[00:01:25] Andrew Michael: Hey. 

[00:01:28] Romeric Philogene: Hey, Hey dude. Thanks for having me today. 

[00:01:31] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you for the listeners. Ramirez is the founder and CEO of covering the simplest way to deploy your apps on AWS and Kubernetes. Romanic started his career out as a system engineer at Yulin and before founding a series of companies such as new smart touts and my social app.

So my first question for you then Romanek today is what happened to my social. 

[00:01:54] Romeric Philogene: It's a very good question. It's, you know, it's the story that you can get from like all [00:02:00] funders that I quite technical spending too much time, like developing a great product, but didn't like get into starting to talk about it.

So it ended like you, or like tons of other, like, product that you can find on product and, or like, Which is basically like, yeah, it's a great technical product, but there is no market . So this is where like, yeah, 

[00:02:28] Andrew Michael: it's very interesting also for those that grow America is as a very, very technical background.

He's a technical CEO as well. So today it's interesting just chatting to him, uh, about trying to attention, but it's interesting that you say that's all that you sort of. Sales and marketing and speaking to, to customers that, because maybe it a little bit about the product, what was the premise and, uh, just to get a better understanding of, uh, we'll get to COVID 

[00:02:55] Romeric Philogene: yeah, yeah.

Us up was basically, uh, so at [00:03:00] the beginning it was, uh, so the story long story short, it was like, It used to be a social network for motor bikers. So new Moda, we have this, a platform that where like food in Europe, in France. So to have like motorbike years to just get around altogether making a ride. We, we saw that we had like developed a very good they're great technology, which is like a very similar to what you can get on Facebook, on Twitters, all the features that you can get from both platforms into one.

And we decided to create a, uh, white Liberia platform that was named my social apps. So the idea was that for anyone that wanted to get like the Facebook, so beating like your Facebook, like platform or Twitter, But they can use like our SDK or API and then get right away or those features. So that was like, 

[00:03:54] Andrew Michael: Cool.

Yeah. Cause that's what I thought. Like I've seen quite a few different companies popping up now where they give SaaS businesses, the [00:04:00] ability to integrate with more social features. Um, so I was interested if like, sort of, that was the use case, uh, back then and interesting to see how like you spend on.

One company that you exited from what I saw from Ms. Marla, and then this formed out of it. Uh, cause actually recently we had on the show, uh, Joe from mez, um, talking, sharing his story of sort of like how he started out with a company called ping, uh, which essentially was what discord is today. Uh, and then just at some point realizing, okay, like they needed to make a pivot and uh, like landed in.

Intimate. So tell us, like, how did you land into recovery then? Like, I'm sure there's a connection and you can connect the dots 

[00:04:40] Romeric Philogene: for us. Yeah. It's like, yeah, we just decided to shut down. Now that's really like shut down my sister because we have a soul. So the company like to another one of our customer, actually, because we are like a mutual customers and one of them wanted to just buy out the companies, but that's what we did.

Uh, but the way that we [00:05:00] get into like, Grace in some way, like religion to my social up, because, you know, we had like this experience of interest with you. We were doing that. We might co-founder. So peer the CTO, we were doing that like for many, like more than 10 years. So it's not like first company together.

We be like three other companies, including like my social life. And this is where we just decided, Hey, listen, we are doing that. Like managing infrastructure, making like the developer's life easier. Or does a company that wants to buy for IQ? Very crazy. Like celery. Maybe we are better, like to just like put all our knowledge into one product and distribute to anyone.

So this is where we get into like a career basically. 

[00:05:47] Andrew Michael: And explain to us a little bit more what you do at coverage. Cause I, I gave a brief intro to start, but what do you do occurring? 

[00:05:54] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, basically we have developed us to deploy that kitchen in the cloud. Um, so what you have just to [00:06:00] give you the full picture, the full context, because sometimes when you're like.

And just see you. You may think that the developers can do like any everything, but actually you have like some specificities. You have some, uh, really expertize to me and the developers, the job of the developers to respond to businesses. You're using these types of algorithms to respond to. Those business did, and it's not doing like what we could do.

Plumbing stuff, managing servers, databases, network, all those things. Even if in the cloud is quite abstracted, it's still like another job. And basically we had them. So we provide like the platforms that make them like very easy to deploy the application. So it's super similar to what you can get on. For instance, queue Orenda.

