Arman Javaherian
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Arman: [00:00:00] if I were an investor, I would only invest in founders that were product people, because as a product person, you are accustomed to thinking about every single aspect of the business now, as a founder, see myself thinking every day about every single one of those functions and calling on that experience.

Jeff: Welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today, we're talking with Arman CEO and co founder at Homa and former product leader at Shortcut, Zillow, and CrunchBase. We talked about why product people should always be selling. Why in his opinion, investors should only invest in former product people. Where AI can help product people today and where it's a dangerous distraction,

and finally, a framework to avoid falling into a world of bad product decisions. So here it is, our conversation with Armand. 



Jeff: Hey Armand, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on.

Arman: Thanks for having me on.

Jeff: Yeah, definitely. I think you might be the first software company founder we've had on the show. As you recently announced Homa which is an AI tool to [00:01:00] help people buy a home.

I think before that you had a pretty extensive. Product background. I'd love to just spend a minute first chatting about What was that transition like going from being a head of product and kind of running product to being a founder, right? That's a huge transition That's probably even potentially bigger than I see to executive.

How'd that transition go? But also this isn't your first founder role

Arman: I think one of the things that really surprised me was just the fact that I had to go, you mentioned I see the executive, I had to go from executive back to I see in a lot of ways. So I had to start fresh, dig in, go back to doing like a zero to one type product. And I hadn't done that in a long time.

So that was exciting and scary. But it allowed me to really get back to the roots of trying to solve a user problem, trying to think through how do I actually help people get through the home buying process, for example, given there's a lot of regulatory changes that came about in the last few months, which was the impetus for us [00:02:00] to start Homa.

But it's exciting to start something fresh and start something new.

Jeff: even before that, you've had a little sprinkle of the founder mode magic from a long time, it seems way back when, in 2011, you co founded a concert crowd which seems to be one of the first things you did career wise. 

What was the kind of founding thesis behind that there?

Arman: Yeah I loved concert crowd concert card was a facebook app that helped you find live shows and it also helped Tell you which of your facebook friends were interested in those artists So you can basically get together with those friends and go to those shows in person and buy tickets, etc It was really filling a problem and filling a need that I saw in the marketplace where a lot of people were like having trouble actually coordinating going on these live events.

And I also had a huge love for live music. So it was a personal passion of mine and my co founder who was my engineer and he was in a band. We had about 10, 000 users using concert crowd. We were featured on TechCrunch, Mashable. We got invited to be part of South by Southwest Accelerator.

So a lot of [00:03:00] really good kind of. Success on paper, but unfortunately on the business side, there was no real way to make money out of it. And that was a really good lesson to learn earlier in my career. Ticketmaster had a, and still does, right? They have a monopoly over these ticket sales. And as a result, they decided to not share any affiliate revenue with any company or any individual for those ticket sales.

So if we're trying to basically create a live music, there's no real money in the ticket sales. It's hard to just make money on advertising in stuff or something like that.

Jeff: Did you guys ever come up with hypotheses on how you might get there? Was that kind of the death? No, it was just realizing the prime path to money here is the ticket revenue and it's just not going to happen.

Arman: Yeah, that was like at that point that was basically the death. Now it was like that was the core revenue stream that was powering the whole industry and Ticketmaster was just hoarding it. And it caused a lot of companies like mine and a lot of others in industry. So to this day I'm having trouble [00:04:00] actually innovating.

And it's a good example of where You know, a lack of competition and having this kind of monopoly power really can hurt products and startups.

Jeff: It also shows right when you're going in sometimes, people go in and say we'll figure out monetization, let's build the audience. So let's build the user base. But that can be a little risky if, there's a high risk that the main monetizable path is. Completely blocked, right?

, that's something to know as you're going in, but you guys still built it to what, 10, 000 active users. You said , what did that look like? how, How did you even get that level of traction? That's pretty good. Especially, without really revenue.

Arman: Yeah. It was a couple of things. One was begging and pleading journalists to write about it, which back then it worked cause it was a cool

Jeff: I think we just call it PR though. Not begging.

Arman: Call it what you

Jeff: It sounds way better that way.

Arman: Yes it's begging and pleading and doing all that. And then also I remember. During South by Southwest, it was just this level of hustle.

I was there for a whole week. Basically we printed out these flyers that look like concert tickets. [00:05:00] And it was perforated edges you can rip off. And each one had a QR code to download the app. And I just had a street team that I hired, went all throughout Austin to every single music venue, every single person waiting in line and just gave them these tickets.

