Julian: Everyone, thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we had Fred Stevens- Smith, CEO of Rainforest QA, a NOCO test automation platform for modern product teams. Fred, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to, to dive into what you've been working on at Rainforest for the past, what, 10, 11 years and, and get to know how you've been so successful, what was early pains, what you're dealing with now.

Julian: But before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started Rainforest?  

Fred: I was getting fired. I I I became a founder through realizing that I could not be an employee. So I was fired from I think, five separate jobs. And at that point I was actually being fired from an internship at a VC fund in London.

Fred: And if you didn't know, you can get fired from an internship. , neither did I. But you can . And yeah, I got fired because, Sorry, go ahead.  

Julian: Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah. What's the reason ? Yeah.  

Fred: Why did they fire me? Yeah. The, because I was spending too much time working on my side project, which was the startup idea that ended up becoming Rainforest.

Fred: Yeah. So, yeah, they, I was a horrible employee and you know, like I've always had the same personality type, you know, like I've always been the same kind of person, whether I was like in the intern or the ceo, you know, like I'm always questioning. Like, whatever the orthodoxy is, I'm always disagreeing when I think something is dumb.

Fred: And so, yeah, just, I'm not a very good employee. So yeah, I was getting fired and that that lit the fire underneath at me to be like, I am not gonna get another job where I get fired. This is gonna be successful finally. You know? And so we applied to YC the second day I got fired and yeah, that's, that was the start of the rainforest journey.

Julian: Yeah. When, when you say, do you think that your kind of mindset of perspective as as like questioning the, the Orthodox or just, I guess it sounds like being curious about why things are working. Has that always been with you? Is that something that was always festering inside and, and that's why you were still working on your project, that it's interesting to hear that you were at these different positions, but still working on this, it sounds like.

Julian: Project, project kind of never, never died, and nothing ever seemed interesting, I guess, enough to combat that, right? Yeah,  

Fred: well, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I knew early on that like, I don't wanna work from someone else. You know, Like I've never liked authority. I, I got expelled from a boarding school when I was , when I was a child.

Fred: Like yeah, I I mean, if you ask, my mom should tell you that my kindergarten report like, was like, Freddy's a very lovely boy, but when he disagrees with you, he will never back down, you know? And that was when I was like four years old, you know? So I've like always had this personality and for me it was like that intersecting with, Yeah.

Fred: The. That it was, that intersecting with like the, with computers, you know, like my, my parents got just randomly got an iMac, like one of the first generation ones, the like colorful, translucent ones, and I was just like, I, I think I, it had like a cracked version of Final Cut Pro or I movie or whatever.

Fred: Yeah, I was just completely enamored with the possibility to create and like I taught myself to code and started my first business building websites. And so yeah, it's always been this desire to like build stuff and it's always been tired with like capitalism for me, you know, I've always thought like, oh, I could build something and then I could sell it to people, and that those have been two halves of the same hole for me.

Fred: You know, I. I was never thought of myself as like an artist. I always thought of myself as like, here's something that people need that I could build. And yeah, it's, I've always been trying to scratch that itch.  

Julian: Yeah. No, that, that's incredible. And, and I love the, the comparison. It's like, it's like this urge, or, or, or this, this, this Need to kind of figure out these problems and, and solve and, and build on your own.

Julian: And the, the idea of learning how to code is interesting because I think a lot of people feel that they have the aptitude or, or ability which I think everyone kind of does. But what do you think is the biggest hurdle for people who, you know, want to code that that may be you know, whether it's, they feel like they don't have the ability once they dive into it, or is it the resources or the access.

Julian: Or is it, or is it the motivation? How do people kind of, Or in your experience, how did you stick through learning how to code? Because learning complex languages is like learning a whole new dialect. Yeah, yeah. How, what do you think is kind of the, the the catalyst for you to, to kind of move past those, those learning those, those kind of learning curves?

Fred: Yeah. Well, I'm a super, Can I swear on this podcast by the way? Or is it better not to Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. No, I was just, yeah, I'm a, I'm a super shitty programmer, you know, just to be clear. So like, I, I'm good enough, I was good enough to like build stuff and sell it to people, but I'm by no music, good programmer.

Fred: I mean, I think it's all about motivation. I, I think it's much like running. I, I, I took up running like last year and I became very obsessed. I ran, I'm an obsessive person. Like I ran a thousand miles in my first year of. Hadn't run a mile in my adult life before that, you know? And I think it's just the same.