Other like your past at home. But the main difference here is that we are not opposed to platform. We are deploying on their own cloud that comes. So they have to provide the AWS account. For instance, they connect the AWS [00:07:00] account, they connect the Kitab or GitHub or Bitbucket repository. They select the services that they want to deploy as well.

Like the database, for instance, positive peer. And then from that, they can do. On their own cloud account. So we bring like the best of both worlds, which is like the great experience that you can get on LQ for instance, but also like the flexibility and the powerful ness of AWS into one platform for.

[00:07:28] Andrew Michael: Cool. And so where did the, uh, understanding for the market come from, from this? You mentioned before you took a little bit too long speaking to customers and so forth, like how did you realize you wanted something with recovery? Um, and to double down on it? 

[00:07:44] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. You mean, uh, when and how I reside? Yeah.

Yeah. It's just basically that we were on. It's like, it's not a sad story, but it's just that we were like about doing that. We were paid for [00:08:00] doing that for so many years. You know, we have these expire ties of managing servers that have bases network, complex infrastructure stack that I quite as sighted.

And if you like to, to even developers, they don't know how to do that. So at some point you have to find a way just to, Hey, you have like an expertize. There is a need, there is a market. We have also disliked speed. Wanting to beat something that is useful and really used by people. And this is where we get into like a correct.

[00:08:33] Andrew Michael: Very cool. Um, so how are things going today? Like, uh, tell us a little bit about the business, like where you're at. 

[00:08:43] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. So just to give you the full context and the background. So we doing this for two years now. Uh, so we've been accented by textiles. Uh, we are starting to launch like your first session of our project in January, 2020.

We started with 50 developers. [00:09:00] Now we have more than 20,000 developers using our platform. We've been at the time, like three in the team. We are like a. And we are going to be like a 20 before the end of the month. Uh, we have a fundraise 5 million in total with creating festivals like that, other content square, uh, people and so on and so forth.

Uh, yeah, it's screen pretty well. Uh, we have, uh, more than 100 customers from FinTech take Africa companies everywhere. Uh, so it could be like in the U S in Europe, in, uh, in south. Uh, we are like, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's going pretty well. And today we are like, we have one main metric that we are following, which is like the number of deployment, because our platform is like a productivity platform and we are bringing like more than a 15%, 15% a week over week on that metric.

So yeah, it's been in the right 

[00:09:56] Andrew Michael: direction. That's awesome. TM. Uh, [00:10:00] and obviously I think like this introduction for you being on the podcast today, came from previous guests, uh, from Rob deli world, uh, from crane VC, and also interviewed him previously. It was just amazing listening to his background and experience like all the different companies he worked at.

Like he manages to pick the perfect companies to be at the perfect time. If you want to, if somebody who managed their career to like a. Managed to invest the time. Definitely recommend checking that episode. We'll put it in the show notes, but he introduced as well. And obviously that you had written a blog posts around your approach to customer success.

And I think we interesting to dive into that a little bit today, considering as well. Like it's a very technical product. You're a technical founder. Um, talk us through a little bit about what you wrote and what your approach to customer success. 

[00:10:49] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. And thanks first, like to have for all of that, because I'm an engineer myself, and for me, it's like, wait, you, even if I'm not like a founder, it's [00:11:00] good to have someone that is like expertize experience that and showing like his background.

And I was like, pretty good at that because he explained to me what was like the time to value, you know, sometime when you have some. You know about all those things, because you explained yourself, but then you have like someone that is just putting the right words on that. It was exactly the situation that we get people up.

And this is where we started to just like focus on these things, which is like the time to value thing. How, how to make sure, like, All customers I'll use are I get into value as fast as possible of our platform in the first five minutes. That was like positions for the last month. And it's quite like, it's not, it's not super easy for like developers, uh, for, for, for, from the likely, because I'm very like product Davan, I'm really like technic technological, like you're driven or those things and being now much more.

Uh, [00:12:00] customer driven user driven is like your sense of parody. And this is like very, very, very challenging, like for, for, 

[00:12:09] Andrew Michael: it's very interesting. Like, and I totally see that. Like, what do you think in your perspective, you know, one of the biggest hurdles to get over, like changing your perception on this and moving more like customer centric, like what were some of the things you found difficult in doing and what are some of the things you think you're doing well now is the results really.