And then every single person would able QR it and automatically the mobile website will pop up showing them all the live shows in Austin, right at that moment for South by Southwest. And that really helped kickstart a lot of the user growth.

Jeff: It's always interesting to hear those, right moment, right guerrilla tactic can go so much farther. I think that people think, and that initial traction, had you guys had a path to revenue, you had a great start there, but always love to hear the, how'd you get off the ground?

How'd you do the zero to one? Because I think that's often one of the hardest parts, right? Once you have kind of traction, it becomes. Now just how you build on the traction. But going from nothing to something is just immensely difficult. Which takes us to, to HOA now. You had so much fun doing it, you said, Hey, let's do it again this time with a way to make money.

Can you [00:06:00] maybe go a little bit deeper what is hoa, why'd you found it? What was the kind of cathartic moment there that drove you to do it? And what's the prime thesis behind it?

Arman: Yeah, so as of August 17th so just a few months ago, there was a regulatory change in the real estate space where previously if you were a home seller, you were selling your home, you'd be responsible for paying the commission of your seller's agents and the home buyer's agents. So you'd be paying the commission of both sides.

As of this regulatory change now, the homebuyers are on the hook to pay the, their own agents commission themselves. So there's this huge transfer of costs that are happening to millions and millions of people now because of this regulatory change. And as a result, what we're seeing in the market is a big portion of those homebuyers, especially the ones that have done the process before they bought a home before are basically taking a step back and saying, no, I'm not going to, Hey, two and a half percent or whatever, their the agent might be asking for, and instead they're going to try and do it as much as they can on their own.

Unfortunately, there's no platform that can [00:07:00] really help them through that process. And that's what we're building in with Homa. We launched a proof of concept a few months ago. It was mainly just a user research tool, which from a product perspective is actually. I'm really important. You want to get something out there to get some users interacting with it to see what they're doing and see how they're behaving.

So one of the things I did was I just bought some Google ads around the country because they want to be at a diverse group of users. That we're searching for kind of like how to buy a home on their own or how to buy a home without a realtor and got a couple hundred people to use the product.

And then we were able to see all the interactions with the AI, all the questions they were asking. And that's driving our true MVP build that we're building now.

Jeff: that's kind of the mechanism for you had the thesis and now what is the user understanding you need? And you've been able to accelerate that with an AI tool. , I know you did the zero to one before but in between has been. A lot of macroeconomic change, a lot of life change for you and experience change for you.

What's been the most surprising or the most [00:08:00] startling. Part of going back to being a founder now.

Arman: I think it's at least for the last few months, it's the amount of time and energy that I had to spend actually pitching and fundraising. The environment, even though this is an AI company, I think right now the environment is still tough to raise. And so just spending all that energy and pitching day in and day out, I think it takes a lot out of you.

And I haven't been able to both fundraise and give my all to the actual product development, which is where I, as a product person, that's what I love to do. So it's, a lot of it is just trying to. Balance these both. Luckily, the fundraising is coming to a close and we've had a lot of good success there, which is great.

And then now we're able to actually switch in gears and go full in product development. My co founder can actually come on full time, start hiring people in a couple of different kind of roles to help with both marketing and a few other key roles that we need in the company.

But exciting now that it's actually I'm able to switch back into product development.

Jeff: And has your [00:09:00] background is having been a product leader helped you here? Do you find it's easier in some ways because you have this experience, across a crunch base and across shortcut and kind of all the places you've been, or is that a little less transferable than people might think?

Arman: Oh, I think Going through this, like if I were an investor, I would only invest in like founders that were product people, because as a product person, especially like a product leader, or even an IC product manager, you are accustomed to thinking about. Every single aspect of the business almost on a week by week basis.

So in any given week, a product person is going to be thinking about, meeting with engineers to think about how they technically build the product, meeting with designers to critique the actual design, meeting with the sales team, meeting with customer service and support marketing. There's every aspect of the company, the product person is involved in.

And I've been doing it for 20 years. I've built a certain level of product. Of kind of experience and wisdom that comes with each [00:10:00] of those different functions. And now, as a founder, I see myself thinking every day about every single one of those functions and calling on that experience.

So product people, I think, are uniquely situated. To be able to do that. And I think that's really exciting to see.

Jeff: And do you find your experience with concert crowd has helped at all? Cause I was looking at the website you've gotten, there's been some writing about Homa already, even though you're so early in the stage. Clearly you've still got the, you know, begging reporters to write about you part down.

But have any other kind of lessons ported over or, have you found it easier? Cause you, you went through that end of it too.

