As a startup, we often get advice on what we should be doing – whether it's experts in growth who tell us that great SEO and original content will bring thousands of qualified leads, or experts in sales who tell us that pumping out more cold emails with better copy should be our primary focus.
Sometimes this can be pretty confusing – with so much to do, what should we really focus on? What should our goals be?
This led our team to take a step back and think about our values.
What type of company are we trying to build?
We thought about the companies we look up to – what do they do that makes them great?
We read blog posts from the founders of these companies about what they think makes a company great (like this one by Calvin French-Owen, co-founder of Segment).
And then we came together and drafted our first iteration of our company values. I'd like to share our guiding value here in the spirit of openness with the community.
Build a great product
This might seem like a simple value, but it can be easy to lose sight of.
To us, building a great product leads to everything else – great customer satisfaction, natural growth, a great brand, and even a great team. I think this value is captured beautifully by Steve Jobs in this interview.
Our goal is to [...] make products we are proud to sell and would recommend [...] and there is some stuff in this industry that we wouldn't be proud to ship. That we wouldn't be proud to recommend [...] and we can't do it. We just can't ship junk. — Steve Jobs
We take this as a serious commitment to continually improve our product. Part of that means building in the open, and sharing our product updates regularly.
The rest of our values and actions stem from this core tenet, for example:
- consistently talking to users – to build a great product, we have to understand the problems our users face and prioritize the features that help them
- giving back to the developer community as a whole – we've partnered with Meltano to improve the quality and availability of Singer taps, and we're working to create useful content for developers in the data integration space
If you look at products like Stripe and Linear you can see their success has been driven by a commitment to building a great product. Developers love using these tools, and they aren't quiet about it.
We want our users to feel the same way about hotglue. Pushing aside our KPIs and metrics, that's our real goal.
Updates
Before I close this out, I'd like to share a few updates from our side:
- We launched on ProductHunt! 🚀
- We began sharing our product updates publicly 👀 (go here to learn about product updates)
- We are now helping 10 engineering teams power their integrations! 🎉
Thanks for reading!
