"Have a constant desire to do experiments and learn". My guest today is Tom Giannattasio, founder and CEO of Cloverapp.co which is the all-in-one notebook for creatives. In this episode, we discuss how Tom got ad money from Tony Hawk for his website in high school, quitting full time job to start Macaw, selling Macaw to InVision, design principles for InVision Studio, leaving InVision to start Cloverapp.co, Y Combinator experience, raising venture capital. For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Tom has been building tools for the creative industry for nearly a decade. He's currently working on Clover – a notebook that allows creatives to work visually. Before that, he drove product design and strategy for InVision. He joined the InVision team via acquisition of his first startup – Macaw – which built responsive web design tools. Before that he designed tools for Apple and Oracle, was acquihired by Twitter, and helped MIT design and launch edX.
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Jayneil Dalal: My guest today is the amazing Tom Giannattasio. Tom has been building tools for the creative industry for nearly a decade. He's currently working on Clover, a notebook that allows creators to work visually. Before that, he drove product design and strategy for InVision, he joined the InVision team via acquisition of his first startup Macaw, which was really cool, which built responsive web design tools. Before that, he designed tools for Apple and Oracle was acquihired Twitter and helped MIT design and launch EDX. Now, as designers, we always function in a way where we put everything like there's no unique linear way. We have a cluster where we have some brainstorming in some side, we write down notes but what if you could have an all-in-one notebook that had a powerful markdown editor in which you can explore traditional and linear documents into a surface in a more intuitive way where you can take notes, brainstorm, mind map, manage tasks, all in one. That is Clover. Tom is the guy behind it. They're currently in beta. So, if you want to learn more about it, I would urge you to sign up at Cloverapp.co.
Tom, welcome to the show, man. Super excited to be having you.
Tom Giannattasio: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Jayneil: I’m just curious, did you do a degree in design? How did you get involved in design, to begin with?
Tom: I went to school for graphic design. So, we studied a lot of print design at the time but my background is really in web design. That's what really got me into where I’m at, at this point. So, this is going to make me sound really old. I got into web design back in probably 1993. And at the time, it was all Geocities, it was all the rave and learning to code websites back when it was just a text area, you didn't even have syntax highlighting, you would type in html, CSS didn't exist and you'd hit preview and the page would reload and you could see what you were making. That was incredible to me. I built a bunch of websites about video games, skateboarding and all the things that I was into at the time. And I think I realized that I wanted to make a living out of this when I had this skateboarding page. I’m sure you've heard of it. It's Tom's Punk Skate page. It's very, very popular but Tony Hawk was doing like a world tour and his marketing team was apparently reaching out to a bunch of skateboarding sites at the time and they reached out to me. I was probably 14 or 15 and they were like “Hey, we want you to place ads on your website. We'll send you some free stuff.” And I was like “Hell yeah.” So, I put on some Tony Hawk ads on my website. And, dude, they used to send me so much swag, I got T-shirts and stickers and CDs, I just felt like “Oh my God, I’m getting rewards for just building websites.” I think that led into just this passion for doing this kind of stuff.
Jayneil: That is insane, man. I lived in Canada for two years. Tony Hawk was big time there, although I suck at skateboarding.
Tom:I kind of sucked too but I loved it. It was fun.
Jayneil:Now, I remember, early on in your career, you entered some kind of design competition which was like free. Did you end up doing that at some point?
Tom: What kind of design competition, probably?
Jayneil: I think there was a tweet I was reading, if I’m not mistaken, where you entered some kind of competition and it opened up doors for you.