[00:12:27] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. It's when you are like your product Dremon and you are vision driven and you think about like dignity and all those things that you can do, you are like projecting yourself into the idea and a way of the state of your company, which is like division. So you're building something sometimes you think about like the future and you're building something in that direction, but the reality is.

How do you make sure that you get into the market? How do you make sure that you respond to the needs of today? Because even if your vision is still the same, then you have to make sure that today [00:13:00] you are like doing like the value in the way that you wants to do that. Okay. And that was like the biggest, like challenge ever, especially when like technical, like me, you think about the future.

If you're building something that you are sure that it's going to change the way that people do what they are doing, but. Maybe, but no one first the ones know about you. So how do you make sure that you get known and is it like really a responding to a need that today? Because even if it's like in five years, because you're seeing a new, you can feel that the market is moving in that direction.

Maybe it's a bit too soon. So how do you make sure that you like get into the market? You just think you've got value today to potential customers to achieve an item like your. So that was the most challenging 

[00:13:49] Andrew Michael: thing. Yeah, I can resonate with that a lot. And actually, like I had the same conversation. I think we discussed it on the podcast with Joe, from maze.

And then also previously with David, uh, dominant from [00:14:00] Hotjar, uh, just sort of like as founders, we have these in, uh, visions in mind of where we see them walk and moving and where the products should be, but we really need to be focusing on where the market is today and how we can meet that market. So we can get to that envisioned because if we spend a lot of time just building features and like trying to get to that.

We ended up missing like the moment and now, and never, ever getting their stuff. 

[00:14:24] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Especially when you are like quite fistfight and in terms of associates, you seem, you don't have like all the, all the money that you would leave to be like the team that you exactly want and all the features.

So you have to make choice. And this is like super frustrating. It's one of the most. First setting thing that you can feel as like funder, because you know that you have to make sure it's like temporary choice at the moment where you are at the stage where you are. 

[00:14:52] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Do you have any framework, uh, from your perspective of like how you going around making these decisions?

Because like you say, there are, [00:15:00] uh, there's an abundance of choice. I think that's also the scary thing is though when you get started and you're moving in, there's a lot of different ways you can take the product and understanding which direction to go. Like, do you have any framework that you work on from your side that helps you to sort of, yeah.

[00:15:16] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. There's only one I'm to be an S is to be closed as close as possible of the market and the market. Being closed of the market is being closed off, focusing us. That's it. Other things are likely to keep bullshit. And it's the thickness

I would prefer to as a, to be honest, as I could think, guy, for instance, this weekend, I spend my weekend like enjoying my time and people think that I'm working, but I was twitching and thinning. According. So I'm beating like a sidecar product for Curry. And I was like a ceiling in real time, uh, due to predict that I'm quitting.

So this is the best efficient, you know, I'm not, uh, it's for me, it's like [00:16:00] normal being here, like coding and spending time in from my computer. Or sometimes I would like to spend like, just more, much more like time coding, but it's not part of my job, the job of this USDA. To understand the market, to understand the customer, to pick the people that are ready to pay for your product.

And just like this, the only family that I have today is just as, yeah. As much as pussy bird, value, making sure that those customer recommend your solution and what you're doing to other like CTOs in my case. And that's what we are. We, we are succeeding at. So it's a, it's quite a.

[00:16:42] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about, uh, your approach to customer success. How do you structure the company? What does it look like? 

[00:16:50] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, thanks for asking that. Um, because like, it's very, it's a very odd to be. Uh, in a way that, uh, it's not [00:17:00] as easy, especially when you have, like, you have tons of taking that company to , but we have like a two men team today.

Uh, we have to predict what we put the product team, which is like working on the project. So we product manager, they propose back in front of 10 SIS that are working like. Did machine, the deep stack, uh, and we have what we call the developer experience team. So that developer expense team is composed of mostly engineers themselves.

But with the ability of talking to the customers, because it's like pick as well. And most of the companies, they think that developer, they can speak to the customer, but in fact, in the. Uh, developers is the best seller ever. If you put like in front of a CTO, a developer, a developers that he's like talking the same language, that it's the best way of just sitting your product because they have like, , they know they understand each other.

So we have those two teams. We have the product team [00:18:00] that is. Putting the agree, making sure that we really like the feature that we need for our customers. And we have like the developer experience that is working closely to their customers, taking their needs, making sure that they get the value of the platform as fast as possible and to report like the missing points that are in the public to the.

