December 23, 2022

Episode 146: Dan Manian, CEO & Co-founder of Donut

After spending years working in product at fast-growing startups, Dan Manian co-founded Donut to help teams foster cultures of connectivity, collaboration, and belonging. When he’s not working on Donut, you can find him playing music for business with his band, Mobile Steam Unit, and teaching a lean startup course at Brown University.

Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Dan Manian CEO and co-founder of Donut, where teams can connect around the water cooler from anywhere. Dan, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm excited to chat with you and your background and experience and how you view product.

I've used your. Your product before, funnily enough, before I think like a couple years ago and love the way it kind of reintegrated culture within a lot of teams. So we'll dive into what that really means mechanically and how you view you know, adding a and hopefully adding on to more features that continue the connection as we're kind of in a remote working space.

But before we get into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started Donut?  

Dan: Yeah. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having. Before Donut, I led product teams at a couple different startups. And that actually kinda led a little bit to the inspiration for Donut, but multiple startup stages.

One was a cloud security startup, one was a hardware startup from the 10 person staged you know, o over the a hundred person stage. But my background is really in product management and Design, design thinking, and other kind of product methodologies like that.  

Julian: Yeah. Well, describe, I love talking to, to people who have a focus on product because I think you view not only the user experience, but the customer experience in such a different lens.

And I'm curious, you know, in your successes as a product leader how do you kind of view the building of product and especially I think a lot of founders, you know, we get a lot of customer input. We get. Maybe ideas that we want to implement and associate, but how do you kind of funnel that down into something that's gonna be valuable or sticky enough to be useful for your customer base?

Dan: Yeah. Great question and definitely a big question, . But we have, I think, you know, I've. Used methodologies that are kind of, at the intersection of design thinking and customer development. And in all cases being super user centric and customer centric. So at Donut, when we started the company the first thing we did was we actually went out and conducted hundreds of interviews.

with Or customer interviews in the sense that we didn't have any customers yet, but the people we thought would be our customers. Yeah. And we were out learning about their needs, understanding what was working, what wasn't working, identifying opportunities that I think is the first ingredient. Then the second ingredient is taking that inspiration and coming up with ideas, and then how can we build quick prototypes and validate things as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and it.

To get to a point where we're building something that our customers and users love. So that's really what we did at the beginning of Donut and it's what we still do today when we're building new product features or new product lines.  

Julian: Yeah. I work closely with a lot of engineering teams and I, it's interesting the relationship between like engineering and product, and I think no one really knows that there's some type of, it's like friction, but then it's like a, it's a love hate.

I don't know if even it's a love hate relationship, but I'm always curious on, on how. The, how you go through the efforts of translating what is necessary to build to an engineering team for those founders out there that are maybe working through the process itself or are building and working now having a product team and in relationship to engineering.

So we'd love to hear kind of your maybe your advice, maybe some anecdotal stories on the relationship and how to create a really harmonious relationship between product and engineering.  

Dan: Yeah that's a great question and there's certainly a number of different approach. My philosophy and our approach is that product design and engineering are really one team and everybody should be super customer focused and super customer centric.

At this stage, you know, we have product leads and designers that are out leading, you know, user research and customer discovery calls. But if we have a team that consists of a product person and a two or three engineer, , we will frequently, you know, have the engineers shadow calls with customers. Not every single one, but enough to get a feel.

Yeah. And then our product folks are also synthesizing and translating those learnings and delivering them to the whole team that's building a new feature and the ideation and scoping of a new product. And feature isn't just in my view, the PM's job or the designer's job. The whole team's job, including the engineers.

So we very much operate where part of the engineer's role is to help us scope and figure out what, how do we best meet the user's needs. I was just in actually full team meeting where we give updates on what every team is working on. One of our designers shared with the whole company like a three minute clip of highlights from a user interview They did.