Tom: Okay. I think I know what you're talking about. Actually, this is a really good story because it's how my co-founder and I started working together. So, back in, this must have been 2009-2010, I don't really remember, there was a competition to reinvent the classroom that Adobe was running. At the time Adam, my co-founder, and I had already built a platform that gamified the classroom. And so, we built this gamification platform and I was teaching classes on, at the time, it was Flash. Remember Flash? It was awesome. Everybody wanted to learn it. And we basically built this platform where we could go on. And I told the class at the beginning “You don't have to do any work in this class but you're going to be on this platform. And if you do do the work, I’m going to put up a bunch of different challenges. If you do these challenges, you complete them, you'll learn, you'll progress and there's a leaderboard that's anonymous and you're going to see where you rank against your classmates.” And I ran this experiment. I think people thought I was a little bit strange running the class this way. People were so much more engaged. And I had people coming in early on Saturdays to do extra work. It was by far my most successful class. Anyways, we put that into the Adobe Education whatever the hell challenge it was and we won for Adobe Higher Education, which was really cool. It was really good. We thought about making that a startup actually. We didn't know how at the time but we thought about it.
Jayneil: So, basically, that free design challenge introduced you to your co-founder and you guys started that relationship of working together.
Tom: Absolutely, yeah. We did Macaw together and now we're doing Clover together.
Jayneil: You were teaching the Flash class. What happened after that? Did you join an agency?
Tom: I was at an agency at the time. I was working at an agency in DC called Include and I was working primarily with Apple. It was an interesting time because Apple was gearing up to kill off Flash, if you remember this. And they were building these design tools basically that were web-based for their new html-based platforms that they were using to replace Flash. And so, they had built like their iAd network but also using the same technology to power iBooks and even interactive content inside of iTunes and they were making these design tools for that. And that to me was super fun.
Jayneil: Like company only, internal employees only, internal design tools for them.
Tom: They used themselves but they also released these. So, there's like iBook, Author it was called, I think iAd. I can't remember exactly the name of those but they were probably the first web-based design tools that I remember seeing long before any of these things existed. It was pretty cool. That's kind of some of the inspiration to do Macaw.
Jayneil: So, how did you finally decide that “Okay, I’m just going to quit working at all these companies and then just suddenly start my own startup?” How did that happen?
Tom: It was sort of a perfect storm and stuff. My life went into chaos. It was good chaos okay but it was a chaotic time that led to this. So, what happened was I was at that agency Include. We got aquihired by Twitter. I was about to move to the Bay Area. I had my first daughter. And so, I stayed on the East Coast and worked for Twitter for a while. The day after my daughter was born, I got called by MIT to go up and start a platform called EDX in conjunction with Harvard and it was going to allow us to stay closer to family at a time where we just had kids. And so, we moved up to Boston instead of going to the Bay Area. We left Twitter. And I was there for six months. I helped them design and launch that platform. And then Adam, my co-founder, came and visited in Boston. And during that six-month period while I was at MIT, on the side, I had been hacking around with some ideas to build some tools that would allow me to work with CSS in a more visual fashion instead of just writing it out. Now that seems so commonplace. It's kind of like “That's silly. Why would you do it?” It didn't exist at the time.
Tom: And so, Adam was like “Damn! That's cool. Let's start working on this together.” So, after a few months of hacking on that, I was like “Let's just try it. Let's go, let's try to start a company. We seem to be making some good progress. Our friends seem interested in what we're doing. It sounds like they might pay for this.” And I told my wife “All right, here's what we'll do. We'll set a rule. We're going to give ourselves three months to launch this product and if we don't, it'll be too much of a financial risk and I’ll just find another job.” And she was like “Yeah, sure. Let's do.” I don't know why she was so cool but she was “Yeah, let's do that.”
Jayneil: You were lucky.
Tom: Extremely lucky, yes.
Jayneil: Most wives don’t think like that, I think.
Tom: The way we usually tell the story is that like the baby hormones may be great chemistry or something because she was very supportive with a newborn baby to just quit. And so, I quit my job we moved back to DC and we started this company. I said that it was three months we gave ourselves. It probably took us 15 or 16 months to get the product out the door. I mean, we bootstrapped. We didn't have any money. It was a very intense challenging period of time. The only thing that saved us is the design community, I think. We had a lot of support from the design community and we decided to try Kickstarter. And there wasn't a whole lot of software on Kickstarter at the time but we thought we'd give it a shot and see how it goes and it was awesome. We hit our goal in 24 hours, I think, it was.
