Video === Jeff: [00:00:00] One of the board members that I talked to, he described Kickstarter as a money printing machine for the longest time. One of the things that companies who are ultra successful tend to do is try to overthink their customers. And sometimes it is needed, but other times it might not be needed. And in Kickstarter's case, we didn't listen to customers for the last, I don't know, five, six years, and that resulted in bunch of competition cropping up, creators losing faith in the platform. Welcome to Launch Pod. The show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're talking with Mahesh Guro Swami, CPTO at Kickstarter. In this episode, we discuss how daily reflection on hard moments helped him grow as a leader, and ultimately led to his widely praised book, how to Deliver Bad News and Get away with It. How Kickstarter went from printing money and experiencing insane PMF to plateauing and how they created urgency and competition to quickly turn it around and finally. The actual process. Kickstarter used to activate its creator and backer communities to shape a better ux, build more loyalty and reignite [00:01:00] growth. So here's our episode with Mahesh Gura Swami. All right, Mahesh, thanks for uh, joining us today. This is exciting. I'm, I'm stoked to have you on. Thanks for coming. Mahesh: Thanks for having me. Jeff: This is gonna be a good one. 'cause I mean now you're at Kickstarter, which a fun story there. But I mean, background wise, you come up through everything between companies like Smartsheet through Amazon, fidelity incredibly wide. Breath. but we get to touch on one that's near and dear to my heart, which is a Kickstarter. 'cause I've, I think I've participated in quite a few Kickstarter campaigns myself. Mahesh: Of the backers are millennials and Gen X, so I'm not Jeff: yeah. And I fall dead on the middle of both, so Kickstarter is a place for creators and people looking to fund things and do interesting things. Which is a good fit for you because you have a pretty solid background there in writing and, you, you publish your own book. So maybe let's dive into there a little bit because, I'm, I'd love to kinda just get into like the sensible manager, how to deliver bad news all these kind of publications you've [00:02:00] gone through and maybe some of the experiences led you into, like why create all that stuff and why focus on. That end of it as well. Mahesh: One of the things I kind of stumbled upon early in my career is that I, lots of people, I process things by reflecting on it, maybe taking a moment at the end of the day Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: it. I process things by writing about it. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: So this is something that I started doing a very young age, maybe even when I was like 15 something. A little bit about myself, which Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: what I'm gonna say next. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: an introvert by nature. I am not. Confrontational by nature. If tough things need to be said, I've kind of trained myself to do that over the years, in general, I am a, I'm not a confrontational person And I also, I am generally very empathetic in nature, which means that if I have to engage myself in an emotionally draining conversation, it affects me more than any other, sort of people who are not wired like that. So one of the things I started doing as a, personal [00:03:00] habit for myself is whenever I encounter a emotionally draining or tough situation at work. way of processing that moment was to , go back home, then write about it. So I would write down an essay, or not even an essay, maybe it's, sometimes it's just a couple of paragraphs about, I had this conversation with this person and it was emotionally charged in these ways. These are the things I did good and these are the things I did not do well. as a personal note for myself, I would say, okay, next time this happens, I would do it in, in this way. Sometimes I do it the right way and I write those down too. And over the years that sort of became my kind of framework for handling tough situations. 'cause there are other introverts out there listening to this, you have to like consciously train yourself. sort of become an extrovert if you need to. So for example, in my role, I go to conferences, I go to events, and [00:04:00] go to dinners where I have to represent kick shutter. And, and the introvert part of me is like, you know what? I'm just not gonna. Participate in this, , but the executive in me is like, oh yeah, I do have to show up for the brand here, show up for the company here. And I have to like learn to like, sort of turn myself into a different version of me. So writing these things down ended up like becoming a teaching tool for myself. eventually those essays became. Interesting enough for me to share it with my team who are struggling with similar situations so I've been writing these essays for the last 10 or 15 years and a year ago when I looked at the amount of material I've written, I was like, wow, that's enough here for a book. So I might just, I might just do that. Jeff: There you go. And that turned into how to deliver bad news and my favorite part and get away with it. Mahesh: Just so there was a lot of that, there was a lot of debate between me and my publisher and of also like people who read the initial [00:05:00] copy of the book who's like this, get away with it sounds. Sneaky and the publisher's point of view