[CEOs] have an inverse approval problem: they're often getting stage managed by their direct reports who are filtering, blocking and processing data. So you're gonna have an interesting kind of inversion there where part of the friction the CEO faces will be all these fucking spoofers who are like ‘I don't want you to see the data’

One other perspective on the CEO persona is, it gets more interesting the less defined the use case [for a product like this]. It is both the Sales angle and the Product angle. And actually, the truth is that those things are inseparable. We just divide companies in Sales and Product because we have to divide it somewhere. But they're completely recursive.

I don't have a mechanism by which to say accurately well, we've looked at it, and either this is a problem or this isn't a problem, or it's gotten better, or it's gotten worse.

When you are taking the time to rethink and revisit [product] positioning, or you're working on a new [marketing] campaign, and you want to check and see.. do we have all the freshest sort of ideas coming to the table to go back out and do the fact-finding through all these different channels… it takes time.

The problem is that it gets done extremely inconsistently and infrequently.

There's often a pretty big barrier between user feedback and what actually gets to [the people doing the work].

So beyond getting it [from colleagues], because I'd say getting the feedback is sometimes the first challenge…. So you've got Customer Success teams, you've got Sales teams. They're talking to the customers. My goal is always to make sure that I've got a really good relationship with Sales and with the Customer Success teams to ensure that I'm actually getting that feedback.

If your product enables getting that feedback and providing it in like a clear, concise way, that, to me seems pretty interesting.

Sometimes it is helpful for them to see the actual, like, verbatim feedback, even when it's negative, because it'll be something that's like very easy to fix.

It wasn't something that was living and breathing. So I think this idea of having something that allows you to engage with and be prompted to engage with feedback and information as different data points with AI today… I'm sure there's so many ways that that could be automatically fed into updates or documents.

If I could have done that with better data to say: Hey, okay, 50 people asked for this feature, but I got 250 complaints about the fact that the loading time takes three seconds. Let me go fix that, which I can do in two weeks. Versus build a feature that's going to take me three months.

It just becomes a case where the loudest, most aggressive or largest customers get an unfair share of the reaction to this feedback… and so I spend a ton of time, frankly combating other areas of the business saying ‘okay, I get that so-and-so has been screaming about this, and they've been screaming about it for a while - but have we really vetted the truth behind these claims.

We use its integration to Product Board, which is, in theory, our intake for customer feedback.

We had Intercom and switched that out for Qualified because Qualified gave us a whole lot of customer insights as well. It linked into the CRM systems and allowed us to see what a customer was looking at and doing on our website, in our documentation, in our product.

And we have, you know, CX team actually working on trying to sort this all out right now. My Korean team is using VoC Studio right now but my Japan team is not using anything… they're just getting insights from direct reports.

And I like that a person can tag some part of a Gong call and then send that as an insight to ProductBoard… that is useful feedback. The problem is that it gets done extremely inconsistently and infrequently.

Before I just redid our sales deck, I watched 15 Stage-1 Opportunity calls from AEs… And I basically built a picture of how I thought the current sales deck was being used, what I thought was going well, what wasn't, and therefore what I thought needed to change.

I have, I guess, like, strategic topics that I'm interested in, and I want to know what's being said about those, and really the only way for me to do it is to go search across the corpus of recordings for those and then go listen to those calls and form an opinion based on that which is, which is quite time intensive.

I would say that it's been more ad-hoc ping on Slack - not a concrete system that tracked.

I think one big problem we have is actually this stuff doesn't exist anywhere like it exists in a ticket.

Where I've seen it work horribly was talking to potential customers and taking their feedback - also verbatim - and then making a priority without considering all other feedback. So every week was a new feature, or the old one was not even implemented.

When I saw the [previous product] of Q&A… I was a little bit like, I don't know if I'll actually use it…. I'd have to train myself to use that. This Report, I will review.

I love that you guys have quotes and that you have links to the actual source.

The Report this week was really good, just read it. Random idea: what if we published online the Positive Feedback section every week?

I just wanted to understand what the fuck is going on … especially in our Sales and CS calls … and it’s all a black box. So I really need this Report.

I think what's appealing to me is less that this will give me some sort of intelligent explanation of something, or a truly creative association…but rather that it's just going to do the drudge work [of finding it all]... I think there just could be some angle for a refreshing take here where you're not claiming it's some sort of a magic AI. It's just doing tons of grunt work and finding these things. It's just fast and efficient.

One top level vantage point: maybe the unique offering of Format is that it's not siloed to one department and maybe they're these more meta use cases, or not even a use case… it's just company level stuff. I think that's a really, potentially differentiating angle.