Jayneil: How much you raised?
Tom: We ended up raising, I think, about 275,000.
Jayneil: Holy shit!
Tom: Which was pretty good to get us started. That's the only money that we really raised to run the business and it was such a cool way to do it. Being able to just connect early with your users and bring them along for the journey, what a cool way to start a business. I mean, it was incredible.
Jayneil: Damn! So, that money basically provided you the 13 to 15-month runway that you needed to launch your product.
Tom: That gave us the money that we needed to build out the team a little bit and finish the product and get it out there and the rest is history there.
Jayneil: And then did you have any angel investors after that once the product is out and stuff?
Tom: No, we ran it just off of revenue until the end of 2015 when we got connected with the infamous Clark from InVision.
Jayneil: Oh wow! Oh my God!
Tom: So, he's a real person.
Jayneil: Yeah, he's a real person. And then before that, I’m kind of curious, I think I read one of your blogs way back, somewhere I read that you had pretty much all the VCs hounding you to take a check for Macaw. So, how did that feel like and why did you turn it down?
Tom: That's a good question. Yes, we had a lot of interest from VCs. Looking back, at the time, we didn't want that for the company. We didn't think we needed it. We thought we would be fine and we were trying to do this because we just wanted to build great products for the community. And looking back now, I’m like “You idiot. You should have taken the money.”
Jayneil: Would you have taken it now?
Tom: Looking back, I think, I probably would have. I don't regret any of the decisions that we made. It ended up being a really awesome journey but looking back, it's like, we probably could have built something much larger, more substantial had we taken the money and learned to build it out. I think we were a little naïve. Your first startup, you don't know what is, everything. There's so much to learn. Yeah, maybe we'd do it differently.
Jayneil: And then how did the acquisition with InVision happen? Were you actively trying to contact them or they contacted you?
Tom: I’m not going to name any names here because you'll laugh at this. We got connected to Clark by a mutual connection that works at Adobe and he was like “Yeah, these guys over InVision are just killing it. You should maybe talk to them.” And I was like “Yeah, InVision is like blowing up. I would love to talk to Clark.” Clark and I connected and pretty right away he was interested in us joining the team and he had just an incredible vision for where things were going, it really just made sense. And so, we joined back at the end of 2015.
Jayneil: Wow! I don't know if you corresponded with Hillary Shirazi there.
Tom: Yeah.
Jayneil: Amazing lady. Oh my God! I was in San Francisco and I just had connected with her and she not only gave me cool things to do in SF because I hadn't been there much but she sat down with me and explained to me basically how the core dev process works and what they look for. So, it was very interesting for me to learn.
Tom: She's a super cool human, one of my favorite people from InVision, I think. Also, her dad is like an incredible runner. He's running back-to-back marathons or something and he's in his 70s or something. It's incredible.
Jayneil: He's probably way more fit than I am.
Tom: I couldn't tell you the last time I ran.
Jayneil: So, you're at InVision and I think you spent some time over there working on the products and I know you have a decade of experience, design tools, as I would say. What have you learned from that or how do you approach designing a design tool?
