Beyond the Blueprint: Redefining Incident Management with JJ Tang

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. The only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down beyond the blueprint, redefining incident management. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought JJ Tang into EO Fire Studios. JJ is the co-founder and CEO of Rootly, a company redefining how organizations approach incident management and reliability. Rootly is powering hundreds of customers like Figma, NVIDIA, Canva, and more. In today's Fire Nation, we'll talk about the importance of seeing the problem firsthand, how to go from idea to MVP, scaling a product while scaling a business and oh, so much more.

0:40And the big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to JJ and our sponsors. If you've ever considered launching a show on YouTube, I may have the solution for you after launching a very successful show on YouTube in 2024, MicroStrategy Today. I've learned a lot on what it takes to create a successful show and have launched a one-on-one mentorship program called YouTube 100. If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com. This is the year of YouTube. Let's go. JJ, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:21Excited to be on the show. What's up, guys? Thank you for having me. I hope I don't disappoint. Something I think that is required, I don't know if too many people disagree with it, but I think all good leaders are in the details. All good leaders are operators at heart. And I think that's especially true for founders and especially true that you don't lose your way when it comes to that. You will hire and bring on executives that will try to keep you as far away from the details and as much as possible behind slides and dashboards. But you'll lose a lot of the real magic when it comes to building a business.

2:03And I think it's important to maintain that. And even if it feels like it doesn't scale, I promise you it does. There's just different versions and flavors of it. Fire Nation, what a way to kick off this episode, which is Beyond the Blueprints, redefining incident management. Now, I want to start, JJ, by talking about the importance of seeing the problem firsthand. Talk to us about that. Yeah. So for context, we build an on-call incident management solution used by companies like NVIDIA, LinkedIn, Figma, Riplet, you name it. The problem for us was very organic. My co-founder and I, we used to work at Instacart, where I owned our zero to one enterprise business about a quarter of our revenue.

2:52And we had a ton of incidents. My co-founder, he was an early employee, first SRE there. And so we actually began building Rootly as a internal tool for the company, started gathering momentum. And as we talked to folks outside of the business, we started realizing that, hey, we're not the only ones that are running into incidents. I think there's a generalized solution. One day my VP came to me. He said, I can't have you working on this anymore. We have to focus on grocery delivery problems. Core infrastructure, that's not our core competency. And so that was the genesis of the business and kind of how we got our start.

3:31So it was very organic. We saw and felt the problem ourselves. We tried solving it. And it turns out we hit this lucky target of where it could actually be a product and a business as well. And Fire Nation, that's why you just need to be having your eyes open, your ears open, talking to people around you. What are you struggling with? What are your obstacles, your challenges, your problems? You don't know what ideas are going to come from that. I mean, we've all heard the Slack story. We've all heard stories where people are just working on issues that they're having. And then they say, wait a second, I bet other people are struggling with this as well.

4:04So JJ, how does someone go from idea to MVP? I think you need to solve it from many angles. One is a lot of people have this tendency to build in isolation, to be in this closed off metaphorical dark room, you know, with their hoodies on, hacking away and thinking, hey, if I build a great product, people will come to me. I think for a subset of people, that is true. And you hit this lucky rhythm where customers are just flowing in. But for most of us, that is not true. You have to go out and really source and find your customers and be where they are. You have to work ruthlessly. I remember in the early days of our business, you know, we spent, you know, I would spend eight hours a day, cold calling, cold emailing, even though I've never sold anything before.

4:55And that those conversations were the ones that ultimately helped us define our MVP. So we were able to intersect what we wanted to build from a product and what the market was actually demanding, what customers were buying. And that became an MVP that was actually sellable, less so an MVP that we just thought was cool and entertaining at the time. But now I want to just talk about the fact that it's easy. It's easy to celebrate and embrace the good moments. But I want to talk about embracing the hard moments because you've had to do that multiple times on your journey. I think it's really powerful to talk about that because it's the full spectrum.