was, this'll this will grab people's attention. And it did. So it kind of did its job and the get away with it, the way I explain it to people is how do you, get away with keeping your sanity Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: the way I would explain it. So there's nothing in the book about how to give people negative feedback, but like somehow twist it into a positive feedback or anything like that, right? It's just how do you like process these things in a way that does not drive you insane. Jeff: This is not some convoluted how to, trickily deliver something and make people feel good about bad news. It's, it's actually like, how do you have hard conversations and how do you kind of have good outcomes and, and deliver things in a way that is, sound for me. A like, let's make everyone good kind of standpoint. Mahesh: That's right. That's right. Which Jeff: That sounds way better. Mahesh: yeah. Yeah. And also, which is why I don't believe in the. In the crap sandwich, right? So you Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: feedback, you give negative feedback, and then you give positive feedback. Jeff: Yeah. Everyone seeks to drill [00:06:00] that stuff. It's fine. I, I feel like 'cause you, you come from an engineering background and moved into product. I come from a marketing background and, and work very closely with our product team now. I feel like I'm hyper aware because of that to all the little like. Delivery mechanisms and stuff where I hear any kind of verbal tool like that, and my first instinct is not. Oh, that's nice. They're trying to deliver it nice. I'm like, God, they're so full of crap. This is such garbage. Mahesh: That's right. The interesting part for me was I learned that lesson when I had to deliver tough news to customers, Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: because customers don't care about the good things happening with your system. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: is not working for them, or if you have delayed the feature that they wanted, you cannot go tell them, Hey, look at all the cool stuff we have done. Right. Jeff: Right. We did do this other thing you don't want we had a, a guy named Steve Nash on, he's a director of product over at Gum Gum and he, he talks a lot about this too, about basically at one point him and, and the, a lot of the exec team at the company he was at. Felt like the [00:07:00] CEO who was there was kind of focusing on them and pushing them down, kind of a, a wrong direction. And he got I, I think. Voluntold he talked about how he navigated that conversation. How was it that, like be straightforward, be honest work with evidence. , don't try and get too emotional, but, but be straightforward and clear and concise and, and also talk about solutions. And it was actually great. The company ended up really turning a corner and really hitting kind of exit velocity and, and ended up getting acquired having a great acquisition. And a lot of it was because him and, and the risk of the exec team that talked with the CEO, they all kinda got together and realigned around a new direction and, and the CEO kinda realized, oh, that's fair. If everyone feels this way and here's all the evidence. It seems like, this is a good thing people brought to my attention. So handling it well, is, can, can really, really make the difference between coming in, and, and delivering with the, what you call a crap sandwich and, and making someone feel a bit like garbage there. \ so again, back to the title, I do love that there's kinda this thing about, you know, get away with it. I get the point of it, but like you have, some of these moments, I [00:08:00] feel like that kind of fit with this and, and your kind of direct, let's just address the point and talk through it methodology where, like when you were at Smartsheet, right? And you came in, in an engineering role, but you were opening up the Boston office and, , you've been at Amazon previously and I mean, everyone knows the level of focus on, on product there. So, great experience on the product side. You, you basically went to the CPO and said, Hey, I think I should run the product team in Boston. 'cause you're all the way out west in, in San Francisco. That in many places could be a very dangerous situation. And that seems like it went well. And, and I have to think as something to do with, some of these lessons that you've kind of ascertained through self-reflection of, of how do you have these conversations? 'cause no one ever likes. Someone coming in and going, Hey, I think I should actually have part of your team. Mahesh: Yeah. , the thing that helped me with that conversation back then was, I think unlike other big tech companies, Amazon actually is, I. If you look at the [00:09:00] product the number of product managers in the team, they're very anemic. So they Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: deliberately choose a small number of product managers for specific areas. if you look at Alexa as a whole, early back then, I don't know how it is right now. There were very little product managers. In general. So every area that was run by an engineering leader or a leader that person was expected to behave like a product manager. So I ran \ the,, data insights team and eventually the conversations team and they had very little product managers. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: a product manager for, for a lot of that work. And the CPO at Smartsheet was X Amazon. So he, so he understood that dynamic. to him and I said, Hey. I think I can recruit good product managers, in the Boston area, I can, I can sort of build out the product Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: of product like leadership, like you want them to. And then he was like totally on board because he sort of like, knew how Amazon operated and he had trusted me. I think the key there for me was. Not to [00:10:00] create like a closed ecosystem, \ like walls are on my org because I would say, , anybody who has interest in learning more about how my org works or wants to give feedback about how the org works or, we also had not online reports for the product managers to the CPO. So if Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: wants to go talk to them directly, then I didn't come in the way Jeff: Right. Mahesh: that. So, I came at it from the perspective of I wanna do right for the business and then, and I'm not gonna create any like walled gardens, then everybody was, was pretty much on board. Jeff: It seems like generally having any conversation that that has even a small chance of being fraught. It's just be aware of like,, why are you addressing this? How do you talk to the person? What's the common ground that you all care about? And I. There's right way and wrong way to commit. You could have a conversation, go south. That's a very easy one if you approach it wrong and hard conversations go very well. So the book, the book, how to Deliver Bad News and Get Away With It you sell it online Correct. So people can buy it. Mahesh: It's wherever you can buy books is available. Jeff: Nice. And then you have the Substack, which you know, I, I, I actually really like it. I read [00:11:00] through quite a few of it. I do wanna dive into that stuff in a second, but I love. You kind of took this idea of, of being a creator and just ran with it and said, you know what Kickstarter, it's, it's such a seminal piece of that landscape that really opened up a lot of people's ability to do this. 'cause I, I think a lot of people might not remember pre 2000, was it 2009 when it really hit the scene. Um, If you wanted to do. Some kind of, decent sized project. You had to go find investors or you, maybe you independently had money. But there were a lot of things albums that came out. Pieces of hardware that came out personal kind of devices. Even even small t-shirt things. , at the time, throughout the teens, the 20 teens, I ran a company on the side that ran beer and food festivals and definitely one or two breweries. I knew, they didn't do their whole financing through Kickstarter, but they raised like their last kind of 10% through Kickstarter. And also builds a great community around the product building just, but made so many cool things really possible. But you know, I think the interesting thing is, [00:12:00] is something like that where just has just undeniable product market fit and just absurd escape velocity for a while. It often runs into that second act problem where now competition starts to set in or maybe the market. Cool. Is just overall and like, how do you maintain the magic? And, and that's kinda when you came in, right? You and, and a bunch of the leadership team came in to kind of take it and how do we look at and take such a magical company and work through the next stage and, keep the excitement going and, and build it up. So that's, I guess, do you wanna set the stage, about what was going on when you came in and, and that kind piece. Mahesh: yeah, for sure, for sure. I think Kickstart is not unique, from the perspective that. Oftentimes when you tap into that sort of insane product market fit vein, you know, you'll see what looks like unlimited or unbounded growth, right? But the, but the reality is every company's growth will follow the scur, right? At some point it's gonna plateau, and at some point you will have [00:13:00] to start thinking about new lines of revenue. And that's sort of similar, what happened to, what happened to Kickstarter. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: hit the product market fit and, then they kept growing and growing and growing. One of the board members that I talked to, he described Kickstarter as a money printing machine for the longest time. And \ that was largely true. But then one of the, one of the things that who are ultra successful end up doing or tend to do is. Is, is try to overthink their customers Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: to like, think beyond what their customers are telling them. And sometimes , it is needed but other times it might not be needed. And in Kickstarter's case, it was very much, didn't listen to customers for the LA for the last, I don't know, five, six years. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: that resulted in. Of competition cropping up creators losing faith in the platform. know, I mean, to this day, Kickstarter is the number one crowdfunding company on Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: but. Jeff: By [00:14:00] a lot too, right? Mahesh: By a lot too. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: customers start leaving the platform or start to spend some of the dollars elsewhere, then everybody just wakes up, Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: the board like, okay, crap. This is, this is not what we, this is not good. a, a lot of credit to kind of this turnaround journey we're on goes to Everett Taylor, who's the CEO. So he came on board a few years ago he, he, he really. Kind of pushed the org and the executives to listen to customers. Something that, that I'm like naturally wired to do because, create economy companies like Hijabi, Smartsheet, all of us were Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: because we listened to customers. But the minute we, we decided to of. Eat some humble pie, all the notions of superiority that we might have and go back to the drawing board in terms of just listening to customers and listening to creators and giving them what they need is helping us right now and what will help us in the, in the future too. Jeff: I remember for a long [00:15:00] time, for instance, you would finish the campaign, get the money, and then kind of fulfillment and everything like that was just, good luck have that and, created some problems. I mean, I definitely, I had a lot of fun with a lot of the campaigns I, I fund helped to fund. But, I definitely had one or two where just that kind of after effect was, a crap sandwich, if you will. Um, but it seems like that that opened up, maybe a, a world of, of, small cottage industries almost to like kind of come at it. , did that open up almost like an entry point for competition to try and come at you guys and take some of it? Or, or like how did that work? Like where was, where was the kind of like the bleeding coming from? Mahesh: , you hit it on the head. This sort of goes back to having points of views on what Jeff: No. Mahesh: the company and what doesn't. of the dogmatic points of views the Kickstarter as company had for the longest time is we'll play in the campaign space only. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: So if you look at the journey of a creator I kind of like categorize them as three broad parts. First one is you're building an audience. You're generating [00:16:00] buzz for your idea. You're building your email list, like all the things that you need to do to, to find backers. The next phase is the campaign phase where you launch a project, you send your backers there and you, or you find new backers within the Kickstarter network and you raise money for your campaign. The third phase is what we call post-campaign. So your campaign is done now. You have to collect addresses from backers. Now you have to collect their shipping details. You have to collect taxes, you have to get ready for fulfillment. if you are making a video game, you need to get ready for digital downloads, like all the things that they need to do post campaign, know, kickstart for the longest time said, we will not play in this space. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: And, and I think in the beginning, the, the competition was symbiotic, right? So they, Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: about and said. Okay, we're gonna fill this gap because you are not doing it. And the relationship between us and the competition was also fairly cordial. We were like, yeah, here's the about our C creators and backers. You can help them [00:17:00] fulfill their campaigns. But guess what once the competition started doing crowdfunding, now the story immediately changed. And to this day, I still believe . The best thing for creators and backers is to do all of this in one platform. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: is why one of the initiatives we've been working on for the last year or so is to build all this in one place so creators and backers don't have to, to leave the platform. And so far the, the response has been great. Everybody is loving it. Creators like, yeah, this is great. We've been asking for it for five plus years, but great that you gave it to us now. I think the lesson learned for me is. There's product manager or product leaders and executives, they like doing these, um, like innovators dilemma or blue ocean type thought exercises. Right? in the beginning I was also guilty of doing them. When I joined Kickstarter, I was like, oh, where's the new, growth? That we can go pull from,, but the reality for kick shutter was we just had to listen to customers. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: this is, they're like [00:18:00] yelling and screaming that this is what they want. So we should just give it to them. And so I think, once we finished this. Kind of play, play. I think there'll be like opportunities to do some of that blue ocean thinking, but right now the demand is so strong from our creators that we should just give them what they want. Jeff: , it's funny, isn't it? Because to go back, maybe half of what we were talking about, but like that dogmatic devotion is probably at the beginning. What helped Kickstarter become, Kickstarter? The, by far the number one thing like, it's the same way. I remember early on at Log Rocket, I've been here for six and a half years now and I joined. During the seed round, it was like 10 of us. Matt, our, founder and head of product and CEO would walk around literally going we help engineers fix bugs. That's all we do. And he would walk around this is what we do guys. And we're not doing this. We don't do this, we don't do this. And that was the dogmatic. Incantation of, of how we looked at what we did until it really had to be something different. And I think that's, that's the biggest thing with [00:19:00] dogmas. Like it will get you to the, to the next thing, but , there's risk to it. 