00:00 – Introduction & Founder Background
02:54 – The Origin of Liveblocks
06:40 – Recognizing the Problem
07:32 – The Future of Collaboration & AI
10:09 – Designing Collaboration with AI
11:56 – Product Evolution: From Infrastructure to Features
14:32 – Finding Product–Market Fit
16:57 – Fundraising Journey
23:30 – Shifting from Builder to Visionary
25:10 – Biggest Learnings as a Founder
27:22 – Learning Go-To-Market & Sales
31:15 – Building the Team & Design Engineering Culture

Megha Sevekari:
Hi Steven, thank you so much for coming onto our podcast today. I'd love to hear a bit about you and your journey so far to start off with.
Steven:
Sure, hi, thanks for having me. My name is Steven. I met Francesco when I lived in Australia, in 2012, I think, 2011, so it's been a while. I now live in Paris and yeah, worked at different tech companies and I'm the founder of a company called LiveBlocks.
Steven:
So LiveBlocks, we provide ready-made features that companies can easily drop into their product. And those features typically are collaborative features, so if you want to add presence indicators into your app, like live cursors or live avatar stack to see who is currently in the document, we can do that. We also have a commenting system that you can quickly add to your product, so we basically provide the React UI components, and you can add a commenting thread to any part of your app.
Steven:
And when somebody gets mentioned, then we also provide a notification system to make sure those people get pinged in tools like Slack or email or Microsoft Teams, whatever the case may be, as well as having an in-app inbox section for people to deal with those notifications. And then we also provide a rich text editor that looks...
Steven:
Pretty much exactly like Google Docs or Notion. You have full control over the look and feel and the behavior. So those are the kind of ready-made features we provide. And recently we launched a new one called AI Copilots. And the idea here is to make it easy for people, for users to collaborate with AI within your product and take actions within your product. And the reason we're doing this, just to explain what the benefit of this is, is what we see with...
Steven:
Companies using LiveBlocks is that their users become a lot more engaged, right? So the time they spend in your app as a result of those collaborative features increases over time. And another benefit that we tend to see often is that when you start adding collaboration to your product, your users become your best kind of growth channel because they end up inviting new people to the product, right? They're like Megha...
Steven:
Can you leave me, what do you think of this thing over here? What do you think of this sentence or whatever the case may be? And then you get a notification and then you join the product. So that's basically what we provide in a nutshell, ready-made collaborative features. Yeah.
Megha Sevekari:
How did the idea come about? Can you tell us more?
Steven:
Yes, so I love design tools, like creative tools that, I love creating tools that people use to create something out of those tools, right? So back when I was in Sydney, I worked at a company called Campaign Monitor, and I was working on an email builder, so a drag and drop tool to design responsive emails that look great, if you say on mobile desktop.
Steven:
Without having to do the boring HTML code. And that's what really got me into design tools. And as part of this experience, I also loved animation at the time. I was really into animations for the web. And I created a tool on the side called EZ. And EZ was an animation tool that helped designers create animations for the web without having to code. Again, another tool that you use to create something out of it.
Steven:
That got a bit of traction and led me to InVision. So InVision was this like prototyping tool slash a tool that you could use to like share designs and get feedback on those designs so people could comment, tell you like, give you feedback about the flow and as a designer, you can make it a bit better because of that workflow.
Steven:
I worked on a specific product within this company called InVision Studio. InVision Studio is basically, the idea was very similar to what Figma became today. We wanted to create an all-in-one design tool where you could do obviously UI design, you could do the wireframes, but you could also do the prototyping and the animations all in one tool. And...
Steven:
At first, InVision Studio was a desktop-based, file-based application. So you basically work on your app or your design. You actually save a file. I know this sounds a bit old school now. But that's what you had to do. And then when you wanted to collaborate, you actually had to publish that file to the InVision platform that was on the web, right? And that's where you would collaborate.