Fred: It's a motivation. For me personally, that's about having a big audacious goal. So like I signed up within a month of starting to run. I signed up for my first half marathon and you know, when you feel lower motivation, for me, that's the thing that was like, okay, well I got a train because of that. And you know, with programming it was the same.

Fred: Yeah. I was like, I had the motivation of like, oh, I can, I can build a website. And like my idea can be on the internet and anyone can go there and like, you know, I'm like 35, right? So I was. A young guy when Hotmail came out, you know, and, and it was like, what? I could contact anyone in the world for free, You know?

Fred: So I've always been, yeah, just super excited about the possibilities of the internet. And so, yeah, I think, you know, when people say to me, I'm trying to learn to code. What do I need? I'm like, What are you fucking talking about, man? Like there's been 20 years of you can, you can learn anything you want online.

Fred: All it takes is you've been motivated. So don't start moaning about like it being hard. It isn't hard at all above a certain level of intelligence. Maybe you're not gonna be the world's greatest programmer, but you could be professional. No problem. You know? And it. . So yeah, I think it all comes back to motivation.

Fred: Sorry, I was a very ranty answer, but Yeah, no, it's all about motivation and you gotta understand yourself, right? Some people are competitive, some people are goal oriented, some people need, you know, to be tricked with food or like, you know, whatever it is. And I think you have to understand yourself first.

Fred: Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, that's exactly right. With most things, it's, it's interesting how people get into this mindset of having to be the best or and, and it's, it's just, you know, once you're good enough and you have the right goal in front of you, the experience, the skillset, it all kind of accumulates to you being extremely good.

Julian: If somebody, you know, I was talking to another founder and we were talking about just. And, and people are kind of measuring themselves and, and kind of working for your passion because a lot of people think, you know, working a startup is, is, you know, and being a founder is about passion a project.

Julian: Typically, you're just good at it enough to where people recognize it and, and it builds some kind of momentum and then you're passionate about it. Yeah. And that, that becomes then the, the driving factor. Once, once you have that. And what, I guess what was passionate to you? What were you passionate about?

Julian: In, in, in. So much or, or interested about so much that rainforest kind of concedes this idea. What was the conception of wanting to build a no code platform that helps teams? Was that the original idea or, or was that kind of iterations of you know, of different type of projects or versions of this product?

Fred: Yeah. Yeah. So it was not the original idea. The original idea was spend analytics for aws. And yeah, we got into IC with that idea. And then yeah, fairly quickly Paul Graham was like, This is a stupid idea. Stop. And so we're. Well, shit. So we started looking around for other stuff we could do and basically me and my co-founder at the time, you know, he was like super technical, deep into like ops, very backend guy.

Fred: He was like consulting for British startups who were moving to AWS at the time. So he was like ahead of the curve on the whole kind of like, you know, infrastructure is a service thing. And I was like a designer at that point. Like I was designing websites for people, designing logos. We thought like we should build something in dev tools to marry that, That combination of skills optimally, right?

Fred: Like data heavy, intra ops heavy, that also requires like good visualization, good design, that's dev tools. So yeah, we, we, we tried a ton of different ideas and to your point about passion. A hundred percent. I think anyone who's a founder who lasts more than two or three years very quickly realizes that that whole thing about follow your passion is a bunch of bullshit.

Fred: Like it's, you know, it's so rare that that's actually the case, that like, oh, there's this glorious alignment between this random hobby I love. Plus this thing that can make loads of money. I think it's a huge, huge mistake. There's huge disservice that's been done to the younger generations that they all kind of believe that they just follow their passion.

Fred: It's magically gonna be successful. Like, no, come on. Like you're not magic. You're not passionate about like law as a service or about like building hypersonic passenger jets, right? It's like you saw an opportunity and you're passionate about building stuff and. So, yeah. Long story short, yeah. For us, we got to the point where we were so frustrated with all of these little experiments that we were running, getting good reception, but no one wanting to pay for them.

Fred: That we basically went and did customer development in the dumbest possible way, , which was, we said to people, Do you have a problem with development that you would pay us a thousand dollars a month to solve for? And you know, we started from the business goal rather than the product vision. And yeah, that was kind of interesting cuz then at that point everyone was like, Yeah qa, it sucks.