5:34It's the roller coaster ride of being an entrepreneur. So talk about embracing the hard moments and give us a real world example of this. No shortage of hard moments. I think they become a little bit less stressful over time. One that really stood out to me and kind of going back on the fact that I think all good leaders need to be operators. You know, for a first million dollars in revenue, I did not want to hire any salespeople. I wanted to make sure that I could do it myself, even though I've never sold anything before. I need, you know, if your CEO can't do it, you really can't expect anyone else in that case.

6:09And as we started gaining early traction and bringing customers on, we actually ended up with a global footprint. We supported customers in San Francisco, New York, London, Portugal, Australia, Japan, all over the world. And when the team was just myself and my co-founder, we needed to provide world-class support that also hit our SLAs. And what that meant was in order to provide global coverage for support, we would have to work all hours of the night. And so in increments of two hours, every single night for 400 days straight, I set an alarm that would wake me up and I would go on Slack and I would see who asked a question about the product, who was struggling with something, who had a question, and I would answer it.

7:00And I'd very quickly go right back to sleep until two hours later, until the next two hours and the next two hours. And it felt like this incredibly unsustainable cycle. But what it offered and what pays dividends today is I have an immense amount of empathy for the things that our customers are building and solving. And we were able to evolve our product faster than we ever could have before. So it was all worth it in the end. Luckily, I don't have to do that anymore. But that was probably physically the most brutal challenge of building this business so far. I love that whole thing that we just talked about here, JJ, because for me, it brings me back to the time when I launched Entrepreneurs on Fire and I had no clue about how people were finding the show.

7:46I had no clue what people liked about the show, what people didn't like about the show. I just didn't know because there was no easy, great way to interact with my listeners. and I wanted to have that interaction. Just to me, like you wanted that interaction with your first handful of clients, you know, all the way up to that million dollar run point because you wanted to hear their obstacles, their challenges, their struggles, and you wanted to be able to sell your own product, your solution to their problem. And I totally understand that because when I was able to get on a call with my very early listeners, and it wasn't easy, but I was really able to get on the call with a number of them on a week-to-week basis, I would ask them four questions.

8:26I would say, what do you like about the show? And I would listen to them. And I would say, what do you not like? What don't you like about the show? And then I would listen to that. I would say, how do you actually find the show? Like, how did this show come across your periphery? And I would listen to that. And that was such a valuable question because I found some ways that people were finding the show I never would have figured out on my own. and I was able to just go in and amplify those things. And then I said, what is your biggest struggle right now in life? I mean, not even with this podcast as a listener, but just in life, what's your biggest obstacle, your challenge?

9:00And they would tell me that. And their answers became the first products and services that I created for my own audience. So having those early interactions, just like you having those early interactions with your customers and clients, it was so key. It was priceless to the growth of both of our companies, it sounds like. So is that resonating with you, JJ? That resonates so much. And I love that you did that. You know, one of the things of how we operationalize this, even today in our business, is, you know, for our first 100 to 200 customers, there's this tendency to abstract customer insights into dashboards, into, you know, user metrics, anything they would teach you any sort of product management course would remove you from the customer.

9:49And for us, we felt that, hey, us seeing, is John using our product? Where is he clicking? Is he struggling to log in? Is he struggling to build this workflow? We felt like that was injustice to our customers to just summarize them into a singular number or a few metrics for customer success health. And so what we did deliberately was we said, hey, in order to preserve some of that magic and set the tone for a culture, we deleted every single dashboard we own. And we told our team, the only way we are going to know if our customers love our tool or hate our tool is we're going to get on the phone and we're going to talk to them and we're going to interview them.

10:32And we learned so much throughout that process. And so that's another version of, I think, exactly what you were saying of how you can be close and do that. 100%. I love that. And Fire Nation, we'll be talking about scaling a product while scaling a business, some mistakes that people make when scaling, and the future of Rootly when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Let's talk YouTube. Have you ever considered launching a show on YouTube? Or do you currently have one that's struggling to gain traction? I may have the solution for you. After focusing on audio for 13 years, I launched my first YouTube show in late 2024 and have seen fantastic results.