Tom: That's a big question. When I left MIT to go build a design tool, I thought to myself “I’ve been using design tools for 10-15 years at this point. This is going to be a piece of cake.” And I can tell you design tools are deceivingly difficult. There is very, very complicated logic that goes on behind the scenes to make the simplest things work correctly. And so, I feel like I’ve learned a lot the hard way trying to not only design but also engineer these products. I mean, it's like building any other super high-performance machine. It's like trying to build an F1 race car because everything has to be super finely tuned not just to work but to work really, really fast and efficiently amidst a really complicated system. When you're designing a website or something, at any given time, there's three potential options for a user to do. They're going to click on a nav link or they're going to fill in a form and that's about it but with a design tool, it's like the user could literally do a thousand different things at any time and it also matters what they just did. And so, it's very complicated network of interactions that you have to design for. And so, what that has led me to is a belief that the way to design really complex systems is by making sure that you design really solid first principles for your team. And so, you're not just now designing what a certain flow is. You're designing to these principles to ensure that you're going to deliver a high-quality experience that you can't maybe fully wrap your head around just as you're designing these individual features. To give you an example of that, the team at InVision will like this one because we used it so much, in fact, it went beyond just our design team and went to engineering and product managers were using it, so there's the idea of just progressive disclosure in design. When you're designing a tool, you want to make it as accessible as possible for people to get up and running but at the same point in time, sometimes making things really accessible means that you're actually getting in the way of somebody who's a pro user. And so, there's this weird equilibrium that you're trying to balance out like make it easy to get up and running but also allow users to do really complicated things. And so, one of the principles that we established on Studio was this concept of “Shallow by default and deep by choice.” And what that means is the first impression with any certain interaction should be set up to account for the average. If you put it on a bell curve of what people are going to be doing, think of in the middle. We shoot for that middle and then we allow people to progressively move through that flow to achieve more. So, the amount of input that you put into the system is commensurate with the output that you get from it. So, when we were designing the animation workflow inside of InVision Studio, we said “Look, we want to make it as simple as possible for you to just like take two screens and say animate.” It should be that simple. You can do that. You can just link two screens and it's animated but we also want to allow people to go in and fine tune every property on every layer and all that stuff. So, some people were like “Just throw out the timeline as soon as they created an animation.” It's like “I’m going to step through it. It's not going to be Flash.” You're going to create a link. You're going to animate it. Then you can go through and you can say “How long should this animation be?” And then if you want to go further, you can say “Let me go into the timeline. Let me actually just move some of these layers. Actually, let me dive into the properties of those layers.” And so, it just steps you through layers of complexity based on what you're comfortable with or what you're trying to achieve.
Jayneil: I love that first principle, man. And I’ve actually used that feature in Studio. So, I really, really appreciated that.
Tom: That's awesome. That's good to hear.
Jayneil: Oh my God. So, you're spending this time at InVision. And, I think, one of the traps can be you are also a user because, I mean, you're a pro designer but then you're designing for all these professionals out there. So, how do you get out of the block where you feel like “I think I need this feature” but then that's you, that's not really the user out there? So, how do you kind of validate or do user testing or user research like “Is it what users really want?”
Tom: That's always a difficult thing. There are some really interesting challenges about designing specifically for designers. You're right in that you run the risk of putting yourself into an echo chamber and saying like "Hey, isn't this awesome? We think it's awesome. It's going to be great.” And then as soon as you give it to people, they're like “What the hell is this?” We made a pretty regular practice of just building the design team out so that they knew how to code as well and it was the designer's responsibility to build out like workable prototypes for the we're doing and actually put them in the hands of real users so that they can validate and make sure that it works. It's also one of those things where we've done some where it's like “Let's just show a couple screens and get some general feedback” but what's really tough about tools is that you're getting a very shallow analysis of what that design is that they're looking at. Yeah, it looks fine but once a designer is actually in flow, they've been using the tool, they're four hours into a project and they're coming up against [inaudible], the way that they interact with the system actually changes. And so, you really need to give it to those people and have them try to do actual work with it to really gain an understanding of how optimized this is and how well it works while in flow. So, that was a practice that we built out in InVision and I think it helped a lot to validate like “Yes, this works. Yes, people find value in this” and it just helped us build better flows in the tool.
Jayneil: Man, I love that research analogy like researching the users when they're in flow. Wow! Instead of just asking surveys and stuff like “Would you recommend this tool to a friend?”
Tom: I think there's value in those as well but in really trying to analyze how well a feature is designed, I mean, that's kind of the real test.
Jayneil: Absolutely. And then, now you're working in InVision. So, was it like one of those things you were in the shower and you're like “Oh damn! I think I need to create Clover. I think this is it. Adam, let's do it” or how did that idea come about?