Fred: We don't wanna do it. Testing super hard, automation sucks. Like can you do it for us? And yeah, that's what got us our first 10 customers, our first 10 K and MRI and yeah, that was the start of the journey to, to Rainforest today.  

Julian: Yeah. That's, that's incredible. And, and honestly, I hope, I hope if, if anyone gets anything outta these podcasts, it's is that message right there, it's all about doing your customer research because you might have some kind of idea, but until people tell you that they're gonna pay for it or maybe your idea's not flushed out yet.

Julian: Your customer's gonna tell you exactly what they want, and you're gonna get much insight onto the direction from those conversations. And, and I mean, you're echoing like, you know, 30, 50 episodes that I've done so far. But it just, to  

Fred: Your point of great versus good, that's the easiest way. Like so many founders fail because they're it needs to be great. And it's like, But you don't know what great is, right? Like you gotta release something horrible because if it has the potential to be great, the customer will use it anyway. Like, do you have any idea what the first version of Coinbase looked like? You know, it was like, like all of these massive services, what borderline unusable, But the core value proposition was so compelling that you could tell.

Fred: If you had the right vision, which obviously Brian did and whatever, like it, you could tell with so many of these things, wow, this could be so epic. And so this whole idea of like, great, and you know, this whole notion of passion, it's like to me it's just an excuse to be obsessive about details that don't matter.

Fred: And I think that's the number one failure mode for startups. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you, you gotta get comfortable with, with, with following the market rather than your own glorious vision. Cuz like sadly, most of us are not Steve Jobs. Yeah. And you know, Yeah. You gotta learn that lesson yourself as a founder really.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that's, that's so true. A question that kind of, as I was looking through your background and, and the, the journey of rainforest, I mean, you've had such success, it's been such a long tenure that you've been running and, and continue to grow and you haven't raised money since 2018.

Julian: But one thing I I think about between rounds is what, what got you from, you know, raising your first 20? To raising then your second 20 mil, Was it, was it the same kind of pro product or project kind of sharpened and honed and, and more strategic and refined? Or do you have to kind of take another leap or milestone that, that gets you to that next kind of point?

Julian: I don't think a lot, A lot is like, you know, question in terms of like what gets you from the first round to the second round. Is it the same thing better or is it something that that is something new?  

Fred: Yeah. Well, I mean, so in b2b, sas, it's a bit specific, right? Because it's so, comes down to the metrics. And so, yeah, I mean, I think if you want, if you want see the miles, so it's all milestone based.

Fred: So if you want to see the milestones, then, you know, I think David Sachs Craft Ventures has a really good, you know, basically table showing you here's the different percentiles. Gary Town initialized also has similar thing here, the different percentiles of arr, net retention, growth rates, blah, blah, blah, at each rate at each round.

Fred: But yeah, I mean, more to your question. Philosophically speaking, it's basically like you're trying to get to strong product, market fit, and most startups never get there. And strong product market fit is about your entire energy of the company is spent trying to keep up with customer demand and. That is really not how most startups go.

Fred: Most startups try to push customer demand, and you can get very far doing that in b2b sas, right? You can execute a sales motion, a marketing motion. You can sell clever contracts, you can have lots of customer success and support. You can. Basically build a revenue curve, right? By pushing rather than the market pulling to you.

Fred: And so essentially when you're raising money for a SAS company, you're, you're trying to make the argument to the investors that the market is pulling us . And usually what you're actually doing is pushing it . And the investors trying to figure out like, well, you know, even though they are pushing it a. Is there the chance that if they get this right, the, the market could pull it and so yeah, you basically, in the first round, in your angel round, it's a hundred percent vision, 0% execution, and by the time you get to like series B or C, it's like a hundred percent execution, 0% vision.

Fred: Right? In the sense that the fundraise there is. You give your financial model to them, they run it through their spreadsheets and it spits out like a big green tick at the end, or a big red cross, and then they say, they give you a term sheet, basically. So yeah, that's, that's kind of how it works. Yeah, I guess very, very systematized.

Fred: And as a founder, I think that that's one of the, Challenging things because you basically, you know, you basically have to build toward, you have to build your company towards a model that is defined by like the 90th percentile startup success story. And the problem with that is that Slack didn't get their crazy revenue growth when they were a great company, you know, prior to Microsoft killing them, sadly.