11:15Over 12 ,000 subscribers, every show getting well over 10 ,000 views, all 100 % organic,$0 spent on promotion or advertising. That is the beauty of YouTube. If you create the right content with the right cadence, YouTube will make sure it gets in front of the right people. My show is called MicroStrategy today and I'm having a blast creating content on a daily basis because it's on a topic I love about a company that I truly admire. What excites you? What fires you up? If you want to launch a show around that passion or improve your current one, I'm launching an exclusive coaching program called YouTube 100, where in 100 days, I will mentor you one-on-one and together we will create a show that you love and that's successful.

11:57I hired the best mentors when I first started and have learned so much along the way. I'm ready to help you ignite your show and let YouTube do the heavy lifting of building a meaningful audience that will allow you to grow and monetize your show in ways you might not currently think possible. If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com. Put YouTube 100 in the subject line and we'll schedule a time to chat, j-o-h-n at eofire.com. This is the year of YouTube. Let's go. JJ, we're back and you had to scale a product while you were scaling your business.

12:37Talk to us about that, the challenges, the struggles, the breakthroughs that you had. Share that. I think the reality is, and I don't think this is a mystery to most listeners, when you wear all of the hats in the business, especially in the early days, raw hours really matter. It is a, in many ways, a brute force effort. There was no getting around the fact that I needed to spend hours on a cold call, hours writing cold emails, hours providing support, hours finding candidates I needed to interview, doing onsites with them. I think the reality is you just have to be that person for the longest time.

13:20Then you can have the luxury of thinking about how you can scale this out more and more and more. And again, that'll give you the right empathy into the business. Efficiency is the best forcing function for prioritization. And that's certainly ranked true. One of the interesting breakthroughs we had in this was, did we really need to evolve that product that much to get more people interested? In the very, very early days, we noticed that our messaging wasn't really resonating. Not many people were converting from a demo to doing a trial. And we advertised our products as this ginormous, all-in-one incident management platform.

14:00And big companies, small companies, enterprises of all scales told me, hey, this looks really good, but I don't think that's for me right now. I think I'm not that far along. And so no one viewed themselves as mature enough for my business. And so the change that we made, it was the smallest tweak was we changed our messaging from all in one incident management platform to we help you manage incidents on Slack. This very, very targeted, particular part of our product that doesn't do us justice in terms of the whole offering, but people got it. People resonated with it. And the majority of people that took a demo with us also went into a trial.

14:44And the majority of those actually ended up buying the tool. It gave us control to disclose the more advanced features of our product over time. And you know what we changed on the product side? Nothing. We didn't change a single thing. And by playing around with the messaging, that was a tremendous breakthrough in the early days that really opened the floodgates. And now that I look across my competitors, everyone has copied that playbook because they know it works. So scaling a product like you shared, I mean, it can have its challenges, it can have its obstacles, but it's critical because we want to grow our business.

15:24We want to grow our products, our services, our offerings. We want to pay our employees. We want our revenue to increase. We want all these things because that's important about growing a business. You must be scaling, but mistakes are going to happen. Talk about some mistakes that you encountered that happened to you and your business whilst scaling. We have no shortage of mistakes. In fact, I could probably think of 20 that we made this week. The most costly, the most expensive, the mistakes that affect that up and to the right graph in your revenue is hiring. and one of the things in the early days we didn't index on enough was I think every startup wants to be like every other amazing startup everyone wants to be a stripe who doesn't everyone wants to be a figma who doesn't and these companies provide things like amazing benefits health and wellness, you know, this, uh, a balance to your life that the reality is a startup like ours in the early days could not have provided.

16:35And I think by leaning too far into that, by trying to be too much like those companies rather than appropriate for our stage made us lean over our skis too much. And what ended up happening was we attracted the wrong people to the business. We attracted people that were more interested in a paycheck and a lifestyle rather than being part of a mission and building and that excitement. And so from an IC level, we didn't end up filtering in the right candidates. And from a product velocity, that slowed us down. And it created frustration, created frustration for the A-plus players that were pushing on that.