Steven:
But this workflow is a little bit broken, right? And so at the time, eventually, Figma started to get a lot of market shares, and a lot of designers were talking about Figma. And the one thing that Figma was great at was it was browser-based, so you never had to install an app. All you had to do was go to a specific URL, and you would be in one file collaborating with other people in real time. And would also be able to leave comments and do all that stuff without having to, like...
Steven:
Send a file to somebody and getting that stuff lost in your inbox. And so we had a project internally to convert InVision Studio from a desktop-based file-based application to a browser-based, multiplayer, fully collaborative app. And I was setting up design for that project. And basically we had a full squad dedicated to this initiative. It was called InVision Cloud. And...
Steven:
And basically, what should have taken like months ended up taking like over a year and a half to complete, to have the initial version working in the browser and having it multiplayer, that took over a year and a half of like a full team of like seven to eight people. And I got a little bit frustrated to be honest at the time. And so I was like, oh, like it took way too long, so very expensive, costed millions of dollars for the company.
Steven:
In terms of the resources spent to just build this. And that's basically what led me to start Lifeblocks. I didn't know at time I was gonna start a company that would basically do this. And I met my co-founder at InVision, at the time, engineer, super talented engineer, his name is Guillaume. And...
Steven:
I was starting working on the design tool again, because I love that things were building like a presentation tool, like a video tools slash presentation tool. like a Google slides meets sort of like, or Apple keynote meets iMovie sort of like the idea was to create like a tool with like a video component to it to do like great presentations. And as we worked on this, like six months in, we realized, damn, once again, we're spending all of our time trying to figure out the real time and the...
Steven:
Multiplayer aspect of things at almost no time on the actual tool itself. That's basically when it clicked and we decided to take what we had built for this tool internally to enable the real-time collaboration aspect of things and turn it into what became LiveBlocks. And so we extracted, turned that into APIs that other companies and developers could use to create Figma-like products, Google Docs-like products. And that's how we got started and that was in...
Steven:
Yeah, we officially started the company in March 2021, so four years ago now. That was a long story, I guess, but yeah, hopefully that helps.
Megha Sevekari:
That is incredible. No, that really helps because I was going to ask you about what challenges you kind of faced in that year that might have led you to LiveBlocks, but it also sounds like recognizing that it's a challenge in and of itself was how you came up with the idea. Is that right?
Steven:
Mm-hmm.
Steven:
Yeah, I stumbled upon the idea I realized how complicated it was when I was at Envision. I was like, fuck, it takes a year and half to do this. That's insane.
Steven:
To me, felt obvious that every software should behave that way. Kind of like Google Docs, what they did like 10 years ago to Microsoft Office. Figma did it to like Sketch and Envision. And I think a lot more software is gonna behave that way. So I saw it was really difficult to do, to build. And then when we did it ourselves with my co-founder, just two of us, it was also still very difficult. So was like, there's a problem here. And I felt we had this like unique insight.
Steven:
At the time around this and so that's how we got started. The product evolved quite a bit since, like it does a lot more than just this now, but like that was the starting point, yeah.
Francesco:
Can you talk through what you think is happening right now? Because everything is kind of real time, everything is collaborating, and it's becoming normal to have that experience. But what do think?
Steven:
Yeah.
Francesco:
Going to happen as well.
Steven:
Yeah, I mean, to me...
Steven:
To me, feel like not every software, most SaaS software should be collaborative by default. I think it's becoming just a commodity almost. If you don't have it, your users aren't just going to use your competitor. So I think it's becoming a base experience that you need to have. And so.
Steven:
And for that to happen at scale, it needs to be a company like LiveBlocks to make it easy for companies to do that because they're never going to be able to have the team internally to focus on this because that alone is an entire team just building that. So we see that definitely happening. Like there's more and more new companies investing in this, but also existing companies trying to retrofit the existing product to work that way. And so you mentioned real time, Francesco, but I think it's...
Steven:
It's a lot more than just real time. Because at end of the day, when you collaborate with your team, a lot of that collaboration happens asynchronously, right? So you want to be able to...