Fred: But like they didn't get their revenue growth right? Like all of these products didn't get their revenue growth by like, Forcing it, they got it because they had such strong product market fit, that the market just aggressively pulled them and they did everything they could to keep up with the demand.

Fred: Yeah. And so I think it's a challenge, especially in sas, where you have so much opportunity for monetization. Where a lot of founders, and this was us right, in the first seven years of the business yeah, we didn't have strong enough product market fit and we overscaled and we got to, you know, double digits, millions in annual occurring revenue before I realized that the product wasn't good enough to go all the way.

Fred: You know? And so our journey, Yeah. The reason we haven't raised money since 2017 is actually because in 2019 when we were thinking about going out to raise our series C, At that point you raised like 40 million bucks. Right? And obviously the next round is another, you know, step up. When when we were thinking about raising the next round, I realized like we don't have the product market fit here.

Fred: Where the market is pulling. We're still having to do way too much push. And so, you know, what I realized was, yeah, we could probably build like a mediocre business here, but we can't change QA and ultimately, Every company has a different culture. For us, the culture was we wanna build an amazing product that really solves the customer problem.

Fred: And we're not interested in doing all the contract trickery and professional services and stuff where it's like, you know, the customer is basically outsourcing the problem to you because that's not like really a product. Right. Then you're like a services company. And so anyway, sorry, I'm, I'm jumping around here, but that's the long, that's the long story.

Fred: The last 10 years of Rainforest and so yeah, in the last three years since the Pivot, we've pursued a radically different approach. We got rid of all of our sales and marketing organization. We are just engineering product and design now, and we went from top down sales to self-serve bottom. And we've essentially built a new business.

Fred: You know, we disrupted ourselves. We kept the old business ticking away. Mm-hmm. And we built a completely new business with the new product, and we used the cash from the old business to fund that. So, you know, we've basically had a second startup, you know, within a startup. And that's been since mid 2019 that we did that.

Fred: And so, yeah, that's been the journey so far.  

Julian: Yeah. What, what was the, what was the like, pivot? I mean, you, you mean pivot, but it, it's kind of always, rainforest seems like it's always been addressing a QA problem. Is it just, I guess, refocusing on, you know, this no code kind of concept? Or is it where, where was the transition, where was the change? If you don't mind kind of sharing that.  

Fred: Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. So, yeah, basically the, our premise has always been, QA is bad because the tools are bad, and the premise has also been that continuous deployment and continuous delivery means that the old ways of doing this, which were good enough, For like deploying once every two weeks or whatever, deploying once every month.

Fred: Those no longer work. And so that was always like the, the kind of vision is we're gonna build a QA platform that rolls all of the individual tools that you need to do QA into one thing and then you're going to use that to do qa. And that kind of worked, but it kind of didn't. The first, you know, without getting into all of the details, the TLDR was we never got developers to want to use us because we were too slow and cause they were being forced to use us by their engineering managers.

Fred: And then we also saw that QA people are not the right owners of quality inside companies. Because they don't have any political power and because the engineers don't want to listen to QA people. And then finally we saw that the PMs were the right owners of quality inside most companies, because the PMs are the ones who are actually deciding when stuff goes live, are deciding when a feature is good enough to ship, are doing the follow up on the metrics and the user research.

Fred: And so we kind of learned that in the first version of the business. And so yeah, the pivot was basically like, look, let. Take these things we've learned, which is this unified platform makes sense. Nobody wants to go and cobble together five different QA tools to just know whether they have bugs or not.

Fred: That's really stupid. So obviously it should be a unified platform. And then the no code thing makes a ton of sense because. We need product managers to be able to use this, right? Like product managers need to be able to own quality because otherwise it gets siloed into this little QA team. And no one wants to listen to the QA team.

Fred: And so even if they do amazing work, they don't get to impact quality because the developers like, Shut up. I'm, I'm deploying and I'm deploying continuously, and so you're not gonna tell me to wait for you to do stuff. No way. Right? And. Of course what happens is something gets shipped that's really broken, the VP of engineering gets slapped by the ceo.

Fred: The VP of engineering is like quality is our priority. And so for like three months they listen to the QA team and then what happens? It goes back to to exactly how it was before. So we just saw that like, look, this industry's broken and it's broken because people are building for the wrong users.

