Re: Lovability: How To Build A Business That People Love And Be Happy Doing It Brian De Haaff
Montez Savoie
Aha! is a different kind of high-growth SaaS company. We are the world's #1 roadmap software and help people achieve their best. Over 5,000 enterprises and 500,000 product, innovation, and engineering leaders trust our software to build lovable products and be happy doing it. We are self-funded, highly profitable, always distributed, and have no sales team. Aha! is recognized as one of the best companies in the U.S. to work for and we have donated nearly $1M to people in need through Aha! Cares. Learn more at www.aha.io.
Lovability: How To Build A Business That People Love And Be Happy Doing It Brian De Haaff
Download File https://tinurli.com/2yXV9R
As time went on, it became clear to both of us that the company needed to concern itself less with growth and more with profitability. That meant getting back to its roots and doing one thing exceptionally well. The board of directors promoted me to the CEO position in 2007 at age 35, and later that year Aruba Networks acquired Network Chemistry. Chris and I had turned our belief in the value of a profitable, back-to-basics approach to business into a friendship. After helping with the transition post-acquisition, we decided to start a new company.
We disliked the time in a big company that was spent managing perceptions. We disliked the lack of transparency and responsiveness and loss of customer understanding. We also disliked the growth-by-hype mentality that infected so many startups, which is also a form of perception management by and for investors. We wanted to do something different, something true. We wanted to be free to focus on creating real customer value and a company without friction. We wanted to build a software company that would help customers do the same thing in their own companies and enjoy it. But we knew that people were struggling to set clear business strategy and connect it to the work of building award-winning products. There was an opportunity to take everything we had learned doing the same and build a product that would help people set goals and initiatives and connect it to the execution. We would build software that would help create a world of awesome products and happy product builders.
We also wanted to create a place where people would love to work. We had too many friends at technology companies who were burning out and checking out. We were tired of investors who put greed before dignity and human well-being. We were well acquainted with the startup model that had been celebrated in Silicon Valley since the mid-1990s, and we knew there had to be a better way to fund our vision than chasing venture capital and trying to manufacture scale with no substance.
Our early success was validation not only that we had built a meaningful product, but that our grandpa-inspired way of doing things was working. It gave us the confidence to start growing our team. We did so through profits. We felt justified in believing that more customer value would lead to higher profits. That plus our long-term philosophy meant there was no need to seek outside capital to fund the company. We also stuck to another agreement: We would hire the best people regardless of where they lived. Everyone would work remotely and we would use Aha! to build Aha! We would depend on web video conferences to collaborate internally and support customers. We still operate that way today.
Nobody loves business software or the companies that build it. They tolerate it. People love consumer goods and services, but not software. Software is a necessary evil. But practically since the day we rolled out Aha!, customers have been sending us love notes telling us how delighted they are with our product and how we treat them.
aa06259810