Yeah. Right. So that the whole company can actually see and hear how are users reacting to something new that we're building. And get a little bit more of that like, visceral feeling of what is this doing for users in their own words. Right? It's one thing to have it be paraphrased. Oh, every.

really loves this new thing we're building. It's a different thing to see and hear a user or a customer talking about it and how it's impacting their work.  

Julian: Yeah. Just for the other founders out there uh what's your go-to tool for like, product, project management and kinda keeping things on pace to, to be able to translate not only from the product team, from design, but then down to engineering and then back up to making sure the loop is closed.

Dan: I mean we use a lot of different tools for a lot of different parts of the process, and that has also evolved over time, right? So like the right tool for a four person startup is gonna be different than the right tool for a 400 person organization. So I think it's like one thing, and I'm gonna answer your question, but I think one thing that we're all mindful of is that as the organization grows, while the.

Principles and philosophy of how we build product, stay the same, right? The user centricity and the rapid experimentation that all stays the same. The way we execute that, the tool set, the way we organize the team and communicate, that stuff has to evolve. And the thing that works at 10 people isn't gonna work at a hundred people, right?

So like we have to be really mindful of that. That said, some of the go-to tools for sure having. , you know, we're fully remote, so for sure having a whiteboard sticky note type tool. We use Fig Jam a ton. We actually have a little widget that integrates with Fig Jam as well. But you know, it's a part of our process.

Back in the in-person days, you know, you do a design sprint, you put sticky notes all over the wall and whiteboarding and brainstorming. I think having a digital version of that is crucial, and we use that for brainstorms, but we also use that for organizing roadmaps, not in a project. planning kind of way, but in a, what are the arcs?

Like what are the big things we're working on? And it's a tool that we sometimes even use with the whole team and do.voting on different ideas and use your feedback. So that's one for sure. Obviously Slack is kind of probably no surprise. We use Slack a ton. While that's not sort of the project management backbone, it is how we organize our engineering teams and have like the day-to-day conversations.

And then there's other tools like. Like Jira and things like that that we use as well to keep things on track.  

Julian: Amazing. Taking a little bit of a trip back through time, you know, thinking about not only, you know, your experience as a founder and in the startup space one what got you so fascinated and what is particularly exciting to you about working with, you know, startups in particular you know, and what continues your motivation as you work through that?

I think all founders know how grueling the process of building a company as in getting not only from zero to one, but then from, you know, another founder side, one to three and three to 30. What got you so fascinated in the pain of building startups, .  

Dan: Yeah. Well you certainly have to love it because it's a lot of, it's a lot of work.

But it's also really rewarding and I think to build to. something from what is initially nothing is just a really cool thing to like start with an idea or a problem you want to solve. I think being passionate about the problem you're solving is essential, right? If, yeah, something could be a great business opportunity, but if you are not enthusiastic about spend.

long hours for many years on it, it's probably not the right business for you to start, right? Maybe it's the right business to go invest in if somebody else starts it, if it's a great business idea. But like you gotta really enjoy rolling up your sleeves, solving the problem for your customers and users.

And I think part of that is having a lot of empathy for your customers and users. I talked about kind of the user centricity and how we approach things. You're gonna be spending a lot of time with your customers and users, right? And like really understanding their pain points, how they are doing their job, if it's a B2B tool like us, or how they're living their life.

If it's a consumer product, right? But like, you really have to fully immerse yourself in that. And I think as a founder, there's like the building, the company part of it, which is exciting and fulfilling. A new challenge. You know, the one, the zero to one is totally different than the one to three, than the three to 30 to use that kind of metaphor.

But it, you know, every stage brings new and exciting challenges and there's always another goal to be striving for. You're never done, right? Like, no company is done. Like, okay, we made it, now we can just kind of relax. Right? And you kind of have to be up for that. But you, I think it's also just essential to be really passionate and.

About the problem space you're working in.  

Julian: Yeah. I know you spend a lot of time not only building in startups and working on your own but advising them and just, you know, out of curiosity is there anything that you see commonly that startups or founders may not consider in the initial first stages of building that it would be important for them to kind of, I guess, address more attention?