Yep. This is the way that we are composed 

[00:18:22] Andrew Michael: today. So essentially what you're saying is then for your customer success team or the developer experience team as you call it is, um, instead of going out and hiring. Traditional, maybe customer success reps from other companies you've gone ahead and, uh, found, uh, developers and engineers to fill those roles and like, do they, are they're learning new skills or these sort of like the customer success side of things, something that they already had, because this was another thing, like, typically you say like, engineers are.

Oh, how do you say this? Like not always the most outgoing and outspoken people in the company. If I have to think of [00:19:00] my experience, it's either the ones that hate sales and success as well. And this is a very big generalization and I really apologize to me and Janiah's listening to the show, but, uh, I think from my experience while with customer success, it's like a little bit more of the opposite.

It's more of the outgoing outreach. So 

[00:19:18] Romeric Philogene: yeah, I will not say that to be honest, I would say it's too. It's the right level of. Yes, you need to have someone that understands like, feel like the pain of the customers, like just make sure to really understand deeply and then propose like the right thing, making sure that these customers are successful at the end.

And this is like a parameter. If you look at this empathy, if you look at developers, you can find like developers. They are like this right level of confetti. And this is exactly what we are looking at is someone that is much more like oriented to someone like, uh, outside than inside. So that's, that's what we are looking at when we have a [00:20:00] delivery experience engineer that is training.

[00:20:02] Andrew Michael: I mean, it's what you've done though. As well as like you've tried, you've hired somebody who is like the persona that you're going after as well, like you said, so they can empathize better with the problem that they have because they've been in their shoes before and so forth. What I've seen as well, like from all the interviews that we do on customer success.

And when we talk about how. It's never really been about trying to find, uh, someone with specific experience, which in your cases, what you've done, it's more like the ability to problem solve, like, uh, the ability to be able to be helpful in being proactive, like to able to learn fast. Like these are the skills they're looking for, but I.

The advantages of what you've done, really, because when it comes to empathy pointed really, really helps. And I wonder if like, this is something that others are doing and they can let me know as well. I'd love to hear from anybody who is out there doing this, but for example, if you're building a software for sales teams, like, does it make sense to have people with sales backgrounds in the customer success team, or if you're [00:21:00] building for marketers, it doesn't help.

If you have market. I experienced. And we have had guests that have come over, like move to tools and stuff, but it is an interesting way to view hiring from this perspective. And going back to the point you made about being able to empathize. If you've been in that, in their shoes, you felt the pain, you know, the frustration they go through better than anybody else.

You're better set up to help them than anybody else. 

[00:21:22] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Completely. And there's the one, that's the last thing that you mentioned is Tiffany. The schemes of the person that you have in, you know, it's like for me, customer success, like developer expense, as we mentioned, as we called that is really like the, is what you, what you get, what you see from the company from outside.

It's the first time that you have, you have the project of UC, they are looking at the documentation. And when, you know, we are talking about like infrastructure. So it's not like your classic dev tool stuff or SAS product, which is maybe not so much critical. We [00:22:00] have like businesses, we are FinTech companies that are like running their business on our infrastructure.

So when they are like, course, they wants to have like someone in front of them, they are very operative because we are much more like expensive than. Into what we're doing, they buy our expertize. You remember, at the beginning, what I mentioned is that we are expert in what you're doing and the platform that we're building is just like the exercise.

So when you talk to someone from like the developer expensive, you just want to make sure that the level of discussion is very, very high is very. 

[00:22:34] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I can see in your case where it is that much more critical as well, to make sure that you have a good face, especially when your whole business is going to be relying on your products and service to keep them up and keep them moving.

Um, and that is an interesting thing I think, to touch on because I think it's a unique challenge that you have as a business then when like your infrastructure is your preferred. Uh, business critical. So what is sort of like the level of support and, uh, that you're providing to [00:23:00] your customers? How do you structure, uh, your success and support team around that?

[00:23:05] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. Very good question. Thanks for asking that is, uh, so today we are, uh, T like a very small teams team, quite early stage, even if we have like, And so as customers, a thousands of developers using the platform, and we really believe in the way that if you want to scale, if you do want to scale your company, you need to make like a product much more like a self service.

And, uh, yeah, you need to make it like very. Usable by themselves. So they need to get into it and get the value by themselves and all those things. So that's exactly where we are agreeing to, uh, where we are moving on, because that this is where it was like super necessary for us like to be as close as possible of focus to.

