THE FOUNDER
Alex Boyd, Co-founder @ ViewExport
Alex Boyd is the co-founder of ViewExport, a search and discovery copilot for your internal Slack.
THE COMPANY
Website | |
|---|---|
Description | The Slack search and discovery co-pilot |
Sector | Compliance |
Stage | Pre-Seed |
HQ | Portland, OR |
THE INTERVIEW
Taking a product from “vibecoded “ to “enterprise-grade”, building with a self-serve mindset, and why your GTM strategy should NOT ignore Reddit with Alex Boyd (Co-founder @ ViewExport)
Here are some things I look for when I talk to founders for Outlaw:
Builders: Demonstrated track record of building things from 0 to 1
10x marketing ability: Always experimenting with new growth ideas
Working in non-consensus areas: Willing to grind it out in areas overlooked by others
Building in public: Creating an audience by sharing what is working
Alex checks all of those boxes.
Here’s a masterclass from him on what he’s building, what he’s learned along the way, and how he is applying lessons from previous companies to execute …
Maybe to set the stage, first talk to me about how you arrived at the problem to be solved with ViewExport. How did you first discover this problem, and how did you decide that it was a problem worth solving?
Interestingly, we didn't come up with the idea ourselves! The former founder of ViewExport reached out to us offering to sell her prototype/MVP of a 'slack export manager' tool. It was free, vibe coded, and positioned as a tool to manage a backup of your slack channel if you were changing plans or migrating to Teams.
We acquired it not knowing exactly what we would do with it. Then, we started reviewing user feedback, enriched the list of free users, and started getting requests for calls from some of them.
What we found was a big light bulb moment: many of the free users were midmarket and enterprise IT teams.
We had calls with a few CIOs who explicitly told us that this really was an eDiscovery product, and they were willing to pay if we built a handful of enterprise and security features.
So we furiously did that for a few weeks, rearchitecting the entire product in the process (it's no longer vibe coded, of course!). We repositioned it as a single purpose Slack eDiscovery tool, and quickly gained 15+ customers in the first several weeks from launching.
What’s a non-obvious truth about Slack data that most smart people get wrong?
It’s actually NOT easy to find a subset of data if you just use the Slack search bar or built-in export tools.
This works fine if you need to find one single message or file, but if you need, say… all of the messages that one of your users has ever sent, filtered for all of them that are of a certain topic/keyword/theme? It's pretty much impossible to do this natively in Slack.
Even if you get a giant Slack export archive, sorting through it could take weeks, especially if your company is large and you have thousands of channels, not to mention permutations of DMs and Group DMs.
Who exactly are you building for? Who is your narrowed ICP today, and how do you think about that persona evolving in the future?
We're building for the IT business user, and the compliance use case.
What we're seeing is that, while HR or Legal is the one driving the need behind ViewExport, they delegate the actual eDiscovery work to either (1) an in-house IT leader they can trust, or (2) an outsourced provider such as their IT MSP services provider, or a dedicated eDiscovery Services Provider.
We're building a legal tech product used by the office of the CIO.
We think that eventually more and more lawyers and law firms will use our product directly, because it's so simple to use (unlike legacy eDiscovery platforms), but for now we can't ignore the fact that 90% of the people who actually sign up for the product and become customers are Senior Managers of IT and IT Operations, all the way up through CIOs.
We talked about this a little bit the last time we spoke, but walk me through your acquisition process (trigger events, first touch point, decision point, etc.).
The way we've acquired customers so far has been primarily through organic search.
What we're seeing happen is the following:
The General Counsel or Head of HR will get a data dump from Slack in raw JSON format, see that it's unusable in its current form, and then go ask their counterpart in IT to get help parsing it and making it usable for their case or investigation.
The head of IT then goes looking for a tool to make it usable and searchable, they go google (or even bing!) around for a tool that helps them with this.
They find us, see that we're purpose-built to help with this process, they sign up, and can make progress on their case within minutes rather than weeks.
You mentioned that the bulk of your customers up until this point have been self-serve. How has this adoption pattern influenced product development (vs. building for something that requires more sales touch points)?
With a self-service product, you just have to make it really easy to use.
We've noticed with past products that white-glove onboarding can sometimes be a crutch for a tool that isn't inherently easy. Often we saw, where hand-held onboarding was optional, the users who needed it were non-ICPs; the real ICPs didn't need onboarding, they just "got it".
So, we try to make products that don't require a specialist to onboard you, because they're simple to use out of the box.
What metric have you found most reliably predicts renewal or expansion? When does that metric lie?
The customer's being on whichever plan indicates that they're using our product for a core utility/job they need to do, as opposed to an optional initiative.
For example, agencies or service providers who use our product on the agency plan to serve their clients as part of their operations: GREAT fit, low churn, net-negative churn.
By contrast: "solo license" users are likely to have super high and unpredictable churn rates regardless of their usage, location, billing, etc because their business processes simply aren't set enough in stone that you're solving a need they know they will have for the foreseeable future.
We try to serve customers that have needed XYZ problem solved in the past, need it solved now, and foresee needing to solving it again in the future.
How have you thought about urgency events in this category (compliance dates, incidents, audits)? How do you design around that clock?
These events are actually the primary driver of our business. Someone sends your company a demand letter for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets, and you think it's completely untrue but you need to defend yourself regardless. So you spring into action and need to immediately dive into your Slack archive to prove that XYZ person didn't know about the trade secrets, didn't share files that they shouldn't have, and so forth.
The main way we design around these events is to make our product self-service even for larger organizations. If we put a 'talk to sales' barrier around the product, it wouldn't serve that "I need it done now!" use case that we see very often.
How are you thinking about unconventional growth bets to reach your first 100 customers?
We just signed on with an advisor that has great connections specifically in the IT side of eDiscovery. This individual will receive not only quick-vesting stock, but very generous commissions. We look for what we now call a "Luke Shalom moment", named after the influencer partnership that took our last SaaS company's growth curve from linear to exponential.
Apart from that, we're going straight to bottom of funnel lead gen with our search advertising, and retargeting across as many channels as we can.
We don't think that "scaled cold outbound" will help us very much in this industry. At this stage, legal tech can seem like a walled garden, and we won't pretend like we can just barge in quickly.
Have you run any experiments outside of traditional SEO?
Finding Reddit threads where our competitors are being discussed, and reaching out to the commenters on those threads with a polite request for any feedback they care to share on their experience with that competitor, to learn from them and improve our development.
We've found that many people are happy to share feedback when you're not cold pitching them.
What is one lesson you’ve learned from building ViewExport that might not be obvious to other founders and operators?
"Don't neglect Reddit" is a big one.
I think a lot of founders REALLY neglect Reddit. I know that in my past lives, I definitely have neglected it. But no longer. It's where a lot of the real action is happening.
What advice would you give to other founders building in HR and compliance tooling?
We're so new to the compliance space that I feel like we need to RECEIVE advice more than to give it. But I would give this advice to myself and all other founders:
Just because it's a new industry/domain, doesn't mean you don't belong. You do. Just don't try to rush the process. Learn about the industry and take that learning seriously.