Tom: Well, number one, I wasn't in the shower with Adam and said “Yes, this dude [inaudible].” So, I’ll give you a little backstory how that started. Way back when we were at Macaw actually, we ran a hack week for ourselves and we were like “Oh, let's just play around and build our own project management tool.” We wanted something that was simpler and more streamlined for the way we do. And so, we built this project management tool that had a text editor that had tasks and all these other things built into it. At that point, I kind of fell in love with the idea of working on text editors. And so, after the acquisition, on the side, I had just been like “I think I’m going to build my own note-taking app.” And I had done that for, I guess, it was four or five years. I probably built about 10 different iterations of it. And some of those, towards the last year or so, I was playing around and Adam wanted to hack around with it as well. And so, we hacked around for a good year just like experiments really for ourselves. And then, in, I guess it was May of this year, we had been at InVision for four and a half years, we built Studio, it was super awesome and I reached out to just congratulate one of my buddies who became a partner over at Y Combinator and he wrote back, he was like “Hey, what are you thinking about for your next steps?” and I was like “Yeah, I don't know, still trying to you know figure it out, hack around some ideas.” And he was like “You should pitch YC.” So, we did. We got in and we had to quit our jobs immediately because we were a late applicant. And he was like “Hey, yeah, it starts in like a week and a half.” So, we had to make some life decisions real fast.
Jayneil: So, you had that conversation with your wife again like “Let's do three months again.”
Tom: She was like “Sure.”
Jayneil: “You'll come around. You came around last time.”
Tom: You're right. And it is three months again. You're right.
Jayneil: I mean, now you've got kids, man. You've got a family. You're more seasoned in your career. So, it's daunting just leaving your stability, leaving that full-time job. So, did you proactively like start saving up money like “Oh, I’m going to save up this fund so in case I pursue this startup idea, it's not a lot of pressure?”
Tom: I mean, yes. I will say we didn't fully expect this to happen, the Y Combinator thing. That's really, really fast. We had a hunch that we were probably going to try to start a company again at some point. It just happened real fast. And so, yes, mentally we were sort of already there but in terms of did we do financial planning and sit down and do it, no, not really.
Jayneil: Wow! This could be a stupid question but I’m just thinking out there are a lot of ways you could go about this. One is that you have this idea or vision of how a notebook for creative professionals should be. There are some other tools in the market that are kind of doing it, not exactly your vision but you have something like Notion. So, did it ever occur to you that maybe you and Adam could just join as product managers at Notion and influence that versus starting your own? Did you ever consider that train of thought or was it just not a thing?
Tom: Not necessarily. I keep a close eye on a lot of these tools and there are definitely some cool teams. Notion team seems awesome. They've built a really great product. There's something about doing your own thing that you're just drawn to doing it. Well, not everybody, I guess, but I certainly am. Making something that you conceived, putting it out there, doing the early work on product is so damn fun.
Jayneil: It’s rewarding.
Tom: So exciting especially because you know that your idea is total shit until you really start working on it and processing it and talking with people early on in the process to try to suss out where the problems actually are and what your point of attack is, it’s so exhilarating. I mean, you don't get that when you just go grab a job, I think.
Jayneil: Because there's a mandate given to you like “We've already got something that's a product market fit. Just work on incremental improvements.”
Tom: Exactly. There's something about the hunt for new ideas that are going to resonate well that's super, super exciting. Honestly, not having a safety net too is somewhat exciting. It's terrifying but that fear drives you to try harder and you just learn more. The three years that I did Macaw was the hardest three years but also by far the most rewarding.
Jayneil: Tom, in a way, somebody who's on the other side like me could argue that you do have a safety net is you are like one of the voices in the industry when it comes to designing tools. So, if you wanted to, hypothetically, get a job, then you have a stellar CV that would just get you at any one of these companies that's designing the tool.
Tom: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. That's very kind of you. I hope that you're right. If things don't go well, I hope I can find something. If anyone's listening, just keep an eye out.