Fred: They're trying to build for QA teams that are siloed and they're trying to turn developers into automation engineer. Both of those are completely unsustainable. Yeah. And we just saw that through hundreds of different client relationships in the first business, and so we literally designed the new version of Rainforest around that ideology, which.

Fred: That you shouldn't have QA, people owning quality. You should have product teams owning quality. And in order to do that, you need to have no code. Automated testing. Automated testing. Cause it needs to be fast and cheap enough to do it all the time within continuous delivery and no code because you need your PMs and designers to be able to.

Fred: Be key stakeholders in the process, right? They need to be able to fix a test, understand the results, run the test. You know, the designer, when they're shipping updates to the front end, they need to be able to fix the test as well. So yeah, that's kind of like the thinking behind it. And then, because it's now kind of like a tool that Yeah, the team uses themselves rather than the tool that the engineering leader buys.

Fred: We, we've gone totally bottom up, so we. Self-serve. We, we let go of all of our sales people, even though they were really exceptional. And we did that cause we wanted to force ourselves to be accountable to. The, the actual user experience, right? When you do a top down sale, you are basically accountable to are you making the right promises and can your services teams get the customers to use the product in the way that you need to?

Fred: And if you do a self serve sale, then it's basically is the product good enough that the user can get enough value that they will continue investing time and money? And you know, in my experience, It's a much better way to hold yourself accountable to getting to product market fit.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible.

Julian: And, and how is that, like what's the success that's come from that shift is as, have you seen a lot of growth in a lot of new partnerships and, and a lot more traction and, and retention from the, your customers and using your, your platform?  

Fred: Yeah. I mean, most importantly we've seen a ton, a ton more attention that that's the main thing that we've always been focused on.

Fred: Right. Because Yeah. You know, Yeah. Your job as a founder is to figure out what are the existential questions in, in the way of you and an ipo and in qa. One of those questions is not, is this a problem that lots of people have, right? Because the answer is yes, and, and also one of those questions is not, is this a problem that people wanna spend money to solve and urgently want to do that?

Fred: Because the answer is yes for those as well. So the problem has always been can you build a platform that makes this painless enough that the product team will own it? And that's fundamentally the existential problem that we are in the middle of answering right now. And yet we have super good retention.

Fred: Now revenue growth is, is much faster on a month over month basis. It's much more efficient because we don't have a sales organization. And you know, I think the most important thing as a founder is just that I understand that my only job is to deploy resources against getting to strong product market.

Fred: And recognize that as a startup, most startups never get strong credit market fit. And so, you know, we got very, very distracted by revenue growth in the first version of the business. And you know, when you build something and you get to like, People paying you a million dollars to use it. You're like, Of course we're a product market fit.

Fred: This is amazing. We're they gonna be the best startup ever? You know, hire all the people, raise all the money. And so the over time by accident, your whole culture becomes focused on this top line ARR curve, and you gradually forget that the reason for that is, Execution of sales is not pricing and packaging and marketing.

Fred: The reason for that is that the product solves a meaningful problem in a meaningful, sticky way. If you lose sight of that too early, then your company stalls out. And for us, we pulled the rip cord before it stalled out. But you see it all the time in sas, right? The startup gets to 20 25, 30, 40 million arr, and they can't grow anymore.

Fred: And they can't grow anymore because the retention isn't good enough. And because they don't have the word of mouth from their existing users saying to everybody, Hey, this changed my life. You know? And so I think it's a very, very, Challenging lesson to learn as a founder is very easy to prematurely think that you have product market fit.

Fred: And yeah, I think everyone should go and, and watch micross videos about this. The, the current, I guess, president of YC is he or CEO of YC whatever. Because he really, really nails it on the head. Like, you know, they sold social cam for hundreds of millions of bucks. Right? And, and he's like, We didn't have product market fit with social cam.

Fred: And yeah, like a fifth of all of the internet saw a social cam video in a two month period, but that still wasn't product market fit because they didn't get to that level of pull from the customers and they didn't get to that level of stickiness. And you know, I think, yeah, this is a real challenge in our industry in SAS because, People get very distracted by ARR and fundraising.

Fred: And fundraising is all about ARR growth. And you can force ARR growth. You know, I did it. We did it the first time around, you know, and that was on the basis of like buyer solution fit, but the end user had no fit. And you know, I think that that's something that is a very, very hard lesson that founder.