Arman: Yeah, I think the in person guerrilla tactics, I've been leveraging some of that as well, like literally going to open houses and finding people like that are about to go in talking, like pretending to be a buyer that doesn't have an agent, how are listing agents going to respond to that? Just doing like a secret shopper in a lot of ways.

It's. As you're founding a company or even product people, I think any product person should be thinking like a founder and they should [00:11:00] be thinking about their product as something that, they're, there's aspects to it that they don't know, and how can they get at that information that they don't know?

And it's not always just doing maybe, in part, like doing a user research call with a customer. Sometimes it's go and pretend to be a user, go in live and talk to people on the streets, if your product is relevant in that. Right.

Jeff: I was actually going to say, are you going to open houses and, giving away the equivalent of, lookalike concert tickets to pitch people on Homa

Arman: , once we have the MVP built hopefully in a few months I think that might be part of the tactics that we'll try and employ.

Jeff: whole street team again, right? Some things change, some things don't still a good street team. Can't hurt in that kind of zero to one traction. 

Arman: Especially when there's so much noise online and I think you have to find a way to get to your users somehow.

Jeff: And also, intent to that point is done, right? You know, Those people are looking to buy a house. Even probably benefits the seller. For context, I bought a house two years ago. So it's still pretty fresh in my mind. And luckily one of my good friends [00:12:00] was a realtor, and represented us and had experts that she recommended, but but just looking, I remember looking through the documentation And, our lawyer laughed that no one usually reads all of it.

My wife worked in a law firm for a decade and, I'm just used to reading contracts. So we both poured through it and it was interesting seeing that, but just thinking taking what was historically two and a half percent or, percent and a half depending on the market.

And now the buyers on the hook for it, like that was just something I didn't have to worry about. And now. Forever going forward, got to figure out how that gets paid. Like, Does it depress house prices? Does buyers take that new account when they're making offers or is it just going to be a fee tacked on and now the sellers get, two and a half back that they didn't used to get.

It seems like a great place to attack, but it seems even sellers might be interested in like, how do they disseminate this so that, , if buyers don't have to use that money and Paying a commission. They can spend that money on the house.

Arman: Yeah, exactly. That's and that's exactly the point we've been also trying to make is that a lot of real estate agents are telling these homebuyers are like, Oh, don't worry, you're not going to be on the [00:13:00] hook for the commission because we're just going to get it from the seller. But now there's transparency to this fee that didn't exist before.

So if the way they would, you would get it from the sellers, you would actually put it in the offer saying, Hey seller, I'm going to give you a million dollars, but you also have to pay 30, 000 to my agent. The seller is not stupid. They're just going to deduct that 30, 000 from the offer price and your offer price is actually 970, 000.

But those buyers that basically are using a platform like Homa, then they can actually go and be more empowered because they can put that 30 K toward their offer price and beat out. Those buyers that are actually using agents. So it could be a huge leverage tool for those buyers.

Jeff: right. It's a really interesting I feel like there's a lot of go to market pieces there. And like you said, as a founder, you have to think about all of them, but it seems like the areas for partnership and distribution are pretty numerable. And when it comes down to it you need the right solution, but you need the right timing and you need the right distribution.

You don't have any of those and that kind of kills it. One thing I'm curious about actually, that I think a lot of product people fancy themselves, Founders who [00:14:00] just haven't founded their company yet. They all, I think it's a very common, desire is to go on to, to be a founder at some point.

I'm curious about how you actually got the kind of PR piece down, can you give some tips to maybe aspiring product people who aspire to be founders? Cause I've found that always to be quite difficult. How do you tell a story that people are going to care about?

You make it sound easy, just begging them, but I don't think it's that easy typically. I think you got something there that you understand probably a little bit better.

Arman: I think it helps to first do some research and find the journalists and see who's writing about the topic that your company is about and see how they're writing about it and see if there is a unique angle that you can pitch to those journalists. So for example, obviously with Homa, it's like there's an AI.

platform that can help replace a realtor. That's a very exciting kind of story that you can pitch. And especially cause it was already in the news already. So I had a list of 200 journalists that were writing about this and I was able to use, there was a platform called a news tip, I think is what it was called.

I paid a hundred dollars and you [00:15:00] can go and just basically, it gives you all the direct emails to every single one of those journalists. And even has a template that you can use to send out to them. So it's not even that complicated. It's, but it is time consuming, so you have to put the time in and sometimes out of a hundred people, maybe one person actually does something with it.

So it's challenging. It's like a sales job.