'cause you have to be really aware of when is it time to pop your head up and realize, we're done with this, we have to do something else. And now we have to be dogmatic about like, now we do this. Mahesh: That's right. That's right, that's right. I think another way to, to sort of say what you just said is put an expiration date to dogma, Jeff: that's a much more concise way to put it. Mahesh: We're gonna stop talking about this because now we are moving on Jeff: Yeah, Mahesh: things. And I think you can, you can see that by, know, or, or like your customers clamoring to use that thing, Jeff: right. Mahesh: are they like trickling down? Right? If they're trickling down, then, then it's like, okay, maybe it's time to go find new pockets of growth. Jeff: Yeah. it was interesting times where it became like, you go from, our case, session replay. Then you had to have, analytics we saw because we saw people were clamoring for it in sales deals. And then, moving into how do you show people what to look at, how do you, how do you use AI to show them what sessions? And staying ahead of that, I think has been [00:20:00] key in that. Right. You can kind of like. Hold onto your dogma too long, you can midway it and probably kind of keep up with it. The, the secret sauce is can you stay that half step, one step ahead, where you're always kind of like, not pulling the market, but at the head of what people want and kind of being the one to, oh, now we got this, now we got this. But I think every company that has ever been successful, probably at some point, finds that they, they missed. The expiration date to use , your thing. And then, but it's a matter of how you, how do you pick up? And I think, like you said, the typically the answer is let's go listen to customers. So like how did, how did you guys approach this now? So you, you kinda realized you had to do this, you went and people are screaming for certain things, but you can't give everything at once. Do you talk to creators? Do you talk to funders, the community? How do you kind of look at and then. What do we need to do? What does that actually look like in practice? How do we prioritize it? And, , do these things work together in any way? Are there any pieces that work together nicely? Mahesh: The way we looked at it was , we [00:21:00] talked to the set of creators first who generate the most revenue for Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: So we categorize creators into high revenue creators, 1, 2, 3, I think it, you know, HRC ones being the ones who are most prolific on the platform, raise the most money and have the most backers. And the post-campaign set was. Was most valuable to them Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: the ones juggling with like millions of. Hundreds of Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: of orders and, and whatnot. So we, prioritize talking to them, getting their feedback on what they need and what is important. We did talk to backers too, to figure out what do they need as well, but we really prioritize listening to these high revenue creators because that's where we are making our money from. The other thing we did is , we deliberately made a decision not to copy the competition. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: what we hear from creators is their experiences from other platforms, right? Because if you ask them, Hey, how did you, how do you want to do solve for X? reference point for X would be how the competition does it, [00:22:00] right? So we're very, very deliberate about taking the feedback, but kind of distilling down what are they actually trying to solve for and making it available on the platform so that if we don't look like a mangled mess, like our competition does, right? So that's, that's another thing that, that, that we did is, okay, this, the value proposition of doing everything on kick shutter is to have a unified user experience. So that's gonna be our golden tenet. we'll figure out how to solve these problems in a way that sets us apart from the competition, but Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: the problem that these HRCs are looking for. \ late last year, we opened up the feature to a small population of beta creators, Because with the feature this complicated and this big, we didn't want to take any chances, , so we're like, okay, we're gonna open it to small group of beta creators, get their feedback, iterate, and then make it better. \ , the other thing that we did, which is not super sexy to talk about, but I love it, is we solved for taxes in a way that the competition [00:23:00] does not solve well. So if you ask any of our creators, I. know, not the big ones, but the, but the small size ones, do you worry about taxes? They're like, yeah, I wish I don't have to pay them. Right? That's what you'll hear back. And me too. I don't wanna pay taxes Jeff: Oh yeah. Yeah. Same. Mahesh: , and the competition has optimized their post-campaign flows to support that. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: some of the, some of the competition, some of the other platform third party platforms have taxes optional. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: leave it to the creators to put in the tax rates, which is extremely problematic because your taxes change. Like you can imagine who you're shipping to, where your manufacturing hubs are, where you are registered. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: we have inbuilt integrations with Avalara. We're calculating taxes correctly for us, eu, every other country we operate in. it reduces like legal liability for our creators and, and backers ' cause it was not something that they're thinking about before. The other thing connected to that is, are not used to seeing the tax broken [00:24:00] out Jeff: Right. Mahesh: on these platforms. So when we started doing it. They started complaining like this is not e-commerce, but we are like, yeah, it is e-commerce. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: are paying for a reward, which you're gonna get. the good news there is the creators actually jumped in to help us. So they started educating their backers, saying, yeah, this is a legal liability for you and us. So what Kickstart is doing? Is the right thing, which is calculating the right taxes and, and getting people to pay them. mean, we can do better in the product too, to educate backers, like why they're paying taxes, how, how we're calculating them, et cetera. some of the things we, we kind of like really thought through how we could solve it in a way that is better than the, the competition. I don't think the work is done, I don't think, I think there's still a bunch of work we need to do on making the. The whole product said better, but taking customer feedback and doing something with it that is unique to your platform, which amplifies the strength of your product is the, is the way to go. Jeff: it makes sense right in that if you can get the, the creators on board with that [00:25:00] and kind of explaining to their own communities. That's really powerful. 'cause they're gonna, they're already trusted people 'cause they're giving them money. If you can get them to explain why this is the best solution, that's gonna be way better than anything you're gonna write and kind of put in a little sticky, question mark widget or something if people are asking. you know, You're better off having, having the trusted source tell 'em this, you know, I feel like immature markets, this tends to be where. You also get a lot of customer loyalty is starting to look at these flows that are hard to do. They're not sexy, but it just makes everything feel nicer. Like it's more enjoyable to, to use this than that. 'cause you don't have to worry about, did I get the taxes wrong? Did I do this? Taxes there. There are entire startups that are worth hundreds of millions, if not, over a billion dollars that just do e-commerce taxes. Mahesh: That's right, that's right. That's right. Half my product managers are probably like tax experts at this point. Jeff: Yeah. But it's a, it's a huge problem and if you can solve that, like it gives people another reason to stick with Kickstarter. Now, this is [00:26:00] kind of tangentially off of that, just something I've generally w wondered and now I have you here so I can ask you. It's always kind of thought this, when I was involved in any Kickstarter campaign is at some level the value Kickstarter is the community you know, you have this discovery mechanism, but how much of it is also. Creators bringing in their own community or, is it valuable to you guys in that if you can bring in these high value creators, partially some of those, contributors will stick around as part of the community now? Or, or like how does that work on a balance when you're thinking about that? Mahesh: I think of, one of Kickstarter's strength is its backer community. So, campaigns will go sometimes like raised like up to 60% from the community. I. Of Kickstarter. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: they will bring some, create some backers with them. A lot of big create, a lot of big creators have their own built, nurtured, like audiences that they will like bring to bring to Kickstarter. But I think the way I like to think about it is the large creators, it's like added [00:27:00] gravy for them because they can tap into the. The sort of the built in backer network at Kickstarter, Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: benefits like newer creators, Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: and up and coming creators. I would, like in general, I would say if you're thinking about a Kickstarter campaign, think about building your audience first and nurturing it, Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: getting them primed build on social, whatever you need to do to build that audience. But if you're a newer creator, there's a real, real chance that you can tap into the backer network within Kick Shutter if it aligns with the interests of the community. Jeff: Right. Mahesh: for example, the, like tabletop games, anything which is physical. Does really well at Kickstarter, like comic books, design and tech products. For example, Peloton came outta Kickstarter, exploding Kittens came outta Kickstarter, the UV Make, which is a UV printer. That that Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: I think our second largest campaign right now. if it's like a physical product, if it is a creative product or [00:28:00] like all those do really well. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: but yeah, I would say like the creators raise up to 60% even more from the network itself. Jeff: And do those people though, that they bring in, do they stick around? Like, Is that a, kind of growth lever for your side, or do you find that their, their audience tends to kinda be fly by night? Mahesh: Yeah, it's a really good question. So there, there is a population of backers, and I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, which we Jeff: Yeah. That's fair. Mahesh: So once they're, in, they tend to like back more and more projects. So for us on the product side, one of the things that we, we are focusing on is getting those. Super backers to be more engaged and getting first time backers to become repeat backers. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: personalizing their experience on the platform matching their search results to their interests and giving 'em interesting projects to back after they back their first project. The moment we consider a backer engaged is not actually when they pledge, but when they receive their reward. So that, that's when they're actually [00:29:00] locked in. They're like activated on the Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: now. They're like, oh, I understand what this and this product is all about. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: pledging , just the beginning of the journey. 'cause you'll come in through an Instagram post, you the creator, post it, and you're like, okay, I'm gonna pledge this. But the minute you get the reward is when they're like locked in. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: try to build these virtuous loops, right? That's when we show them, here's some Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: you might wanna. Consider backing. and that's always trying to convert these first time backers into repeat backers. Jeff: , I think a lot people who are the age who are listening to this, this is something we all kind of came up through and, became huge and very formative years for all of us. And so it's cool to see kind of behind the curtain of what is this thing that we've all given some level of money to at some point, probably before. You guys were solving sales tax problems and everything like that. So we just were throwing cash at people who were going, oh my goodness, what do I do and how do I send, to all these states and countries and not go to jail? There's another issue that you and, and the executive team kind of addressed when you hit [00:30:00] this point and when, , you and Everett or when Everett came in and kinda built up the team is, you kind of had this world where you grew up in almost no competition because you just exploded. And, and almost anything that would've been competition ended up just being these kind of companies that were really additive and complimentary. But some point that kind of, that script flipped and it went from a world where you could kind of move and, and almost be, I don't wanna say be nice 'cause you still wanna be nice, but you suddenly had to be really competitive and speed mattered, and you had to add these things because people were trying to move the other way and integrate down into the, the funding part of it. I feel like, again, your kind of background in, in the writing, you've done a lot of this thinking fits really well into how do you have these kind of , difficult conversations kind of move organizations along to say Hey guys. Now it's time to turn it on and, and we gotta, be a little aggressive like every company's in a race. Right? And, and now it's time to put the, the sprinting shoes on. Mahesh: , for good [00:31:00] or worse, , all executive teams are extremely competitive in nature. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: which is the same for, for kick shutter too. I do think when it comes to convincing the broader organization about bringing a. That level of intensity and urgency and like you said, putting on your running shoes. that takes, that takes effort and Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: and the way I approach it is being ultra transparent with, with my teams or anybody that I talk to. Right. I don't mince around where we are from a financial standpoint. I don't hide any, any of those facts because I think one of the things that I've seen other companies do is. Not address the elephant in the room and because their worry is that the team might get disengaged or you people might leave or whatever might be the case. I don't believe in that at all because I think I really want people in the team who are willing to solve this problem with me. If this landscape and what we're up against then. running up the hill. If that thing is not for people, then more [00:32:00] power to them, right? They can just go find some other thing to do, which is why I'm, I'm very transparent with my team about what the realities of the market is. What is the reality of competing with these competitors? And oftentimes these competitors are smaller in nature. Which means their impact might not be huge to our business, but they move faster because they're smaller Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: Their cost structures are different than ours. Like we, we've been in the business for more than 15, like 16 years now. So we have entrenched cost structures and RD teams are inherently the most expensive teams in the company. So your competition might have a team in Eastern Europe, which is. cheaper than building stuff in the US right? And all those things are like hard for people to listen to 'cause they're like, because nobody has had this conversation Jeff: Right. Mahesh: the past. I'm not like that at all. I want my team to understand like what we're, what we're up against. and one, one of the things I realized is, or at least I've observed, is some teams don't tend [00:33:00] to respond well to competing with others. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: in those situations, I, I kind of reframe my talking points to competing with yourself. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mahesh: if we say, as a team, , we can do this in this quarter, can we like beat it next quarter? I would like to believe that anybody who's working for Kickstarter or any tech company in general, or working anywhere in general, wants to become a better version of themselves as they spend time at that place. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: way I think about my world. The minute I stop growing, I become antsy and I try to find something else to do. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: so that's kind of the, the, the culture like I wanna build at Kickstarter too. but sometimes it is hard for people to get behind it. Right? Because sometimes the people who listen to this message equate what I'm saying to, oh, this executive just wants to become out of the fat cat. Right? So you just get the share price up make some money off of it, and then, and then live in their like beach house or whatever. [00:34:00] Right? Jeff: I mean, Mahesh, you clearly scream Fat Cat. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Mahesh: But the, but the, but the equation for me as a, as a leader is, the, the company's leadership or the Kickstarter's leadership, the Kickstarter, CEO, my boss and the board have entrusted me with, with, with like turning this thing around, Jeff: No. Mahesh: And I think about my legacy quite a bit. So when I leave Kickstarter, what, what do I want people to remember? I don't want people to say that. Oh yeah. He was just a, just a, just a through type of leader. Right? I want people to remember that, yeah. I was part of the turnaround story. We turned this thing around. It was hard, but we pulled together, we made all these tough choices. We worked to, to get stuff done and, my hope is. The majority of teams like think like that. Jeff: Yeah. Mahesh: to think about, okay, are you leaving legacy behind a positive legacy behind, are you having an impact on the work and on the company and the [00:35:00] team you're doing? this is something that I, leaders that I coach or like up and coming leaders that I coach, I like talk about it quite a bit is don't think about your time with this company just have to like. Pass through, right? So think about what do you want the headlines to be after you leave? So think about the impact you can make on the company. Jeff: , I think it's important. You talked about you want people to. Be on board with, it's going to be maybe a little difficult. We're gonna have to move quickly. One thing I always kind of tell, my team is whenever, 'cause even even people who want to move fast and have impact and, and work really hard, sometimes they look at the size of problems and they go, I just don't know what to do. And they get a little deflated. But , the team we've collected is, is really good at is, is finding what seems to be almost impossible. And let's find a way to not just do it, but doing really, really well and processize it and make it efficient. Only so many people can do that. And if you can do that again and again and again, you build a moat where that's how you build, a billion dollar company, that's how you build an institution like [00:36:00] Kickstarter is by doing hard things just over and over and, we have this concept called phon, PHU, with an um, laden, and it's the idea of, fun is like you go to amusement park or waterpark, something like that. It's, it's fun. Everyone knows what fun is. Fon is, it's it's really not fun while you're doing it. You choose to do it. It's hard. It comes from some friends we're ice climbing and it was just freezing rain. It was terrible. And they, they did it and they got in their car and they're like, why do we do this one? 'em goes, remember it's fun. And they're like, chittering and chattering. And they go, no, that's not fun. That's fun. Like we, that was not, nothing about that was fun, but it stuck with me those are the things, you look back years and years later and go. I did that, right? , in your case, in the turnaround of Kickstarter I helped to build Log Rocket. During the time you're, you're nervous and sometimes you, you feel like you might wanna puke once in a while that means you're, you're trying hard enough, right? Mahesh: That's right. It's I'd rather be solving hard problems Jeff: yeah, Mahesh: about it. Right. Jeff: exactly. Mahesh: that's a better use of my time than worrying about what's going on in the market. Jeff: That's when I get antsy is when the pace slows, I start to be like, all right, well, [00:37:00] what else we need to be doing? So I, I always see it as a warning sign, I feel like. But no, I mean, it was great to, it was great to have you on mesh. Thank you so much. We had a whole section of your writing that I really wanted to get into about kind of this idea of. Coming up, what you, what you self describe as average and clearly you have an above average career track at this point. , something clicked, but, I think it's a good thing to go through and may, so I guess we'll have to have you back on. Maybe you guys kick out a few more features on Kickstarter. We'll have you back on in a little bit and see how everything's going there. And we can talk about average to, extraordinary and, and finish up. But thank you so much for coming on. This is really, I think. It's good to talk through how you have conversations that are difficult. How do you look at hard problems and be happy you get to tackle them and how do you kinda drive that intensity in, something as as important and longstanding as Kickstarter. So thank you so much for coming on. This was a great. Mahesh: Thanks for having me. It was great.