Getting like the onboarding process, because today the way that we onboard our customers, we have two options for them. It's they cannot model by themselves, [00:24:00] or they can be like bombarded manually by one of our . They are like your ticket. They can choose whatever they want. And that was that option. So the manual one was very necessary just to improve the experience, the overall experience.

We are talking about like infrastructure and deliver of support is like part of some of our customer requests, like sh uh, so, so that's the service level agreements, uh, okay. Because there are any like your petition. But, um, yeah, it really depends on how much they are going and they're ready to pay for obesity and to critique in the criticality of their business.

But today the way that we are structured, the support is, you know, we have like the best of the best, best option, which is basically. So, uh, they send it like an email or through the chat and then we'd respond as fast as possible. So legally we can respond. We can take the time, but what we do is because it's part of the expense for us, we [00:25:00] respond as fast as possible, meaning that generally it's around one hour maximum.

Uh, we have also, uh, the, the option, which is like a metaphor, but we could cook. Which is like completely free. It's basically you connect to, we have a one, four on one place where you can share, like, ask your question and then you get the response from our community or users or even the stuff. Okay. And we have like a premium support offer where it's like negotiated case by case customer by customer, where we can like provide

It really depends on, but today we are discussing. Does she fought to really count, you know, to just get your first customers, to make sure that they are like super hard to using your two platforms, they give you like the feedback and so on and so forth. So we are very close to them and we are not, uh, yeah, we are ready to make like the for them.

Yeah. 

[00:25:53] Andrew Michael: Yeah. For sure. Especially at this early stage, it's like, they become your best champions as well, after a [00:26:00] while and recommending, and you really need to make sure that you're you're on it. Um, so. You have the team then as well. Now it talks a little bit about customer success and so forth. The company's been going for about two years.

Now, you said a little bit longer. Are you predominantly annual or monthly contracts? How do you structure your pricing? 

[00:26:22] Romeric Philogene: It's a very good question because I was looking back. The CTO of font that I know pretty well.

So I can just see that at this podcast, but, uh, yeah, you were telling me that something like, if you can charge as fast as it does make it like any change, actually like you're charging starting this semester is like, And uni, it would be great for the, like the future of the company. What would you see?

Everyone knows about that, but you know, when you start your company, you don't really know how you can do that because your product is like in the development and [00:27:00] so on, so forth. So now we have started to get like our first customer we'd like you on your contract, but most of our, like, They get like a monthly contract they 

[00:27:09] Andrew Michael: contract.

Yeah. I think a lot of companies, I think, even looking back at Hotjar we only introduced like annual plans in year three or four. I think there was only monthly plans for the first three or four years. Um, so how does churn and retention then look for yourself? Because like, In my mind again, like, because this is infrastructure and a it's built in, it's one of those things you put in, you said, and forget to send something you just can rip off easily.

So I would make assumptions that you've got really strong and strong sticky products. Um, but what does it look like for you? Like what are some of the challenges when it comes to generate attention? You. 

[00:27:46] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, I can give like precise number of birds. I've those things, but you can imagine that our customer, like they are spending three to four, five [00:28:00] hours per day on our platform every single day.

Okay. Sometimes even like during the weekend, because they are for that, they wants to deploy. And when we get them, we never lost them. Uh, so yeah, this is the way that we get our retention. So it's like, it's quite a, you know, we are really integrated into that, into their working environment. I think it's, if you want to take like a byline, it's the same as a good solution.

Like you get a, for instance, when you're like the developer using GitHub, it's very hard. Yeah. It's part of your website. It's not like one more. To that? No, it's you need something at some point you need something, deploy your application. It can be done manually and can be done like Biotronics or like one person, but that take some time to manually.

And when you are like your developer, you do have the choice because maybe you don't have like knowledge. You don't want [00:29:00] to be bothered by that. And you're like picking a social. And when you start using it, then. Yeah, it's just like 

[00:29:07] Andrew Michael: the switching costs and everything become high and you don't want to do it.

Uh, it's interesting as well, like this, I had the conversation with David to dominate and again, we're talking about, and I don't think you should like choose a business based on like how high churn is specifically, because sometimes there's opportunities when there's, but like the. The measure he sort of had for himself was like, when you think about how far up on the budget list are you, like when shit hits the fan?