Jeff: Yeah, . You understand that you have to have something that they're going to want to write about first, because you seem honestly like a great founder as a marketer to work for. Because, oftentimes you get the, the, you get the expectation of just go sprinkle some PR dust on it and get it into the newspaper that we have this launch coming up.

But when you have, a founder who's been through it more and, you found a company before you've been through the product and then you've helped grow companies. A lot of people don't actually care that much. You have to make them care. So what's the hook to make them care.

Arman: I think it also helps as a product person product. People are Always selling. They're always trying to sell their product to the exec team, to the engineers, to the marketing team, to the support team, to the [00:16:00] sales team. So they're always in this mindset of like, how do I best position the product?

How would I pitch it internally and externally? And another reason why they're like really well situated to be in the founder role.

Jeff: Speaking of pitching and selling there's product, there's also vision and looking back, like maybe a little bit before Homa it's not like you just stepped out and became a founder. You've been an executive at several successful companies.

Yeah. And so hopefully taking some of those lessons about, what you learned and what worked and what didn't work, pitching the vision of kind of alignment at shortcut, right? It seems like everywhere you've been, there's been a core thesis of what the company is working forward to, or what, maybe what you're pushing them towards as well.

So shortcut, planning tool I think the vision is generally brings product and engineering together, but there was this big thesis of alignment. Why is that so important from those? Organizations. And what was the thesis behind how shortcut delivered on that?

Arman: So shortcut is a project management tool. That's competitive with tools like JIRA. And [00:17:00] so one of the things we noticed at shortcut was that many of Product teams that were using it. There was this kind of misalignment between what the executives at those companies wanted to do and what the actual engineering and product teams were executing on, and the executives didn't really understand what the engineering teams and the product teams were actually doing, how much, like what was actually being worked on.

And there was just this transparency issue between the two sides. And whenever you don't have transparency, it causes misalignment. Because product everyone makes assumptions when there's not no transparency. So the executives might think oh, we're actually working on this thing And we're gonna get it done in this time frame etc.

Etc. And the engineers that are at the ground level They're like I'm just building this ticket. I'm just working on this ticket and it may or may not Relate to what those executives need to be built and what they have in their vision. So what we did was we basically built out an OKR framework inside shortcut as a project management tool.

And we tied everything together. So as an [00:18:00] executive, you can go in and set your objective. You can set the key result for a specific function or part of the strategy of the company. And then those key results. Now you can actually tie projects directly underneath them And tickets and epics underneath each of those.

So now if you're an engineer, you can go and say, Hey, this ticket I'm working on ties back to this company objective and vice versa. If I'm an exec, I can go our leader. I can look at that objective and say, okay, how many tickets and what's the progress of each of those tickets that everyone's working on?

And it creates this like transparency and unified language almost that companies can now talk about together, which was really empowering for our users.

Jeff: Was this kind of move to alignment a. Reflection of, things you had learned over your time leading Proctor, was it kind of vision of founders there and something you helped deliver or a little bit of a little bit of B,

Arman: It was a lot of kind of, how I thought about the cohesion and collaboration that [00:19:00] needs to exist for products to be developed because it's a combination of like sometimes when you're like mid tier manager, let's say you're a director of product, etc. You're sitting in between both.

You have to basically try and communicate out to the exec team what's going on. Then you also have to create a vision and motivate the engineers and the product folks beneath you to execute. And in those roles, it's very common to see that misalignment. And when we started talking to actual users and teams that were using it it was just constantly coming up in these user research calls.

And so that was the validation that we needed and like hey, this is an actual problem that we should solve.

Jeff: If I'm a, upcoming product leader, what does that kind of stuff look like, or can you give maybe examples of the problems you actually ran into or the issues you ran into where. You don't need to solve for this alignment. Like, how's that kind of smell if I'm coming in and trying to diagnose the problem, 

Arman: one symptom of it is that you have engineers that are not motivated. Because they're working on things that they don't see that like what it's related to, [00:20:00] because engineers, I think people take for granted a lot of times like, oh, they're just gonna like to work on code. No, most engineers actually want to improve the bottom line of the business and they want to move the business forward.

They just don't have visibility into that. And so that's a key symptom if you see engineers that are not motivated, they don't understand how their work ties back to the business goals. That's what this is also trying to solve. And I think that's the most, probably one of the more powerful improvement areas in which this feature helped.

Jeff: before you were , at shortcut, you came in at crunch base, which I'd say for the maturity of the org it's interesting to see that you came in and you didn't, you didn't start product, but you really exponentially grew the function there and, made it a lot more impactful.