Steven:
Collaborate or give feedback contextually to whatever you're looking at in an application. And that often can be done through comments, right? So in the case of a spreadsheet, for instance, you're gonna leave an annotation on a cell. In the text document, you're gonna want to highlight a specific part of a paragraph to say, okay, like this sentence, can you rephrase it to sound a little bit more like a brand tone of voice?
Steven:
And so I think being able to share that feedback and collaborating on like contextually to whatever you're looking at is super important. And in fact, happens more often than the real time aspect of things. So like being able to have this mention somebody, making sure that this person gets notified at the right time without getting spammed. So then that brings the user back to the product. And sometimes they're gonna happen to be there in real time. And so in the same file simultaneously. And so I think when that happens, it needs to work. But it's not like it happens like,
Steven:
Frequently, but when it happens, I think it has to work. So that's one thing that we've evolved into at LiveBlocks is we started from the real-time aspect of things, like how can you enable multiple people to edit the same data simultaneously and see what others are doing by seeing live cursors and other presence indicators. And now we also enable other parts of the collaborative workflows with comments, great notifications that get sent at the right time, and that's...
Steven:
Does those sort of things. And so that's just for the collaboration aspect. And then there's an entire field we can get into if you want. But I also think that we're seeing a lot of AI companies leveraging LiveBlocks. And to me, only see, I think LiveBlocks is greatly positioned because AI is basically just another entity you need to collaborate with. And so before you have humans to humans collaboration, and that's...
Steven:
You know, don't know, seven billion people on earth, not that saying that every app is gonna be built on top of live blocks and all of them are gonna be collaborating together, but like, I see AI as just another entity that people need to collaborate with and that's a big investment for us at the moment. How can we make it easy for people to ask an agent to do something in an app? Seeing that AI kind of using the tool like in a similar way that a human would so that it's very clear how to interact with this entity in a not.
Steven:
Creepy way. So those are the things that I'm thinking about at the moment, yeah, that we're working
Francesco:
It's interesting, there's no like, yeah, a button for that. Like, there's no an actual, like, oh, this is how it's done.
Steven:
Yes.
Steven:
I agree. think the space is so new that there isn't a clear pattern on how you're supposed to collaborate with AI or interact with AI. And I want Lifeblocks to become that, to become basically that interface layer to interact with AI. That's like a major investment for the company at the moment. And we just launched what we call AI copilots like a couple of weeks ago. And
Steven:
That's gonna be a big focus for us for like 2025 and beyond and so there isn't a clear way to interact with AI but I think That's that's our job to basically like figure that out and find like what's the best way to enable people to collaborate with AI? for sure, what's what we know and what I think is is certain is that to To ask an AI to do something and collaborate with you like you need to have a way to ask that AI something
Steven:
I do think probably the best part in there is probably a chat, right? Like that's what Chat DPT kind of has done, right? That they kind of define this pattern, being able to ask the AI something and like refine it over time in the chat interface. I think audio is gonna be big as well in that sense.
Steven:
But then it's like, what does, that's the easy part in a way. It's like, then what does the AI do to actually interact within your products? And I think this is where there's a lot of things that are yet to be defined. You know, like, if you imagine like an AI within like a Figma file, for instance, like, you wanna make sure you get the feedback as a user to understand what the AI is doing and like, is that done through like a live cursor that shows you kind of what the AI is doing?
Steven:
Maybe, but maybe that's because the eye is working so fast, maybe that's going to get a bit hectic. So there's like a lot of things to define there. That's basically what we're working on. There's a lot of things that we're also working on around like.
Steven:
Text editors and the way you would ask an AI to help you. For instance,
Steven:
Like the way I think about this is like what are the workflows we do as humans and how can we enable those workflows with bots basically? And so if you think about like, you, I guess, do you guys have to write blog posts? I don't know if you have like a lot of content on your blog or anything like that, but like, I guess you ask for feedback, right? Like once you wrote the first draft, you wanna ask for feedback or like.