When there's a global pandemic, customers are canceling their phones and they're like, are you the first one to go on the list? Are you the last one to go on the list? And, um, and when you think about some of the tools that are the last ones on the list, they're the ones where the infrastructure and where the company is dependent on having, like it's something you can't report.

[00:29:54] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, but it's also the others to get it's the most changing thing. [00:30:00] Yeah. It's the most sending because we have to repeat the trust. You see, that's why we are communicating so much. That's why we do it. Completely how we treat our customers, how we make sure that they are successful the insulin it's part of the strategy because we build the trust with them.

We just explained, and we opened the books and show them, Hey, look at how we built the company, who are those people? And we are, yeah, that's exactly why, because the most challenging thing that we face in the company like us, and that was exactly what. I remember, like two years ago, I had like the first, uh, introduction to, people that wanted to invest into the company and they were challenging me in the, oh yeah. You will not succeed. How would you differentiate of that? And, yeah, it's not like you to the changing too complex and sponsor for. Uh, and today we are breaking that we are just showing that we are able to get into those in the organization, even like big companies from, uh, 10 people to 500 to 800 to [00:31:00] like people with gray, like engineering team, like crazy engineering team, if they get into career, because it just makes sense.

And we happy stress with them. 

[00:31:08] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Nice. And what are you doing to build trust, obviously? So you mentioned the, you're talking about it. Uh, I'm assuming websites and blog posts and things like this, but because it is probably like, there's very big change. One end, once you get them, you have them. But because of that, it's like a very, very big decision that needs to be made.

And, uh, so like, what would you say is like the key factors that lead you building trust with. 

[00:31:34] Romeric Philogene: Yeah, there is a first thing is that we have like a very strong marketing strategy event. We don't have like official marketing team because everyone in the company, like they are marketers, even like the developers, you know, that they're working on the product.

But when they start talking about what they're doing, it's like promoting that job. You don't deliver. The question is like quite important here, because the more, the better you [00:32:00] will just communicate on what you're doing. And it's basically, we are different levels. So we have the plan. Uh, so the branding, we are building the ban.

We are liking this lot. The content that we're doing on that side, we have also the awareness. So it's all the actions that we put in place to make sure that people at least getting to Corinne one way or the other, for instance, we are creating a content or sidecar project. It's a good way for me, for instance, with this project that is AP by to synchronize like cloud databases that are created at Curry.

It's a good way just to. Uh, Don is that we need as one so far. So that's all the actions that we put in place just to be in that trust. And it's also in the product itself. When you use the product, you see, you can see and feel that you see the product is policed. It's like your design system is clean and all those things.

So that's the way you [00:33:00] just like to prospect, to users and all those things. The first couple times we also liked the developer. Yeah, it's part of the trust. When you start talking to him, you see how he BAS all the restaurant that he provide to you. Uh, it's very clear, sharp. You can just show and explain exactly how you have to do that and how the platform would just have to make more and faster and better.

It's just a way of being that trust. It's all those things and you see it's something that is quite interesting. It's communication. Talk like globally, it's the communication. All those things are like even the product. The documentation is like communication, showing something, explaining something, and the way the form is also super important.

[00:33:51] Andrew Michael: Very cool. Yeah, man, I think it's really important to sort of you every single touch point across the journey, especially when you start to think about trust and making sure [00:34:00] that there's strong alignment across the board, because it's, it's very easy in company sometimes to sort of like have this miscommunication misalignments and then selling mixed messages in ads is what you see on the website.

And then when you get into sales and companies that really, really do well have the super strong alignment from beginning to end around the user experience and that honestly, product. And it's some piece of software again, using, but the product is the company and all the different touch points that the company has with.

[00:34:26] Romeric Philogene: Yeah. Just one thing to add. This is a quite interesting here, because you mentioned, how do you be like trust is being presented at the right place for your right to. And the right way of doing that with developers, by creating for them, because they are always curious about something they want to learn, learn.

And how do you make sure that's your like present? And today we have attracted both or like 100% of our customers. They were attracted by, we are not doing any advertisement, like paid ads. It's only like 100%. So this is where you [00:35:00] yeah. 

[00:35:01] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And you're hitting the right target audience and you've already built some level of trust by delivering value, uh, upfront and very cool.

So I see we're running up on time, so I want to make sure I save time for these two questions that I ask every guest, a hypothetical scenario, your avatar in your company, general attention is not doing great. This year comes to you and says, aromatic, you need to turn things around. You have 90 days. What are you?