Is that where some of these learnings came about was as you're growing this team and it's one thing to be aligned when you're like, two product people or three product people, engineers, you can tie that together really well. But as that org grows, it's a lot harder to maintain that kind of cohesion of vision.

Is that where you started to first see that? [00:21:00] Or what did that kind of process look like there?

Arman: Yeah, I think at Crunchbase when you're growing very rapidly, as we were, there's definitely growing pains. Part of those growing pains, for sure, was, having not a cohesive vision or product direction , that is communicated to every single person in the org.

So it's, it just requires a lot more meanings. It requires a lot more conversations between it was thinking myself and the head of engineering and getting in meeting with those individuals on the teams to really get them to understand why we were doing what we were doing and wherever we were going I had a very Strong team of co executives at Crunchbase, like the executive team was super strong, Jagger was a great CEO, and we were able to really sit down and pivot our product strategy as an org.

And, but pivoting the product strategy was only half of it. Cause once you pivot and you say, Hey, we're going to focus on this new, maybe persona to go after. And in Crunchbase's example, we were really hyper focusing on the sales persona, like sales [00:22:00] professionals. Once we decided to do that, that's only half.

The battle. The other half is okay, how do you then communicate? How do you turn this into an actual product vision with designs and UX and features and a roadmap, and then communicate that to the team and get them excited about building it. So seeing, having to be able to do that from like the top down, I think is, was really critical to CrunchBase's success.

Jeff: And where did that kind of Shift or pivot come from whenever you're making a big seismic change like that. Most of the time, there's an underlying maybe discovery or discovery process. Where'd you guys come to the. Confidence to, to make that kind of sizable change.

And how did you then work it through? This is before you had shortcut with it's integrated, alignment for taking everything up to objectives. So you had to do that yourself. How'd that work from a, operational standpoint as well.

Arman: That's a great question. I think there was a very key insight that we had that we found it was in the data, it was actually. Hidden in the data, our [00:23:00] user behavior data. So we were trying to figure out how do we actually grow the number of like users per account. For example, one person would get by a crunch space pro account and then they would just basically have one.

They would just, have one kind of log in. How do we get everyone on their team to use it? So what we did was we dug in and we luckily we knew the different functions that every account was built was created under. If a sales team was paying for crunch base versus investors versus job seekers versus analysts, whatever it was, we knew that.

But once we dug into the data, we saw that salespeople in particular for every one crunch base pro account and log in credential, there was 50 different IPS using it.

Jeff: We'd never, we would never do that here.

Arman: Yes.

Jeff: that's totally other companies.

Arman: yeah, I don't know if it was 50, but it was like, definitely like it was a lot. It was a lot.

Jeff: exactly the phenomenon you're talking about there.

Arman: yes. So once we, that was the key insight, we're like, okay, wait, this, there's a, almost like a latent [00:24:00] demand. That's already there. And all we had to do was figure out a way to actually. folks a reason to create their own account. And one way we did that was basically integrating with things like Salesforce and their Google, because as a salesperson, you're not going to, share your Salesforce credentials with another salesperson. So by integrating it directly, then every person we saw boom, had to create their own Crunchbase prologue and to get those benefits.

And then that really accelerated our growth.

Jeff: It's really funny to me how the growth of SSO has, the benefit touted is always security and authentication and safety. But I've always wondered partly if part of the play there is it forces you to not account share. It's really difficult to share accounts when you have to SSO through Google or through your Salesforce, like you said.

And it's a backdoor into let's make sure that, if you need multiple people using this, you have multiple accounts set up for that. , was there any pushback to that or how'd that kind of go, from a user standpoint, [00:25:00] before we get into how to, how do the engineers share that vision?

Arman: It wasn't like we were forcing anything on people. We were using a carrot approach, not a stick. So

with a 

Jeff: better way to do it. Like,

Arman: Always a better way to do it. Sometimes you need both. Sometimes you need both. But I think for example, Netflix is uses a very, like it's a stick approach mostly for Netflix.

But building out really, it forced us to think about what are really meaningful features and value and benefits that we can provide. That give that user their own personalized experience with Crunchbase as the more personalized you make your product, the less likely that they're going to want to share it.

If people are sharing your product products, probably not really that valuable, but as soon as they start personalizing it and having their own version, then deeper into it, then they get a much deeper, richer experience, which is what we did.

Jeff: you have the vision of, focusing more on the sales persona and how do you push that through? Obviously there's going to be changes that have to be made at the product level as well. How did [00:26:00] you bring along the rest of the company with that? Like you have, it sounds like you have the founders on your side, there's consensus there that this is the decision to do, but like you said, you still need to bring along the engineers.