Steven:
You're ask somebody on the team, I guess, like a copywriter or you, Francisco, to review or something. I'm trying to think, what does that look like for AI? Ideally, you probably wanna do the same thing. You wanna be in your app, ask the AI, you review this? And then maybe the AI goes through and actually leaves comments like a human would do with suggestions of changes that you can then improve. thinking about all those workflows from a UI standpoint, I think is...
Steven:
Is super important. And those patterns are going to differ based on the type of products on which the AI is making changes on. If it's a text editor, it's probably going to look like this, I think. But if it's a visual canvas-based tool like Figma, it probably is different. So that's something we're working on at the moment, trying to figure out what those patterns are for specific use cases within different kind of product.
Megha Sevekari:
Myself. So when you started, you were kind of thinking about live collaboration, but then as you progressed, you kind of realized that, you
Megha Sevekari:
Might not necessarily be there at the same time. How did that realization then impact the types of like features or approach or changes you made to LiveBlocks?
Steven:
Yeah.
Steven:
So I
Steven:
Think that's super interesting because, yeah, we started with the real-time aspect of things. And even, it's not just that. We focused very much on the infrastructure layer. Because at first we built what we wanted, like one microphone and I wanted. And turns out that's not necessarily what the market wants. So we've very much focused on the real-time infrastructure piece and the way you would integrate that into your product.
Steven:
Was fairly not difficult, but was a fairly low level API. So you still had a lot of work to do as an engineer to.
Steven:
To get a nice product on the other side, And a lot of the complexity to create a great collaborative product is not just on the infrastructure and the real-time aspect of things, it's the interface that you provide on top. Basically, we had all the tools, we basically had all the little building pieces, or Lego blocks, I guess, to build a house.
Steven:
That looks amazing, but if you're not an architect, it's gonna look like crap. And so we had obviest and great companies that had very talented engineers using us at first, because there were those architects building a very nice house. But what we learned quickly is actually, if you don't provide a great interface layer for all of this, basically like a pre-built house.
Steven:
That looks great by default that you can customize and stuff. It's hard for companies to adopt. And that's the big learning for us. We basically spent the first two years building this infrastructure layer, fairly low level API. But the business really started to take off when we started shipping pre-built ready-made features, pre-built components that companies could very quickly add to their product. And that was the big unlock for us, basically.
Steven:
We shipped like a commenting system where we basically built the entire UI for you. Like here's what an avatar is gonna look like, here's what the comment input is gonna look like when you mention somebody, making sure the name kind of shows up perfectly in the right space. So that when you press enter and you leave the comment, then the person gets notified. We started shipping like the entire experience on top of this, like from a UI standpoint that relied on the infrastructure we spent the first two years building.
Steven:
And that was the big unlock, right? Because now companies could come to us looking for specific use case and buying that use case. Well, before they would buy the infrastructure. And so now we're basically selling more the features over the infrastructure. And so that was a big change for us. So I think it's more on that set. It's more about.
Steven:
The layer of abstraction that we provide to companies more than is it real time or not. That was a big change for us. Obviously, I think.
Steven:
Moving away from just real time and providing the entire kind of collaboration suite from like synchronous and asynchronous collaboration was key. But the real unlock was providing the actual interface. And so that's why now people like they buy, they typically come to us like, I need comments in my product. need notifications in my product. Or I need a collaborative whiteboard in my product. Or I need to have basically Google Docs in my product.
Steven:
That's what we hear. They don't come to us. They're like, I want to have a real-time Loloville API kind of thing. So that's kind of the direction we've taken as a company. And so now we're very much focusing on, OK, what are the top features that companies tend to want in their product? And let's perfect that from the entire experience for the end user, make sure we the components that companies can quickly add to their product. So that was the big unlock for us.
Francesco:
How did you discover that?
Steven:
Well, I would say that what we're building is very complex and we had to build this foundational layer. that took, when we launched LiveBlocks 1.0, that was two years into the journey of the company. And after we launched, we didn't feel like there was a strong product market fit.