But you're not going to tell me I'm going to speak to customers, figure out the pain points and then start there. You're just going to choose some tactic that you've seen be effective other than your current company or previous companies. And you're going to run with a playbook blindly to try and reduce trend fast.

[00:35:41] Romeric Philogene: Uh, say to get a new question because it was like very, 

[00:35:46] Andrew Michael: uh, so yeah, so I was basically just saying it's like, if you had the Sierra comes in and says, you need to reduce churn and retention fast, and you only have 90 days, you're in charge. What do you. [00:36:00] But don't tell me you're gonna speak to customers and figure out the pinpoints.

You're just going to choose something that you've seen. That's been effective either at your current company or a prior company of reducing churn quickly. 

[00:36:11] Romeric Philogene: Hmm. It's a starting 2000, like a child. It tells them

it's a good way to address the exact pain of what you don't want me to talk to them. But actually it's like a very, it's a very tough question. And it's a very, very tough question because if you can't like them, how do you make sure that you are? Yeah. And maybe I can just like read you the churn right now.

I can just. Start to say, Hey, now you have to pay like annually, but actually, maybe they will choose that because they have no options and they it's likely for us to put your products. It means that if I force them pay like two annual contract, they will take it. But probably I will use them like at the end of [00:37:00] the next year.

So it's, 

[00:37:01] Andrew Michael: you're not solving it. Just delaying it. Yeah. It is a difficult, it's a difficult question there, right? That I think there's not much you can do in the short period of time. Um, But yeah, but if you, 

[00:37:12] Romeric Philogene: if you have to do it right now, then I will probably be like, DuPont, for instance, imagine like the penny is getting in and then you, you know, that you're going to be impacted.

So what's your choices, you know, that if you can stick a state alive, like for one more year, maybe it's better than just like dying now. So this is why it's. 

[00:37:34] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, what's one thing that you noted about general attention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career. 

[00:37:42] Romeric Philogene: I think I knew, you know, there's like two difference between like the theory and the practical things. So sometimes you have the theory, but you don't have like the price. And that's exactly my situation. I know exactly about like all those things that everyone [00:38:00] is saying, always the same thing. And even today, sometimes, uh, I remember you are like people that, you know, dislike, famous sentence that you get from the YC, which is like, it's something that people are.

It's like, it's like, sounds like you push it, but when you did it, like experiment that, that you already know, and this is exactly like the situation where we are when you are asking this question, it's exactly what I have in mind. It's a, yeah, we have like the theory and everyone get the theory, but, uh, unless like you practice these, uh, nothing would happen.

So. 

[00:38:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah,

no, no, it's good. It is good. It's just funny. I think the one thing is like, it's one thing, knowing the theory, it's another thing executing on the theory, uh, and executing consistently on the theory, because you hear a lot of things that you should be doing, you should be doing, and then you start doing them, but then you end up stopping doing them at some point because other things come up, you get busy, like, uh, but just always remember.

Uh, like it's only about the [00:39:00] customer problem, the customer pain points, understanding that deeply and solving that, but yeah, in theory and practice is two totally different things and, uh, it's, it's easy to forget as well. Yeah. 

[00:39:12] Romeric Philogene: But, you know, because also there is something I'm super biased. The reason was like completely biased because it's my company and the other one is like, not a real success, like your success in some way, because I felt like those companies.

Okay, great. But it's not a success in my head. And from those experiences, I I've learned so much. That's exactly why we invested into the communication since they wanted to cover it. Yeah. I knew that. Yeah, you can be like the best productive, but if you do not communicate on that product who know about your product, no one's would use it.

Yeah. 

[00:39:51] Andrew Michael: Pusher. Well, it's been a pleasure chatting to you today. I really enjoyed the discussion. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave [00:40:00] the listeners with? Like anything that should be about. 

[00:40:03] Romeric Philogene: Yes, we are going super fast. So if you want to join like the next to the future of the cloud, just feel free to apply it on our website.

And that thanks for having me. And I would like also to thank my team, uh, which is like, you're doing an amazing job, but they know already about that. So.

[00:40:22] Andrew Michael: And we'll make sure that we get it out to them as well, so they can hear that. But then we had all the different links and things that we mentioned today in the show notes, it's been a pleasure seeing you, and I wish you best of luck going forward. 

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