Jayneil: Oh my God! So, you are working on so many iterations of that note-taking product. How did that pivot happen from “Instead of note taking, let's expand this to more of a productivity tool” to what is Clover today? How did that happen?
Tom: I just went through so many different iterations of this and a couple of those iterations involved building a text editor from the ground up to understand how they actually work. There are some really great libraries out there already that you can utilize but I kind of wanted to have a deeper understanding of it. So, as I was building some of those out, I kind of realized that “Oh, the way you think of the lines in this document, wouldn't be cool if you could also break that out so that you could have multiple documents technically on a surface?” I think, my passions of text editor and design tools somehow merged together in my brain and I was like “Shit! Let's see what it's like if we put those two together.” So, one of my iterations had that and I used it as an agenda. And you could zoom all the way out. You could see like the past three months of all my work on this giant surface and I was like “Damn, this is kind of cool. I like working this way.” I would sometimes find myself in Studio using it as just a thinking tool to get some thoughts and I was like “I kind of wish I just had this in like my note app.” That's, I guess, the genesis of it. So, taking those things we've learned about design tools, mixing them with this text editor, you get a pretty interesting result. It's a pretty cool thinking platform.
Jayneil: It literally reminds me, if you've seen some of those FBI shows like Mentalist or Dexter, there's always this police guy with this huge massive wall with a bunch of stuff in it. When you were saying I could just zoom out and I could see three months of work, I’m like “That's exactly what I would use it for to see everything at once.”
Tom: You're right. Yeah, we need to bring some of those metaphors of strings all across the wall.
Jayneil: Oh my God! And now, since the app is in beta, you guys are in Y Combinator, how are you guys doing user research? How are you guys just recruiting users, showing them your screen to the user testing or just giving them a private beta link like “Tell us what you think?”
Tom: So, a couple of things. So, we're pretty early on in the product and when we got into YC, we said “Let's go super deep on discovery.” And so, we basically just reached out to anybody that would be willing to speak with us and set up call after call after call after call and just interviewed them about their tools. So, that was kind of how our process started. And from there, we started to see a lot of similarities. The number one problem that we kind of saw was that “Too many damn tools. So many tools.” And we said “Yeah, same here. Let's see how we can consolidate some of those things” which led us to “Yeah, we really need this flexible surface that can sort of bend to accommodate a bunch of these different workflows” which has kind of what got us to where we're at. And so, we do a lot of those customer discovery calls to just learn about people's current problems. And then what we've been doing is we have an alpha group that we actually ship to and we are very high touch with those folks. So, we'll hop on calls every week to check in and see what their thoughts are on the new features and everything. And just this past week we did an early launch on product hunt just to kind of connect with more people really, let them see what we're working on, get some feedback which has been awesome. We've heard from so many people.
Jayneil: And I hated the troll there. I mean, there were some people trolling there and I was just pissed off, like that guy was going back and forth. Do you get bothered by that, people just trolling?
Tom: I mean, it's the internet, right? There's going to be trolls wherever you go but you've got to connect with an audience early on if you're going to build a great product. I mean, you can't do that in a vacuum. It's great that there are platforms or product that allow you to connect early with those people so that we can build a better product when we do finally deliver it.
Jayneil: And for the customer discovery calls, how are you finding those customers and were you just messaging them on LinkedIn or emailing them like “Hey, I would love to get your perspective?”
Tom: Oftentimes it's just I’ll send out a tweet and see who's willing to connect. Some of them are folks that are just already in my network that I would reach out directly to, who've just always been good resources. We tried something new this time where we had a small wait list that we just sent an email to like “Hey, anybody wanted to chat with us?” We just threw up a calendar and let them book. Pretty much anything we can do to get people on talking to us is we're willing to do.
Jayneil: That is insane. I’ve been to YC startup school but I never applied there for a startup idea but I know that it's good to have actual customers, it increases your chances but, I guess, in your case, your background in a prior successful exit made it okay, if you guys still were in an early stage, to get accepted.