Steven:
Sure, we had customers and people were starting to pay, but...
Steven:
We're not on the right track, we had to figure out a way to sell more of this. So that's one thing. And so it took time to realize this, but then about a year after this, so basically three years into the journey of the company, we're like, okay, this is not quite working. We have something that's super powerful, but it's too difficult for companies to use, and so the time to value, when an engineer...
Steven:
Signs up and start using the product, there's too much engineering work even after the fact to get a valuable outcome. So we're like, OK, what are the most standard use cases that we could invest on? What are the most standard collaboration use cases that we can invest on that could work on most SaaS products? And to us, it felt like Comments was a great.
Steven:
It was a great use case to focus on because it feels like comments can be added to pretty much any kind of product. And so that's basically what we decided to do. Okay, let's nail that use case, let's provide the components, let's make sure the notification tied to this work really well. And we basically spent, and we're still working on this, we're still very much focused on this at the moment. And took us a while to ship the initial version and we saw the instant change.
Steven:
It was much easier to sell. Companies wanted it. It was very clear from a positioning standpoint, like where we were selling. Like, you want a commenting system, that's where we're going to sell you. And the thing, also, what's great about this is that when you sell a feature, the perceived value is different than when you sell infrastructure. When you sell infrastructure, you basically sell usage, like,
Steven:
Compute and you sell, here's how much data you're storing, that kind of stuff. And to make meaningful money on this, you have to reach massive scale. That's what companies like Vercel and more DevTools companies have. You need massive scale to make any kind of meaningful money. And when you focus more on the high level features or ready-made features, like I said, you can actually tie...
Steven:
Revenue to the value you provide to businesses. And in that case, it's more like, we're gonna sell you engagement in your product, we're gonna sell you user growth. And so now...
Steven:
We're able to charge a bit more value, essentially, that we provide versus just infrastructure.
Francesco:
How did you go from your craft to raising funds and working with VC? I think that would be... And also how has it changed going back to Omega Stain, how has changed since you pivoted?
Steven:
Yes.
Steven:
Yeah, I love building stuff, right? I love making tools, and this what I said earlier. So I still like that. I like making things that people use. That's what got me started on this. And the journey, think, like for me, I honestly didn't know I was gonna get into raising a bunch of money for this. It kinda happened.
Steven:
I think the big motivator for me at first was I was honestly a bit unhappy. I was living in New York and I had this experience and vision that was a bit frustrating and like in vision I was very attached to this product. Like I had spent like four and a years working on it and it really felt like it was my product even if I was working at the company. And that didn't work out so that was, I was emotionally attached to it to be honest.
Steven:
So I was disappointing that it didn't work. And then I worked at Facebook for a little while, and I was not really happy there, like a big company, and I was like, what am I doing? And I had a good friend of mine in New York, entrepreneur, he was like, man, like you need to, I had been basically experimenting with this real-time thing, because I was so frustrated with my vision, I was like, need to learn how to make this work myself. And so was like experimenting and like,
Steven:
And I was basically building, because I felt, was like, I knew I needed to start something, but I didn't know why I was gonna start. And I did something that makes no sense. I basically built everything, all the common parts that you have in an application, which means like logging in, seeing a dashboard with like your documents, your personal settings, being able to invite people to the place. But I actually had not built the actual tool of whatever.
Steven:
That thing was going to be. It's like if you build Google Docs, but you just build the view to browse documents, right? That's basically what I had done. Because I like, I'm gonna figure out the tool later. Makes no sense. But this guy was like, man, you should start a company. I was like, I'll put the first check in. So you quit and you start the company. I was like, okay. So basically he was like, I'm gonna put $100,000 and you quit and you start this company. I was like, all right.