Fred: Have to learn themselves. And, and it's why I'm so amazed and impressed by first time founders that manage to build products that truly get strong product market fit. Cause that is some magic, You know, like you look at Brian at Coinbase, that's some real magic to do that, to do to, or, you know, Apporva, Instacart, to, to, to have the first product you.

Fred: Get to strong product, market fit and get very quickly to that phase of like, the market is just aggressively pulling it from you. That, that's some Steve job, star magic right there. And yeah, I mean, for the rest of us, we gotta just work at it.  

Julian: Yeah, no, I think there's so many things that you said that you know, you see time and time again be very true within startups who are building and startups who fail.

Julian: And, and we've seen like, you know, a lot of those startups that had kind this old mindset really did fail during the pandemic because of the fragility of their business and. The customers they were capturing. But we saw the opposite. We saw other companies double down on, you know, focusing on their customer needs.

Julian: That really you know, the word of mouth concepts interesting. Me cuz I had a founder. I'm pretty sure it was Brendan Keegan, and if it's not him, I'm so sorry for the, for the founder, I'm forgetting who recommended this book to me. But it's called Contagious and it talks about the idea of word of mouth, how, how much more substantial it is as a phal for client acquisition or, or customers adopting your product or, or service or whatever.

Julian: Because it is a firsthand. Of the, the success of, of using your product. So it's, it's, it's fascinating cause I'm reading that book right now and, and it's just, it's so much more potent than virality or, or anything else, any marketing technique or strategy. Yeah, the word of mouth only comes with good work.

Julian: And yeah, people pulling your product or wanting your service only comes with that that referral or reference from somebody who's used it. Yeah. What's the biggest risk for, for Rainforest QA at this point in time?  

Fred: Biggest risk is that it, it, we can't do it. You know, the, the biggest risk is that the existential, the, the, the answer to the existential question of can you build a product that it makes QA painless enough that product teams will use it in ongoing basis.

Fred: That, you know, the answer could be no. Yeah. And we don't know. And, and, you know, The, And yeah, like, I, like, there's good signs, right? We have a subset of our customer base that have hit that bar, you know, but we, the answer is still shrug. So yeah, that's the biggest risk. There's nothing else, you know, there's, there's no market risk.

Fred: Everyone else in our market is building for the wrong people. You know, everyone else in our market is building tools for QA teams. Or trying to turn developers into QA people, and both of those are just colossally stupid. That's never gonna work. Neither of those work. It's been proven time and time again.

Fred: Go to every single software company and ask them, Hey, how's your qa? They're just gonna grim us at you. You know, there's not a single software company's like, it's awesome. It's a self problem, you know? So, Yeah. We're the only ones who can fuck it up. The biggest risk is, is can we actually execute on the vision and, And that's all about user experience.

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

Fred: IPO Julian, obviously. Come on. What do you mean? No, I mean, yeah. the, the, the long term vision is just to solve the problem meaningfully, right? Solving the problem means that we think that QA. Should become something like infrastructure, right?

Fred: That startups don't have to solve infrastructure problems. The majority of the time you, you sit on AWS or GCP or Azure and you have one or two of your devs who have a slight specialization in ops, and that's gonna get you to. Tens of millions of revenue, hundreds of people before you have to build a specialized team to worry about that stuff.

Fred: And there is no conceptual reason why QA shouldn't be the same as that. And so that's, that's the vision. We wanna change the industry to be like that. And, you know, I don't think that I don't think that this problem is gonna be solved until then. And it's fundamentally a problem that is gonna keep accelerating as our tools to build stuff, get more powerful.

Fred: Get more interdependent with different services and our deployment and desire for iteration in front of the customer gets faster and faster and faster. So, so yeah, that's, that's the goal. And like the way we think about it, like everything is, if we can solve that product goal, then a massive amount of revenue comes out of that.

Fred: You know? So IPO is not the goal. Yeah. Solving the problem is the goal, but if we solve the problem and IPO is inevitable, you.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that's incredible. And it's exciting how, you know, you, you, you've kind of used your learning from the first iteration and, and years of your product and, and customer relationships to then focus on something that is fundamentally gonna be, you know, that much more successful and, and kind of bear more fruit in terms of, you know, not only revenue, but also just like, I think stickiness is a huge, is a huge thing.