At some level you need to bring along marketing. You need to bring along, people throughout the whole org to make the whole thing happen. And that's , the benefit of product is you see the whole sausage being made and you're part of it, that the downfall is also, you got to make sure all those bits happen or else that failure can land on you.

Arman: yeah, I've always been a huge proponent of having a strong user research team or individual and in my orgs, both at shortcut and in crunch base, I had my user research team sit at the same level as product and design. They didn't report into design, they didn't report into product, but they were an independent third party to the team.

And so that's important because they were able to create a check and balance on each other. And what was most important is then I could work with that team and say, hey, One of your goals and objectives is actually building empathy throughout this organization. So then they can go about and say, [00:27:00] Hey, we're going to create a bunch of these user research interviews and invite engineers, invite marketing, invite sales so they can listen in as we show them these new features and see how these people react.

And once people see the customer or user actually react to the product in real time in a zoom or in person, even it changes how they perceive everything. Any assumption my experience, any assumptions they would have had or any negative assertions they might have had about the potential of a specific feature goes out the window once they see a customer that loves it.

And so that's what you have to do.

Jeff: It's really hard to argue with someone's face, just lighting up when they have the right feature in front of them. So 

Arman: Yeah. And you record that and you take it to your town halls and you like show it to the whole company and everyone sees it and they're like, Oh my God. And that's part of the role of a product person also. It's like cheerleader approach.

Jeff: exactly. It's not just operations. It's how do being on board with something is an emotional exercise at some level. And so how do you foster that? You want to get the aha moment for your product users, [00:28:00] but what's the aha moment for your stakeholders too, is super important.

So that's great that you can pull that through there. Looking back, this is. The tailor made experience set to, Go on to, to found something successful, right? You walk through how do you bring in a kind of more established org and change the direction and bring people along and grow the team really quickly.

How do you drive that need for UX having a real seat at the table and just user empathy. And then, all the way up to. Shortcut, how do you drive alignment and seeing those problems and solving those problems, coming into Homa, it seems like beyond just, as a founder with a product background, it's the right set of, how do you understand your users?

How do you understand your org to get things done? And now it's just a matter of, go build the thing. 

Arman: Yeah. Build it and help people want to use it. It's a brave new world. Cause every, I've usually just a joint organization where they already had traction, they already had revenue and we're trying to build something and educate the public at the same time.

A lot of people, most people don't even know you can buy a home [00:29:00] without a realtor.

Jeff: Yeah. But you're starting from the empathy point, right? You're, you got the AI kind of MVP. You've got, you're going to open houses, which I still think is getting, a street team there 

but I think this also gives you an interesting view and just AI right now, which is clearly, like you said, it's a whole new world of not just real estate, but of AI and, it's changing over the past two years. It's really been in pop culture has really changed behavior and how people look at problems.

As a product person, like how do you look at AI or how is it worth looking at from a standpoint of AI and product and an overall thesis?

Arman: So I think there's two ways. One is just how can AI help you as a product manager be better in product. And so using AI to help, in the future and in your future, you'll be able to as a product person basically use a lot of no code tools to build prototypes, build even actual features.

So you can, you might be able to in the not too distant future as a product person, just build your own version of the product using AI and actually literally have a working version that you can go and [00:30:00] show users yourself. You can also basically go and have AI help you with strategy, which is something I do every day.

I'm interacting with ChatGPT and asking it questions and giving it situations and giving it circumstances and challenges that we might be facing. And it's going through and thinking about all the possible ways. That, for example, listing agents may create objections to those buyers that they may encounter in the real world.

And it gives us a real key insight into what are the new problems that we need to approach? And so as a product person, that's a key part of their kind of day to day work is how do I make sure that the features I'm building and that I'm thinking through all the scenarios and in chat, GPT, AI can help with that.

And then beyond that, actually leveraging. AI itself in the product. And I think that's a key thing that we're still all trying to figure out. I think some people do it. Some people don't do it well.

Jeff: There's a class of product that is just saying it has [00:31:00] AI and that's supposed to be the magic thing. And then there's. A set of products that are understanding AI enables you to do something you couldn't do before really gives you a power you didn't have. And that's long term going to be.

I think where we see the benefit clearly. But how do product people think through that now? It's very easy to get caught up in the, tornado that is AI right now. How do you bring yourself back to ground, rationalize and think through like, where is this going to help?