Steven:
I'll do it, so basically I quit. But that was a big decision for me because quitting meant I had to leave the country, right, because I was on a work visa in the US. I was like, I'm gonna do it. And then my co-founder also left his job and we went for it, basically. And because I had this initial check, I started going after people I knew in my network and see if we could, my goal was to raise, I think,
Steven:
500k or something like that. was like this is gonna be enough like I had no idea what I was doing like turns out you always need more money than you think and And So I was going for like I think 500k at the time and people like so the Give them a demo and stuff. This is amazing and like Then everybody started knocking on my door. It's like a wall of mouth like all the biggest BCs and like
Steven:
Wanted to chat with us, I'll give them a demo and like a month or two later people are like, I wanna give you like millions of dollars for this. I'm like, what's going on? It's like, okay. So we ended up doing like a one, raising 1.4 million for the first like pre-seed round from like botsters in the US. They're like specialized in like enterprise dev tools.
Steven:
And they want to be the first check, that's specialty, investing very early on, even before you have a product. Then we got really good traction from there, but I was still very much a builder, because we were like two or three people, I was designing and building stuff. And we got really good traction, had a small launch on the marketing page. We started having our first customer, people were really into it, it was still kind of niche. And so like,
Steven:
Five, six months after, I remember talking to Botstar again, and we had our first team of site, we were just three people, we were in Mexico City. It was my co-founder and the first engineer we hired on the team. And I was on the phone with them. I was okay, we have good traction, I think we need to be bit more ambitious, and we need to hire more, I think. And what I thinking is like,
Steven:
Probably early next year we'll raise again and like grow the team to do xyz. And on the call I remember they were like, why don't you raise now? Like we'll give you the money like this week. I'm like, what do mean? Like what are you thinking? Like the homage you need, I don't know like four or five million probably. They're like okay, we'll put four million and you find the other million. I'm like okay. So we basically ended up doing a run like this.
Steven:
Days, like now it's very different. That was 2021, which was like, there was a bit of a bubble in the VC world, so it was easier. So I went into pricing another five million and then grew the team and went from there. So that's basically what happened in the early days and how I got into VCs. And so obviously as time goes by, I went from like being more of a builder to...
Steven:
Now my role is more like
Steven:
Yeah, setting the vision, motivating the team. Every now and then I still go into building, especially when we have marketing launches and that kind of stuff, but overall I don't touch code or anything like that anymore, I don't design as much. I basically do the things that people don't wanna do. That's basically what I do now. The boring stuff, usually. But I say that's a good question, and maybe I went on a big tangent here, but like the...
Megha Sevekari:
You
Steven:
I think I lost myself a little bit in recent years, going from a builder and someone that thinks about where we're going, almost from my gut of where I think we should go, more than the numbers or the market study or whatever. In recent years, I've been very much focused on numbers. If we do this, we can do that, and trying to think very much rationally about everything. I'm trying to change that a bit again and go back to my roots and...
Steven:
Trying to be more, okay, now we're gonna do this because I think this is the right experience and the right business opportunity for us and be more of a vision person, I think. So it's interesting, I think it's been a journey. I think at first I was too much on the builder, like I'm a designer kind of thing and like.
Steven:
And that led to lot of the decisions. Then I got super focused on business, like growing the revenue and like very much like a finance-focused person and like numbers-focused person. And I'm trying to find a balance between the two. I think that's gonna make me a better founder, hopefully. But it's hard, it's a journey. There's been like a, I've never learned, I've learned so much in the last four years, to be honest.
Steven:
More than like, more than I have in the previous 10 years, I think.
Francesco:
What are the most challenging things you learned?
Steven:
I'm a product person. I love building stuff and I get excited. just building something is fun for me. Like I'll even if I, I did that on the side, like I like building apps and things like it's just fun.
Steven:
And doing a company made me realize that the product is important, like I think it's key, but a product alone won't get you a successful business. The go-to-market aspect, like how you gonna sell the product, how you gonna find your customers, what's your positioning from a marketing standpoint so that it resonates with people, that's equally as important.