Tom: Yeah, I think we're definitely leaning a lot on our background. Because we had built tools kind of in this space and we had 10 iterations of experiments and a background of building and exiting, I think, that definitely helped us get in. We also do see that there's a pretty large market here, there's a big opportunity. And so, leaning on those things has helped us get into the program, which has been great. It's a little different doing it all remotely but they've figured it out. I laugh at this because we're still all figuring this out, this whole COVID situation and they're trying to do this program with people all around the world. It's been kind of funny to me to go to one of the presentations on something. And tech billionaires struggle to get in the Zoom call. For some reason, I get a kick out of that.
Jayneil: It just makes them more human just like us.
Tom: It really does. It's like “Damn, you know what, maybe I could also build something big like that someday.”
Jayneil: Oh my God! I remember that moment when I was at, I think, that startup school in 2013 and dude, we got to see the Airbnb founders, we got to see Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey. It was insane just being in that same room and suddenly, it's no longer that far away.
Tom: Yeah, it's pretty intense, right?
Jayneil: Yeah. It was like a very deep moment I had there. So, now this is your second time around, I’m curious what lessons from working at InVision, at a startup of that scale, having done Macaw, what are you bringing in terms of lessons to Clover this time, as a company?
Tom: They've said this again and again in YC and I definitely feel it. They said that the first-time founders focus a lot on products and second-time founders focus a lot on user acquisition. And I’m definitely feeling that. I definitely am feeling like “Hey, we should go out and make sure that we have an audience for this first as opposed to just driving super hard on what our vision is.” We still have a vision. That's still important but making sure that we have the audience figured out, understanding how we're going to actually go and build that once it's really time is so much more important. So, I felt that advice myself now. We are still very heavily focused on product and we learned a lot about how to build more rapidly, get in front of people earlier. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that we made at Macaw is that we didn't know how to build design tools yet. So, we had to figure out how to do that. There are a few teams that have done that. So, we had to learn the hard way how to not build it and then how to build it. So, it just lengthened the time to which we could actually get it into people's hands. So, we are now like “Let's get it into people's hands as quickly as possible.” And you just learn so much more by just talking to people.
Jayneil: Damn! And then right now, it's just you and Adam, just two-people team or you guys hired anybody?
Tom: Yeah, just the two of us, yeah.
Jayneil: So, how do you guys split the roles and responsibilities? Do you do the design and the he does the coding or it's like both of you do everything?
Tom: I do most of the design but Adam and I both do coding. And I will say that the design that I do is usually we're kind of like pairing on a lot of the stuff. And so, it's a pretty even split. Adam is with YC and doing fundraising now and all these other things. I’m getting pulled into a lot of just business operations and those types of things right now. And so, Adam is primarily driving the engineering at this point but I think we have a pretty good back and forth and an understanding of who will do what and flowing with it.
Jayneil: And you guys have a working relationship of what, like 15 plus years it seems like.
Tom: Yeah, I think we figured it out the other day. It's like 12 or 13 years.
Jayneil: Damn! That's a long time to build trust.
Tom: We worked at an agency together. Building Flash websites for hotels is what we did. It's been a crazy journey doing all this stuff together.
Jayneil: So, in terms of investors and people that you would like to invest, is it just like “Okay, whoever can bring a check, I’m just going to take the money” or do you have a filter in terms of what kind of investors you're looking for as you go about the fundraising?
Tom: At such an early stage, we're definitely looking for somebody that we can consider more of a partner in helping us grow the business. We're doing seed now. We need series A later. Will they follow up, will they be able to help us raise that round as well and help us really grow the business throughout? I mean, it's a big commitment. A VC said this to me once and I had never really thought of this way but now, that's the only way I can think about it is that this relationship that you make with the VC is harder to get out of than a marriage and it’s like “Damn! Really should wine and dine each other probably first before we make this big of a commitment.”
Jayneil: I’m assuming since the fact that you worked at InVision, you probably know a lot of these angel investors like Clark is the first one that comes to mind. Hypothetically, you could easily just ping Clark and be like “Hey, Clark. We're doing this. If you want to invest in this.”