17:18And so you have this disconnect inside of your culture, which is ultimately a very big distraction for your business. The second thing that was unfortunately happened was we made the wrong bets on several leaders, several leaders that weren't able to build out the functions the way that we thought they would because we didn't vet it properly. We, you know, we indexed too heavily on past pedigree and we failed to see the fact that maybe some of their success was because of tailwinds that were happening in the industry. I would read, I would interview someone with this, with that same caution. They were coming from if, you know, a frontier labs, AI company, of course they're doing well.

18:05The whole, the whole world is betting on those companies right now. And it doesn't mean you're necessarily great. And one of the tall tale signs was leaders that were too eager to just replicate the exact same playbook that they did at another company where they saw success. Because the reality is your business is unique. You need to define it in your way. Not to say you're not triangulating advice from others or doing things that has succeeded in other places, but to blindly say my hiring plan is. is the same as that person's hiring plan, it's hard to believe. That one size fits all really doesn't exist, in my opinion.

18:47And those two things cost us a ton of time and distracted us from the business and ultimately slowed us down. Unbelievably valuable pieces of feedback there, Fire Nation, from somebody who experienced that firsthand, building, scaling, hiring, firing. I mean, man, if there's one thing that just really grinds the gears of a business to a halt is churn. Having to bring somebody on, onboard them, get them all lined up, and then they don't work out. And then, oh, it's finding, it's just, it's so painful. And it's why you had to spend so much time trying to do it in the best possible way. JJ, what's the future of Rootly?

19:29The future of Rootly, obviously I'm very biased, but it's very exciting. we've spent the last couple of years focusing on how we can help companies be consistently fast in their incident management process. How can we make them more reliable? How can we make them more consistent as they go to market? And how can we really make reliability a superpower for these organizations? But as technology has shifted over time, We are leaning into how we can help companies be even more proactive. How can we help you think through challenges and issues before they even arise? How can we be more predictable from that standpoint?

20:14Those are the areas that we're investing in right now. The other thing I love to think about is what are the things that are not going to change? You know, the things that aren't going to change for us is our level of care and attention when it comes to customer support. We probably have one of the most unscalable ways to handle customer support. Everyone, regardless of what size a customer you are, gets this white glove treatment. No one is buried behind a support ticket waiting months or weeks or even days on end before response. We have meticulously grown and scaled our team to continue offering that because we realize an incident response and incident management and reliability.

21:01Tooling is a portion of what we need to solve, but the people, the process, the culture, that is incredibly important. And I love thinking with the team, when we set our goals for the year, when we set our goals for the quarter or the week, the things that we're investing in that aren't going to change and how we continue doubling down on those. JJ, we've talked about a lot of critical things when it comes to building a business, scaling a business, going from idea to MVP. What is one thing that you really want to make sure our listeners take away from our conversation today? I think there's a few things that have really proven useful to me.

21:42I think one thing in particular, a lot of people don't talk about is you will always feel like an imposter when you're building every single day. you're building the biggest company you've ever built before. And the ones that you see on the news and in your timeline are home run successful CEOs and entrepreneurs. And you think to yourself, how can I be that one day? Will I ever get there? There's so many of these little challenges in my way. And the thing that I would say for anyone that is starting a business, it's just to have confidence. It's just to continue believing in yourself, betting on yourself embracing the stress embracing the challenges and knowing that you will get through it because the thing we talk about a lot on my team is while life is really boring playing it on easy mode it is a underrated privilege to be able to be stressed about these problems to be able to be in this position of vulnerability where you don't know maybe where things are going or how you're going to tackle this problem.

22:50And I think we will all look back on that and appreciate those times, even if in the moment it feels like the worst thing possible. JJ, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more about Rootly, what is your call to action for us today? If you're interested in Rootly and you're looking for an on-call or incident management platform, please visit us at rootly.com slash demo. And in the field of how you heard about us, you can ask for me and I'll personally show you around. Otherwise, I love posting on LinkedIn, all kinds of random thoughts I don't think are particularly useful, but if you find them interesting, you can give it a gander.

23:29Give it a gander, Fire Nation, because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JJT and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type JJ, J, the two letters, J, in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And JJ, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks for having me, John. Thank you, Fire Nation. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and JJ for sponsoring today's episode.

24:01And Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days. And we're talking step by step. visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side.

24:40Go!