Julian: Making it, making. Fundamental in the development process to, to use, you know, rainforest and, and your product. Yeah. I always like to ask this question one for selfish research, but also for my audience as well. What books or people have influenced you the most? I'll, I'll say, I'll say go with books because you've, you've mentioned a few people in the podcast already.

Fred: Yeah. What books have influenced me the most? You know, I don't have a good answer for this because I don't like startup books. I don't think that you can learn, let other people's lessons. I think you have to be out there learning lessons yourself. I, I think that some of the worst entrepreneurs I've met have the biggest book stacks, you know, So it's not to say that you shouldn't read, you should read, but I think about reading more about motivation.

Fred: So I've really enjoyed some biographies. That I've read, honestly, the one that's to, to answer your question in a useful way, I'm sorry. The, the one that's had the most impact on me professionally is the Patrick Lenny book, Five Dysfunctions of the Team. That. Yeah, if you can internalize that, that mental model, like we did a leadership offsite recently, and we literally were like, everyone was forced to read the book and then come to the offsite and discuss what are our dysfunctions.

Fred: And our team has never been stronger after that. So yeah, five dysfunction between, Yeah, that's the one I recommend the most and I'm just very skeptical about most of the books that take, you know, to your point about virality and referral and all that shit, it's like they take a, they take a. A behavioral pattern.

Fred: You see when you have strong product market fit and then they try and reverse engineer it as if you can make that into a tactic. Yeah. And then all of us do it. Yeah. Like all of us now have a frigging case studies tab on our website Case studies doesn't mean that people are out there referring your product.

Fred: Right. You are not going to get 10 cent month per month revenue. By having a really beautiful case studies page. It, you know, so, and, and like how many books have been written about how many books through the book stack about referrals and virality and all that shit, So, Yeah. Yeah. I, I may be, I may be a contrarian on that, but I just, I, I, I wish humans were able to learn other people's lessons.

Fred: I really don't think in general we can, I think philosophy and inspiration are the two real values that I've had out of books by far. The strongest business philosophy that I've ever read is, is Five Dysfunctions of the Team. So yeah, that's the one I recommend. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. I I love that. And, and definitely, you know, another founder talked about biography as being a huge, like, motivating piece and learning lessons from someone's past and experiences.

Julian: And I agree a lot, a lot of, the lot of the startup books, quote unquote are, are taking one concept and then writing about it for a hundred plus pages and Yeah, and it really just needed like a sentence and maybe an.

Fred: A tweet. You know, just the tweet is all we need. Yeah, exactly. We don't need the book.

Fred: Yeah. We just need the tweet, you know? Yeah. As Naval says, make email into like, you know, turn the meeting into an email, turn the email into a text message, turn the text message into a tweet, like, do you even need to send the tweet? Probably not, you know, but, People go to buy books.

Julian: I love that. I love that.

Julian: Well, , I love that. I love that. Well, Fred, thank you so much for being on the show. I know we're at time and I, and I'm sure we could talk probably an hour plus and, and maybe not more. But maybe we'll have a second version of this episode at a later time. But last little bit, I would to give my founders a chance to give us your plugs and.

Julian: Tell us where you are, where we can support. So what are your LinkedIns, your Twitters, your Instagrams, Where can we find and support Rain rainforest and what you're doing?  

Fred: Yeah. Leave me alone. Go to Rainforest . Yeah. rainforestqa.com. And yeah. If you are a startup and any of my ranting has resonated, then check out the product we have.

Fred: It's free to use. Free to try. You can run. You know, five hours of automated tests per month for free, which equates to couple hundred tests. You know, you can run it on every deployment if you have a small test suite. So, Yeah, we are still in the phase of very quickly iterating. We are shipping changes to the product every single day based on the feedback of our early adopters who are all early stage startups.

Fred: So yeah. Even if you're like, This sounds like a stupid vision and I don't agree with this guy, Fred Atul, come and try it and like tell us why it doesn't work, cuz that's gonna be very useful for me. Yeah, and you might be wrong and. rainforestqa.com  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thank you Fred. Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself and, and thank you so much for being on the show.

Julian: You know, I, I learned so much from, from your journey, from your experience, from, from your philosophy, and, and I think, you know, my audience will have, have a really good time viewing this episode. So thanks again for being on the show.  

Fred: My pleasure Julian. Thanks.

‍