And would create kind of more long-term sustainability or success. We talk about a lot of reasons why startups fail, but I feel like a lot of times it's something that can be, you know, maybe focused on or addressed initially, you know, and we talk about it in engineering all the time where it's like, you know, making good code so that, you know, you don't have to create so much coding debt and then, you know, having to reinvest in those resources.

But is there anything that you see commonly that. Maybe don't consider early on that they should?

Dan: Yeah. I think this is maybe less common than it used to be, but I think for me, where my mind goes with that is really having some humility about your product idea and how you're gonna solve user's problems.

And knowing that there's gonna be a learning journey. I mean, most startups undergo some level of a like, pivot or like, we weren't building quite the right thing. Yeah. And I think, you know, you gave the engineering example of like, you know, building something that's gonna scale and not have a bunch of tech debt and things like that.

I actually think at the very early stages, , who cares about that? The goal is to build something that people need. And yeah I think it's easy to think, you know, what people need, but until you get a product in someone's hands, you don't know for sure that you're building the right thing. And you know, most startups have a pretty finite runway.

And I think the way I would think about that, How many times can I iterate? How much space can I create to learn through iteration in that runway I have, if I burn three quarters of my runway, getting my first thing into customer's hands, I don't really have time to get it wrong. Yeah, but the reality is, , usually the first shot isn't exactly right And you gotta iterate and you gotta pivot.

So, and I mean the very, very first prototype for Donut was literally a piece of paper with like the chat bot sketched on it. And we were like running all over New York showing it to people. We actually had about a dozen different ideas that we were showing to people. And you know, we had five companies ready to go who wanted to start using our.

before we wrote a line of code. Yeah. Right. So like, we had already tried and of course it wasn't perfect even then, right. But like, we shipped something that at least some people were willing to try, get feedback on and iterate. So I think not being too wed to your initial idea. Be committed to solving user's problems, not building the product that you think they need until you really validate.

Julian: Yeah. Love, love that. I love that. What inspired Donut in particular, and what really was the, was there a catalyst that, that said to you to re invest in, I think, and I've used the product before and I love the way it kind of builds culture and comradery even with. You know, most teams. Now, I don't know if most teams will have to see statistically what that represents, but where a lot of teams are going fully remote and a big challenge for founders is maintaining culture.

But what was the inspiration? What was the catalyst?  

Dan: Yeah, great question. And I think what's been interesting on our journey is, you know, when we Donuts, you know, older than the pandemic, right? So when we started building Donut, it wasn't designed as a. Tool necessarily. So the initial inspiration really came from my own experience having, you know, lived through startups and go, you know, early stages, mid stages going through growth and this feeling of, you know, in the early days you're 10 people in a room.

The cohesion, the camaraderie, the connection, it is almost just natural and organic, right? You're just like in sync. The performance of a team that's, that connected is really high. You're say half the sentence of the next idea you have and the other person's got it right. Like, and that, that creates such momentum.

And I felt that in larger organizations or experiencing scaling organizations, it was really hard to kinda like keep that early days magic. It. . All of a sudden you go from 10 to 50 to a hundred to 500. It's like you walk down the hallway, you don't even know this person's here for an interview or working at your company.

You're not sure what this other team is working on over there, right? Like you it's just like really hard to feel like one team anymore. So when we started, we really set out with this idea and hypothesis of like, there were really no tools to help with that. Like no tools to help scale connection and camaraderie.

In a larger organization, and we didn't, we frankly didn't know exactly what solution we would build. As I said, we went out and talked with hundreds of folks and you know, the very first product we built is basically a coffee roulette system that, you know, happens in Slack. And it wasn't an accident that had happened in Slack.

In those conversations with customers, we weren't asking about slack. Slack was coming. Like people, this was 2016 and we were asking about culture and connection and you know how things have scaled and Slack was in people's answers, right? Like we, we heard people talking about how much fun it is with giffy and emojis and like, you know, this is six years ago now.

