Pis up to monitor a load of energy usage. So we talk about all those sort of things quite a bit. Sounds fun at our house, doesn’t house?

Jeroen: Sí. En realidad, mi suegro hace lo mismo. Quizá deberíamos ponerlos en contacto.

Hannah: Oh that’s cool. We definitely should! Who does he work for?

Jeroen: He has his own company that does these kinds of installations and he really cares a lot about the sustainability side, so he’s always looking for ways to work on it. Even if the market is not super ready for it yet, he always finds a way to get it working here and there.

Hannah: That’s cool, because there’s a lot of stuff in that industry. A lot of the hardware and software; although it’s very early days for a lot of these technologies, and they’re moving on very quickly.

Jeroen: Yeah, and also people don’t get why they should get it. I mean it costs a lot of money.

Hannah: Yeah, that’s the other part of his job really, is making those cost arguments, and the ROI analysis, you know, “If we put these heat pumps in this building, it’s going to pay us back over X years, and in the long term the outcome is a saving of whatever.” So that’s the other side of it, and I think that’s kind of like what we do in a lot of ways.

Jeroen: ¿Crees que es el momento adecuado para Receptive en este momento, o la gente todavía se está preparando para profesionalizar su gestión de productos?

Hannah: That’s another good question. We still feel like it’s early days market wise. There’s quite a few smaller companies popping up here and there, for feature request management, and customer feedback insights.

Así que creo que empieza a haber cierta tracción, lo que es realmente emocionante de ver.

Jeroen: Yeah, that’s how I feel as well. We’re also currently looking to professionalize our stuff, and looking at solutions. We should maybe have another look at Receptive as well, it’s been a while.

Hannah: Oh, any time. But yeah, it’s an interesting one.

Jeroen: ¿Dijiste que estabas en Londres?

Hannah: We’re actually up in Sheffield. So we’re a couple of hours north of London.

¿En Sheffield?

Hannah: Yeah, which is pretty nuts, because most of our customers are in the States. I think we’ve got customers from about 35 countries now. We do make a real effort to get out and spend time with customers. We go over to America quite a bit.

Jeroen: ¿Vuelas mucho?

Hannah: Yeah, we do it between us. We’ve not been there yet this year, but we’re going to be over soon. I think that side of thing’s really important for us — to actually spend time with customers onsite. That’s one of the beautiful things about software, you can create something and you can be anywhere and you can still sell it all over the world, which is kind of cool.

Sí. Siempre que encuentres buena gente en Sheffield con la que trabajar, supongo.

Hannah: Oh the team is brilliant. Really, really lucky there. There’s actually quite a lot of software and technology companies here, and a lot of creative industries too. So that’s cool.

Jeroen: ¿Hay universidad allí?

Hannah: Yeah, there’s a couple of big universities as well. But it’s big technology companies based here as well — like WANdisco, SkyBet and others.

Jeroen: SkyBet, that’s the betting company?

Hannah: Yeah. I’m not a fan, but they work on some interesting scaling problems. I can’t say I like what they do.

Jeroen: Yeah, we have a similar thing. In Belgium we have, I’ve forgotten the name of the company. But it’s the company behind half of the porn industry.

Hannah: Oh, claro, caramba.

Sí.

Hannah: Así que ahí lo tienes, una pequeña ciudad en Bélgica y Sheffield.

Jeroen: Sí, estos lugares son quizá incluso la frontera de la tecnología.

Hannah: Sí, podría decirse que en muchos sentidos, definitivamente.

Jeroen: Starting to wrap up, what’s the latest good book you’ve read, and why did you choose to read it?

Hannah: Oh, I’m a bit terrible with books because if I’m reading for work stuff it tends to be blog posts.

Jeroen: No, no necesariamente trabajo, sólo en general.

Hannah: Oh my gosh, I read anything. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I’m reading this really weird series about this lawyer based in London at the time of Henry VII at the moment. I honestly, read anything and everything. So I’ll have to think about which book.

El libro de negocios que leí fue Play Bigger, que trata sobre el diseño de categorías.

Jeroen: ¿Sobre qué diseño?

Hannah: Diseño de categorías.

Jeroen: Correcto.

Hannah: Yeah. So it’s about, you know, like I was saying about Receptive and where it is in terms of the market and if it’s too early, or whatever. Category design is about you owning the positioning and giving a name to what you do and that’s a really interesting book. I’ve taken a lot away from that one.

Jeroen: Yeah, because you’re basically building out a category.

Sí, exacto. Así que recomiendo ese.

Jeroen: About me, I think I probably shared it on a few other talks as well already, maybe another one. The Black Swan was pretty good, up till some point. I don’t know whether you read it. It’s about how looking back, people look at history and they connect things. While when it actually happens, it wasn’t all that connected — just casually. Like the one thing that didn’t actually happen so logically, makes the other thing happen, because there are many factors. And when we look back, we start ignoring all these little factors here and there, which is a really interesting way of looking at things, because it makes you realize that you do that every day actually.

Not just looking at history, but that you look back and you connect things that make sense for your brain right now, but it didn’t actually happen because of that reason. It’s just you rationalizing things.

Hannah: Sí, que es algo natural.

Jeroen: Sí, sin duda.

Hannah: Te hace sentir seguro y en control, supongo, si lo haces.

Jeroen: Exacto. Pero cuando entiendes esto, te ayuda de alguna manera a no tener algún tipo de sesgo extraño y esas cosas.

Hannah: Lo buscaré, gracias.

Jeroen: Sí, aunque se hace un poco repetitivo después de 150/200 páginas.

Hannah: You just summarize the rest of it then and I’ll read the first 150 pages.

Jeroen: Ah, el resto entra más en detalles. Básicamente, he resumido el libro.

Hannah: Perfecto. Voy a ir con eso.

Jeroen: Última pregunta. Si tuviera que volver a empezar, ¿qué habría hecho de forma diferente?

Hannah: Habría localizado y encontrado a Ali Mayham, que es nuestra directora de éxito de clientes.

If I ever had to start a business again, it would be with Dan and Ali. So Dan’s my current Co-Founder, and Ali has become the third Founder. She came to work with us maybe when we were a year in. She has brought so much to this business from a customer success point of view.

So there’s no way, if I started over again, I would do it without having her there because it’s just bought the company so much.

Jeroen: Yeah, it’s all about the team for you.

Hannah: Yeah, oh my gosh. It is so all about the team. I’ve made a few wrong hires along the way, and that has a lot of impact — not just on you and the business, but on the team around you as well. You don’t realize often how someone’s who’s not a great fit has an impact on everyone around them as well. So yeah, that’s what I do differently. I’d get three co-founders and go from there.

Jeroen: Yeah, cool. Well, that’s all I got for our coffee session today! Thank you for being on Founder Coffee. It was really great to have you.

Hannah: I really enjoyed it. Did you finish your coffee? I think I’ve got a bit left that’s gone cold.

El mío está terminado, sí.

Hannah: Oh, bien hecho. Muchas gracias por recibirme.

Jeroen: Thank you and I’ll see you soon!

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