Steven:
More important, like the distribution aspect. In fact, I think it's probably more important now. And so that's the biggest learning for me. And I'm very much focused on this part. The last two years, I've been very much focused on go to market. I even had like a year, like not anymore, because I hired somebody in sales now. revenue was really low at some point. I was like, we need to fix this. And even the...
Steven:
VCs were pushing me, like you have to fix this. So I spent a year learning sales. I would just do sales myself. Which I kind of like now, in some ways, but I had never done it before, right? So I had to email people, get on phone calls, demo the product, learn what the sales process looks like, talking to different stakeholders of the organisation. And then I got the revenue to a certain point, and hired somebody to do this for me.
Steven:
So that's also learning like you always have to.
Steven:
Change and learn and you think that's at the time are most important for the business because what has worked to get us here isn't what's gonna get us there. And so you always have to change. That hasn't always been
Steven:
Easy but that's another thing that I think made me learn a lot because you constantly have to change
Steven:
As a founder.
Megha Sevekari:
So
Francesco:
I'm interested about the change because yeah, I think that that's the hard part about being a founder, right? You get through, you like you start from your craft and then you kind of like fall into things and things might work and then, you know, like you raise fund meal or whatever that might be in your case. But then you actually need to change what you do, how you act according to what the problem of the business is. And...
Francesco:
You are some founders that just are in, you know, in your case, for example, I needed to sell, so you put yourself into... Other founders, they just hire a person. Yeah, you went for like, do it yourself.
Steven:
Hmm
Steven:
Yes, that's a good question.
Steven:
So basically...
Steven:
We had to figure out the go-to-market aspects and find our sales motions. It's just fancy way to say, how do we sell the product? How do we find customers? How do we sell it? How do we price it? And at first I thought, OK, I'm going to hire a salesperson, and they figured it out for me. That's what I thought. But what I ended up doing, I got introduced to somebody, an expert in go-to-market in the Bay Area.
Steven:
Thanks to Botstar again, great VC, they've been amazing partners. this person was like, you can't, there's nothing worse than hiring a such person, there's no playbook or anything like that. And their belief, what they told me at the time was like, as a founder, you need to do every job and understand it.
Steven:
To a point where it's working and you can hire somebody to do what you've done that's working and do it even better. But it's important for you to understand it because if you hand it over to somebody, you're never gonna understand it well enough to then make the decisions that you need later on. And so I was like, yeah, that makes sense. And I talked to different founders and stuff. was like, okay, I think this is the right way. So I made the decision to not hire and stop doing.
Steven:
All the other things I was doing to just do sales and learn it. So I worked with this person as an advisor. He would join the sales course with me for like two or three months to give me feedback. Okay, no, don't do this, do that. I think here you could ask it this way. He was always telling me like, need to draw the line, Steven. Like you're too nice. Like I was just like always like giving people stuff like, yeah, we'll do this, we'll do that. But like never asking for money basically.
Steven:
So those are the things I learned over time, just understanding how that worked. And I got the business to like about half a million in AR myself, and I was like, okay, now it's time to hire somebody to take that over and grow this for me. Because I had enough, felt, that worked that, okay, now feel like we can get somebody to do this job and do it even better than I could myself. So that's my approach now, and I think for every...
Steven:
I think that's, I'll probably repeat this for every part of the business. Like now my challenge is okay, top of funnel, like how do we get more leads, how do we figure out the marketing aspect in a way that's repeatable? That's my focus now. So I'm trying to figure out, I need to nail this myself so it works, so then that can hire somebody marketing to do it. I don't think you wanna do that for too long, because I think that's gonna slow you down, but you wanna have, as a founder, like a good understanding of every part of the business.
Steven:
Before hiring, I think. That's my view, but I could change my mind as well in the future. We'll see, but that's what I think now. Yes.
Megha Sevekari:
Hold you to it.
Steven:
Thanks for the opportunity and have a good night. It's probably getting late for you guys. thanks. All right. See you. Bye-bye.
Megha Sevekari:
Thank you so much and you have a good day. Bye.
Francesco:
Thanks.
Francesco:
Thank you.

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