I’m Dan, Co-Founder of Viable, and we're launching today 🔥 Ask Me Anything (AMA)
Daniel Erickson
11 replies
Hey everyone, I'm Dan Erickson, Co-Founder and CEO of Viable.
To celebrate our Product Hunt launch, I’ll be holding an AMA session throughout the day!
From early engineering at Yammer, to CTO at Getable, then VPE at Eaze, and on to CEO and founder at Viable, I've had a wild ride of a career so far and I'm happy to share whatever shreds of wisdom I've accumulated.
👋 Here to answer any and all questions about AI, SaaS exits, remote work, or even co-founding a company with my twin brother 👯♂️
Come check out our launch here: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Replies
Nicole Bansal@nicole_bansal
Hey Dan, I understand you've consistently built engineering teams that have a very healthy 50/50 gender split - something I've never seen working for any tech company. What are the tangible steps you've undertaken to make that happen?
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Great question @nicolebans!
First, I want to say that building a diverse team starts with building an inclusive team. You can't hire great people from different backgrounds if the team they land on doesn't make them feel safe, supported, and energized.
Here are some tactics I've used to recruit diverse teams:
1) Start with your network: your network is the field in which you plant the seeds of recruitment. If your network is homogenous, so will be your team.
2) Spicy take: the overwhelming majority of applicants you get are going to be straight white men. Since time is the biggest limiter on outreach, you want to prioritize your time toward only reaching out to candidates that will help you bring new perspectives to the team. Specifically focus on outreach to diverse candidates.
3) Once you've got top of funnel taken care of, it's time to focus on the rest of the hiring pipeline. Where are candidates falling out? Are you evaluating candidates fairly? Do you have any bias that you can mitigate?
Hope that helps!
Hi! Super thrilled about the launch! I actually have two questions, particularly about remote work.
1. What strategies do you use to build and maintain trust among team members who are working remotely?
2. What lessons have you learned from managing a remote team, and what advice do you have for other startups transitioning to remote work?
@joana_fernando thanks for asking!
1. I wouldn't say that we've completely mastered remote work, but we're getting pretty good at it. There are a few techniques we use to increase trust on the team: promoting a culture of written communication, monthly virtual team socials, and regular team retreats.
2. Remote work works best when you work in a async of a way as possible. If you're just taking the habits that you built up working in an office and applying it to a remote team, you're going to end up with a lot of inefficiencies and pain.
Hi Dan,
Congrats on the launch!
What catalyzed the launch of your product?
What are some unique value propositions of Viable that one can't get in some other similar tools, for example, Qualtrics?
Hi @ieraj, great question, we actually share quite a few customers with Qualtircs!
Qualtrics is a great tool for _collecting_ feedback data, but it's not a very helpful tool for _analyzing and taking action on_ it. That's where Viable comes in. Instead of having to read through all of the responses to a Qualtrics survey, you can use Viable to quickly understand what your audience is telling you and how it's affecting their relationship with your company.
I have a question! What was the biggest challenge you faced while building Viable and how did you overcome it?
@rockinbinbin love it. I think the biggest challenge so far has been maintaining focus. When you're surfing a huge wave like Generative AI, you can get sidetracked by cool new ideas pretty easily. The key is to keep the problem that you're solving *and for who* in mind all the time and really focus on what drives value for them.
Heya, congrats on your launch! How might a data analyst benefit from Viable?
@mila_dymnikova Viable does all of the boring/hard stuff (like data labelling, categorization, clustering, etc.) so analysts can focus on the fun and strategic parts of the job (figuring out the right course of action, determining causal relationships, etc.)
Hope this helps!