Tom: Yeah, I mean, we've reached out to a few angels that are in our network and we've had a few that have come through for us and have kicked off our round and stuff. And YC culminates in a demo day and that is on Monday and Tuesday next week. So, we're really gearing up for that. We're excited. I probably shouldn't even say. I don't think I’m supposed to. It's like fight club.
Jayneil: Oh my God! And then you hit the product-market fit. You're coming up with new products. Is there a fear that somebody like Evernote or any other company for that matter can just clone this functionality, just the UI that's there? Facebook Stories is a good example of just taking the snapchat idea. So, does that worry you?
Tom: No, I’m not so worried about that. Any good idea is going to get stolen. This is maybe my personal philosophy but I don't think that anybody should be too afraid of having their work stolen or also not too afraid to steal work, knowing how to steal in a way that remixes and makes sense. There are some people that will blatantly rip off work. That's different. That's somebody putting absolutely no thought into it and said “I’m just going to rip off this whole website and pop it right in front.” That's different but recognizing that there's a great idea out there that you can steal and rework, understanding the principles that led them to that and applying those to the work that you're doing, I think, is a really important skill and it's almost something you have to sort of unlearn in a way because you're brought up like “You shouldn’t steal. That's not nice” but it's like “If it's the right move for my product or my business, I should probably do that” I suspect people might take things from work that we do and they should suspect people will take things from what they do.
Jayneil: Absolutely. And you made an amazing point of this, I believe, in your awards talk where you said pretty much all the design tools stole the idea of layers from Photoshop because Photoshop had already trained users’ mental models. So, none of the design tools had to reinvent it from scratch. So, I think that was a great example.
Tom: Yeah, why would you reinvent a paradigm that people are really responding well to.
Jayneil: Absolutely. And then are there any future things that you can talk about in terms of the roadmap for Clover?
Tom: Yeah, we're playing a little close to the chest just because we're still early and we're still figuring a lot of it out. And so, still doing a lot of discovery work on what else we bring into this infinite surface that we're building. That's our main focus right now is making sure that we have the core experience of that surface really, really nailed down and figuring out how that works on mobile devices, for example, is a big concern that's coming up now. Right now, we're very focused on individual creatives and building a tool that makes just a great companion for those folks throughout their day. We just want to make them fall in love with it. so, we're building it for them. And hopefully that eventually grows out and expands to other areas like team workflows or even just broader creatives. Right now, it's a lot of designers and folks but anybody who thinks visually will find a lot of value in a product like this.
Jayneil: That is insane. And then what advice would you have for a designer who wants to follow your path and do a startup at some point, launch a tool? What would you tell them?
Tom: That's a great question. I think the most important thing in my career that I felt has had the biggest impact on my career has been a constant desire to be doing experiments and to learn. Macaw started as an experiment – “Can I build some UI to help me with CSS?” I had no ambitions of building a company. I just wanted something for myself and I thought “Ah, maybe I can learn to do it.” And so, that led into just bigger and bigger experiments that eventually led into building a business and eventually led into an acquisition and all these other things. And it's the same exact path that has led me into Clover – “I just wish I had some better tools to manage tasks. I’ll just build out my thing as an experiment. I’ll just see if I can teach myself to build a text editor.” And here we are numerous iterations later, it's like “Oh, build another business out of it.” I think it's the one thing that I always look for when I’m hiring as well is people who have taken initiative themselves to try to learn even if there's no obvious return on their investment there. They're just trying to build it because they just need to figure it out. The number one thing I look for when hiring people.
Jayneil: Oh my God! That is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that, your filter, what you're looking for, man. How can people follow you? How can people contact you?
Tom: You can find me on Twitter at @Attasi. I also have a website Attasi.com but you should check us out at Cloverapp.co.
Jayneil: Awesome! Thank you so much, Tom, for coming on the show, man. It's been a blast.
Tom: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it.
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