Arman: a lot of companies what's happening or what I experienced as well is that AI is such a hot topic. That you get this kind of downward pressure in the organization. So you might have investors, board members meeting with your executive team, asking about what, what's going on with AI, what are you building on AI?

Where are we going with AI? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And that creates pressure to that executive team to actually deliver on those folks, because those folks have a lot of power in those organizations. And that can create an environment for bad product decisions. Because if you're an individual product manager and , your chief [00:32:00] product officer, whoever your CEO is saying, your founder is saying, Hey, we need more AI stuff.

You're going to be distracted by AI. And instead of what you should be doing is think about AI as just another thing that can enable your product. So Bluetooth is one example of that. You can think about data. As another example, like if you have access to a new data source as a product manager that unlocks a whole slew of things and integration partner.

Let's say you're you've you just built an integration with a really cool software solution that unlocks a whole set of features and capabilities for users. A. I should be no different. Think of it as one of those rest ingredients in your recipe, not the recipe itself. And I think sometimes you have to push back.

You have to push back at your execs, at your founders, at your leaders and say, this is not what's going to help our users. And the best way to do that is with actual data, ideally qualitative data, show them the user research interviews and prototype sessions where you're showing maybe this prototype of this feature and see their reaction to it versus maybe what you actually want to build and what you think the [00:33:00] user needs.

Jeff: How have you done that in the past? Have you run into a situation where. You do have to go back to, someone who maybe is above you, whether they're a founder or, maybe when you were more junior how did you handle that? Specifically and does it always turn out well, or sometimes it's just, all right, I did my best.

It's time to disagree and commit here.

Arman: I think there's a lot of nuance because as a product manager or even like a leader, you want to make people happy that are higher than you. You want to make your founder happy. You want to make that whoever it is that is at the top of the company, you want to make them happy. So we sometimes can't identify Why we're doing a certain thing sometimes, like there's there might be a subconscious element to wanting to help them where it goes against your best instincts if your instincts are saying, Hey, I know I need to focus on the user solve a problem for the user, but you have this founder saying, No, we need to do this.

And they get you excited because they have a great storytelling and they set a vision and do all these things. You get drawn into that, too. So [00:34:00] It's really trying to just meet with others in your team, discuss it, try and get others opinions and make sure you're not in an environment where you're in a silo thinking about this, or even in an environment where there's group think around it because you have to find a way to think independently.

And that's the first step. Think independently about what it is that's happening.

Jeff: . This reminds me a bit of a prior role I was in, I got a promotion at one point. But I remember my then manager talking to me about basically, always the view is, you should be looking at how do you make, Your manager's life easier, or how do you make it better?

How do you affect up? And then, again, the promotion always like you take something off their plate. But what I found interesting was this thought that, do you look at that acutely, or do you look at that broadly? Cause like I can, to your point, you can make your manager or your founder, whoever it is happy by just acquiescing which in the short term is probably The easier one it will probably yield a [00:35:00] very short term payback where they're happy.

I think our jobs, especially as we grow and mature in our careers and you take on those bigger titles, part of it is you're looking at the longterm. So my job isn't, I'm here as VP of marketing for log rocket. I don't view my job as making our CEO happy today. It's how do I help the rest of the team build, a company where we're happy in a year and six months.

And that might be, some unhappy bog to wade , through the short term. , Kind of looking at kind of the more junior folks, can you give any advice on how people should weigh that of the short term, longterm paydex is also the thing about like maybe the founders has a vision that we don't have and right.

They're founders for a reason. Sometimes they just know, and , they got that founder mode magic sometimes in them. Yeah.

Arman: that individual? If you respect that founder and you think Hey, they have a track record, I believe in them. This is why I joined the company. I'm going to follow them. That's important. But if you find yourself constantly questioning or resenting a specific executive or founder's decision making or if you feel that leader needs you [00:36:00] to just do whatever they're telling you to don't work at that company.

that company because you're going to be, if you can, right? Because if you're going to be constantly, you want to be in a place where there's such humility at the leadership level, where you go to them and say, no, you're wrong. Then they say, okay, show me why I'm wrong. And then if you do it, they're like, okay, you're right.

Let's switch. You want leaders that are not married to their vision or to their ideas. You want them to be constantly permeable. And my, it was a, yeah, like flexible in their decision making and in their thinking, and that's where you want to work. So if you find yourself in a place where the founders are just doing top down and not listening, leave, that's my, that would be my suggestion.

Jeff: Yeah. I think that's always the great thing to look at is, do I feel strongly that this is the right way or do something wrong because I have a vision or I have And I think that's always a key thing to hone in on before you go strong one way or the other is don't capitulate necessarily every time, but at the same time, sometimes the answer is [00:37:00] disagree and commit.