So like Slack was new and fresh, and now we're all used to using it every day. Having channels that were. Special interests or ERGs. So there was definitely for us a like, whoa, there's an opportunity here to build something really new and interesting because there is a, there's a canvas to build upon that didn't exist up until now.

Right. Like the level of fluidity and connectivity on Slack compared to like your email inbox, it's just a different world. Right. Right. And that, that was really. yeah. The early days of it.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible to hear that it wasn't necessarily Slack just kind of came up in, in conversation and that's kind of what led the building and or the integration of of Dona into Slack.

And it's amazing how you know, it, it really kind of builds upon that camaraderie and that initial mission that you set out to One, one thing I'm curious about is, obviously I've used the roulette version where, you know, you you know, have coffee with different team members and things like that.

How do you continue building upon that experience and adding more, whether it's like icebreaker conversations or facilitating that experience to continue? Cause I think a lot of times people love what's new and what's exciting and. They need more new stimulus to be integrated or more catered experience, right?

It's like, oh, new and exciting. And then I either need something that continues to improve or offers me something different that, that is unique. How do you go about building that and what new features have you kind of built into Donut to continue, you know, building upon that initial experience?

Dan: Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, as we talked about, kind of the first thing was really just like the. Coffee roulette, which, you know, two and a half years ago when we all went into lockdown, instantly turned into a remote coffee chat. Yeah. Right. Like everybody was doing it on Zoom.

And we, even before that, and then especially with that, we started to see something really interesting happen with that product, which is, you know, the way that works is have a dedicated Slack channel. Whoever's in it is gonna get matched with each other. . The framing was just a coffee chat, but we saw teams making a whole bunch of different Donut channels for different reasons, right?

There's a bunch of different reasons why you might want to connect people for different purposes. Sometimes it's meet someone on a different team and get to know you, you're an engineer, meet someone on sales team. But we started to see people use it for things like mentorship programs or ERGs using it, or people have facilitating d e i conversations and chats with it, right?

So, yeah. You know, oftentimes the inspiration comes from customers, right? We saw some teams taking the tool and using it in different ways, and then, you know, we helped facilitate that even more, right? With more options and more settings and different logic. I mean, we have a setting now that let's a leader do a lottery where like once a week a CEO could have a random coffee chat.

And during the pandemic we saw. company, some CEOs of like public companies doing that. And it was this like really cool thing to see which wasn't exactly the initial intended use case for it, right? But then what happened as we all kind of went into this remote work world is not only did people want to use Donut to meet new people in their organization, we saw this demand.

help me connect with my immediate team. And that was a little bit of a new need because in an office, if you're on a, you know, a 10 person squad, you probably sit, you know, right around each other. You go to lunch together, you chat while you're getting coffee in the morning, right? Like there's a bunch of just kind of very lightweight connection happening all the time.

And when you go to a remote world, it's. We're in this little box and when we see each other it's kind of the do business. We kind of have an agenda, like we're here to talk about something. We're here to like hang out and refill our coffee. So to your point, like how what have we continued building?

We saw this need to help teams that already know each other just build more social bonds and in particular, people were asking for, give me something I can interact with every. Like, I want a little bit of socialization every day. Zoom fatigue became a very real thing. So having a virtual coffee chat every day, like that's actually not what people wanted.

And we learned this from talking to customers and people who tried doing that, and it's just like zoom overload. So that led us to build a product that's called water cooler which is designed to. just kind of recreate some banter, except it's in Slack, it's asynchronous. You don't have to get on another video call.

So again you pick kind of a random Slack chan, or you pick a Slack channel. You could call it water cooler. You could use your random channel or an existing one. And then Donut, we'll just like post a conversation topic. You could do it every day, you could do it every week, whatever fits your team. How do you like your eggs?