And I've had plenty of times where I have come out the other side going, Oh, glad I listened on that one. Aside from real estate, just go, let's just continue going broader and broader at this point. Where else do you think. AI is really poised to, to have effect and, this kind of effect of like, buyers agents and the transfer of fees in, in buying a home, maybe it's not giant societal, it's not solving world hunger, but that's a real cost for a lot of people that, that they're going to have to mediate now, but that's a great use case. If, you can find the product market here, solving that problem is going to have real benefit.

Like, where else do you think this can be helpful to people?

Arman: Yeah. To your point, I think with Homa. Access to home ownership is a big part of the mission. About 50 percent of first time home buyers can barely come up with a down payment, let alone if you're going to ask them to fork up another two and a half percent, which is 25, 000 on a million dollar home.

It puts a lot of homes out of reach for a lot of folks. So that's definitely part of it. I do think there is this movement right now of, I think they're calling it vertical A. I. Vertical agents. So A. I. And real estate. A. I. [00:38:00] And medicine and all these different angles. You're gonna see a lot of those kind of proliferate probably in the next year to two years.

But I want to go even a little bit beyond that. What I've been thinking about is what happens in 3 to 5 years. And I think in 3 to 5 years, you're gonna get it. Much more obviously advanced A. I. That's able to be independent, do reasoning, do a lot of our jobs, really. And in those situations, what's gonna happen is you're gonna get a lot of these big companies.

These incumbents that are gonna find themselves basically flat footed. They're gonna be in a situation where they have all these employees and this business model that's based on all these things, and they're not going to be able to compete with What's going to happen, I think, is that you're going to go from, if there's 10 million companies in the U.

S. right now, that 10 million is going to turn into 100 million companies, and those companies are going to be two or three individuals each. So I think now is a really interesting time for product people in particular to think about. a company. Think about going and saying, Hey, how do I actually build a company with [00:39:00] as little as possible?

Maybe get a little bit of precede or seed funding and see how far that takes me. And then once you have that, then that is your advantage against any incumbent. The fact that you're able to be that lean and have the A. I do so much of the work for you is gonna be your advantage. So I think we're gonna see me.

Hopefully 100 million little small businesses that pop up in the next five years in this company because of this. So we'll see.

Jeff: I was reading a thing on LinkedIn. I can't for the life of me remember the company name, but it was, one of those LinkedIn thought leadership posts. But if this is real, they're talking about, they had driven 9 million of sales pipeline that was open right now. And it's like a seven person company.

That's just absurd multiples right there on, if you can even convert that at any kind of rational, reasonable conversion rate is a pretty good flow through. So that's that, you can do that reliably. That's pretty good. But I also think there's an interesting play here where.

There are just so many legacy industries speaking, back to property and real estate that were hobbled by or constricted by [00:40:00] access to just proprietary information or just work, right? Think about like legal, a big law firm can come in and bury a little one because they can just have 500 associates drop stupid paperwork.

They're just going to bury you in hourly fees. Those are one of the things that it seems like easily the right AI can really even the playing field. And if we can have a world where there's more equal access to, things like legal representation and just more equal standpoint, that's, on the level of more people having homeownership as well.

Arman: That was my backup idea. Actually behind Homa was it was, I was actually in the process of working on that with a friend of mine who owns a law firm here in Los Angeles, but accidentally using AI to provide equal representation and access to justice because 92 percent of people don't actually Can't afford attorneys if they have issues with someone.

So they're trying to self represent themselves. AI can help them in the same way. A home buyer needs self representation.

Jeff: Exactly. And just, and the life of the lifeblood of legal is precedent to all the time and just I don't know, I don't know what you, I haven't memorized every court case from here to [00:41:00] 1928. Being able to draw that miraculously be great. All I could go down this rabbit hole forever with you, Armin, but I'm really excited to see how Homa comes out.

Definitely please, you Keep us updated. Maybe , after a year or two and you're the 20 million ARR three person company that you just talked about. We can have you on and say, we knew you when, but until then, you know, people want to follow up or, curious, or if they can be of help to you at all, even what's a good place to find, is it LinkedIn? Is there another way, or

Arman: Yeah. ARMAN at trihoma. com. That's the URL trihoma. com or just find me on LinkedIn. I love kind of interacting with folks. 

Jeff: Nice. Well, It's been a blast having you on. Thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it. And we'll have to have you again. Hopefully. Awesome. 

Arman: Likewise. All right. Have a good one.