Would you rather be able to fly or be invisible? What's your favorite form of. What was your first job? Right? Like, so we actually have this huge library of hundreds of these questions organized by theme. Different teams wanna like focus in on different things. And we now actually even have some that are particularly focused for kind of special interest channels.

So like, if you have a pets channel, like we have a whole pack about, you know, , what's your nickname for your pet? Right. And like, get people talking about that stuff. So, you know, this really compliments our other product, right? Like, we're all about creating connection and comradery. A, a random coffee chat is one way to do that.

And a lot of people want to do that. Not everybody. And that's okay. Part of our goal is to provide options and products and different ways of connecting that are gonna fit different people's kind of working style and how they want to socialize with.

Julian: That's incredible. And to answer your question over easy in countryside or are my two uh , my two preferences.

But but no it's so exciting to see the evolution of it and how it's so driven by the user experience. And and I love this, the. The facilitation and almost just, you know, really lubricating the connection between companies and people and teams. Tell us a little bit more about the traction.

How many companies do you see are using, how much user activity do you have, you know, over time and what's kind of exciting about the next phase of donor?  

Dan: Yeah. Yeah, great question. So, so we have upwards of 20,000 organizations that, that use Donut. So there's a lot of people out there talking about how they like their eggs and having common class with each other.

We've made millions of connections between people. So, yeah it's pretty exciting the scale of which that we've helped people make connections. I mean, we have all kinds of user anecdotes about making new friends. Best friends and like all sort, all sorts of things that, you know, I would've never known this person.

And then there's kind of the work outcomes, right? Like some, sometimes we hear really cool stories about two people on different teams that started collaborating on a project or gave each other an idea, right? So there's like all sorts of things like that. I think looking ahead what's really exciting is like we're kind of.

Early in building. What I think is a new category of product that's gonna be essential to how we work going forward as, yeah, either remote or hybrid work really becomes the norm. There's just so many new challenges around how we build culture and comradery. Even just take for example when somebody joins a new company remotely, integrating them into the culture.

it's just exponentially harder. Yeah. Than when it was with an office. Right. With an office, you immediately step into new envi environment and a lot of aspects of the culture and the values are almost palpable. Yeah. You join a new company, you're sitting on the same couch, you're just clicking a different zoom link and going to a different slack.

Right. Yeah. And. A huge problem on both sides of the equation. That's not great for the employee experience. , and on the company side of things, it's like, how do you build connection, which leads to retention and alignment to mission and all of those sorts of things. You know, I think early days in the pandemic, we, a lot of companies actually reported increased productivity, but I think that was a little.

Misleading in the sense that we were all coasting on the in-person relationships. We had already built, you know, people were at companies where they did know their coworkers and had solid relationships and that lasted a little while, but two and a half years later, people changed jobs so quickly.

Right. That, that, that benefit has kind of, dissipated a little bit. I just sort of picked one example of the type of problem that fits into this zone of how do we help people build really strong relationships, and why is it so important? But there's just sort of an endless amount of things that we can build and do to really bring that connection into the everyday workflow of what people are doing.

Yeah, that's a big reason why we're in Slack. Right? It's not like go to some new. To connect with your coworkers. It's like, just keep doing your thing and let's help you build relationships and build trust in a way that's really organic.  

Julian: Love that. What are some of the biggest risks that donor faces today?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, immediate. I think a lot of companies face a lot of the same risks. You know, we're at a moment where where obviously the economy isn't the same as it was a year ago and Right. You know, companies aren't hiring as much, et cetera. We're fortunate to have a really big user base and frankly, an efficient business.

While that's like a short term thing that's not really any different than it is for kind of the rest of the B2B SaaS landscape. Looking more broadly, I mean, I'm gonna kind of flip your question around and talk a little bit about the opportunities, which, if not seized, kind of become risks, right?

I think. the future of work and how we all, what remote and hybrid work, like how that all, how the dust settles there is like, I think far from certain, right? Like companies are still figuring out what does this evolution from the office to not being in the office look like. Right? And there's plenty of surveys out there that, that show workers generally would rather be hybrid or.

There's definitely some companies that don't want that. There's a little bit of a tug of war there. But I think the opportunity and, you know, being user-centric is gonna be a key to this is us really keeping our finger on the pulse of where our future of work kind of arrangements going and how do we best support that, right?

How do we build products that fit in with the way people are working today and in the moment and the way people were. , the beginning of the pandemic was different than where we are now, both of which are completely different from 2019 and before. Right. Yeah. So it is just a, it's just a rapidly changing landscape that I think we have a huge role in supporting.

But to go back to your risk, like the risk would be to stop paying attention to where that landscape is going and kind of losing the pulse of what people really need.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. If everything goes though, what's the long term vision for Donut?  

Dan: Yeah the long term vision is to be the tool that companies rely upon to keep a connected, cohesive team and culture that leads to trust, comradery, and a higher, high performing team.

You know, get to the point where, you know, if you joined a new company and they didn't have Donut, you'd say like, how am I supposed to integrate and feel supported and feel, you know, build all the relationships I need to have to be successful? Because the reality is being successful in any job today, relationships matter.

Right? Having connections, having a team, having trust, all of that stuff like really matters. Yeah. So I think the vision is to be the key tool in that equation.  

Julian: Yeah. Incredible. I always like to ask this next question, not only for selfish research, but also for my audience as well whether it was early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?

Dan: Yeah. Great question. So I think for that I'm gonna go with Steve Blank, who he has written a couple books. His first book is Four Steps to the Epi. I was really lucky to take his class at Stanford quite a while ago now. He himself was an entrepreneur, had a string of multiple startups and is really one of the creators of the customer development kind of ethos, which then kind of fit into the Lean Start startup movement.

A lot of what we have done in terms of how we go out and talk to customers and try to innovate on our business model. I learned from a lot of his work and teachings. So I would highly recommend both the four steps to the Epiphany or if you look up, he actually has a great blog.

I would recommend that as well. Oh, okay. Right on. He has just like a ton of startup. stories and all sorts of insights. So maybe that's the place I would start  

Julian: with that. I love that. Yeah. No, that, that's great. And I love always asking that question to see or really just expand the wealth of knowledge and where people go to get resources and inspiration and motivation.

Last question. I've been using this question a lot and I really like it, but if you were working on Donut, what would you be doing? Oh,  

Dan: That's a good question. I don't know. I think on that one I'm gonna, you can actually see the headstock of my base right behind me. So yeah. , I think maybe I'm gonna go with that. I think I'd be in a band. I mean, I am in a band, but I think I'd be, that would be.

Julian: . Amazing. Amazing. Well, know we're at the end of the episode, and I always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs.

Tell us where we can find you, where we can download Donut. What is your LinkedIn's, what is your website? How can we integrate and be involved and honestly, I guess, empower our own team to be more cohesive and kind of gain, regain that culture and camaraderie. What are your resources where we, where can we find you?

Dan: Yeah. Thanks for asking. Appreciate that. I'll keep it pretty simple. donut.com is where to go. If you use Slack, there is a button right on the homepage that just adds the Donut app to your Slack. That's the easiest way to get started. We do have a free forever plan. There's of course, limitations on that, but it's honestly, you can set Donut.

in five minutes to get up and running, and it's, you know, you can try that with five people in your Slack workspace and, you know, pick a channel, a test channel, try it out, see what, see if you like it or, you know, throw it in your random channel or, you know, if you already have a water cooler channel.

So yeah, give it a try And we have a little chat bubble on our website. If you have questions. Just, you know, shout there and tell us you, you heard about Donuts from this podcast. We'll make sure we, we answer questions and help you get up and running.  

Julian: Awesome. Well, Dan, I hope you enjoyed yourself and thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Dan: Awesome. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.  

Julian: Of course.

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