Prioritizing Features and Yourself: An Conversation with Danielle Simpson, Co-Founder of Feedback Panda

Michele Hansen  0:00 
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Colleen Schnettler  0:55 
We are super excited to have a guest on today's podcast. We are joined today by Danielle Simpson, the co-founder of Feedback Panda.

Danielle Simpson
Hi, Colleen. Hi, Michelle.

Michele Hansen  1:07 
Hey, Danielle, I am so excited to have you on today.

Danielle Simpson  1:11 
Thank you for having me.

Michele Hansen  1:13 
So, so excited. So I want to give a quick background on you. And then we're gonna dive right in.

So Danielle is the co-founder of Feedback Panda. And how this came about is Danielle is a classically trained opera singer, who moved to Berlin. And while she was singing, she started teaching English online. And part of that process for teaching the students is to provide them with feedback. And her she and her partner Arvid Kahl who many of you probably know from Twitter, figured out that the process for this feedback could be much more efficient. And there was actually a software solution in here to make that easier for teachers. And so they launched feedback panda together. And then they sold feedback panda in 2019. And so I am so excited to have you here, Danielle, because I feel like there's so much for us to learn from from you. And just so many different points, whether that's, you know, starting a company based on your own needs, scaling that company, figuring out what other people need, even you know, selling that company, and then what do you do after selling that company? There's so much in your story that I think really resonates with people. And so I'm so excited to hear your perspective on everything.

Danielle Simpson  2:38 
Thanks. Yeah, it's my privilege to be here and to share it with you.

Michele Hansen  2:44 
So my first question, you started Feedback Panda based on your own needs. And this is a recurring theme of our show, it's where Geocodio came from. It's where Colleen's Simple File Upload came from. It's where a lot of great bootstraped companies come from. And in those early days, it can be really hard to prioritize your different needs. And when you're solving something for yourself, you know, there's a million things that could be done. And so I'm really curious to hear more like, like, when you first started it, how did you even figure out what you should work on and what you should work on next?

Danielle Simpson  3:22 
So thank you so much for asking this question. Because it's definitely, you know, if you didn't bring it up, this was something I really wanted to share, about how we prioritized work. In the beginning, it was really easy to divide the different work because Arvid was the programmer and, you know, I would have the ideas, I have the knowledge about what the teachers need, what I needed. So I could tell him what to build. And then he would build it. And then so we work super closely. In this kind of like feedback loop where he would build something, I would test it out, I would give him feedback. He iterate on that. And so before we had customers -- super easy, super easy to just kind of build a prototype of a product.

And then about a year, no, sorry, about four months in when we actually had customers. And before this, like adrenaline of something needs to be done and you just are like on autopilot, you just figure out a way to do it. We actually made this pretty expansive chart of 52 roles that we thought our company had. We're a company of two, but we got really specific about different departments, different positions in each department. And then what job what responsibilities each of those, call them people or positions had. So whenever we were kind of stuck for, okay, there's a million things that need to be done today, but what role hasn't seen some attention from us? Or what role kind of gets forgotten about because there's customer service is always something that's like super prominent, because it's actually somebody on the other line that's wanting your attention. But so in that kind of part of the company for, you know, customer experience and customer success, of course, the person on the desk is getting a lot of attention. But what about, you know, who's building the knowledge base? Is that getting a priority, and then, you know, that's going to help the person on the customer desk. And so we got super specific on these different roles. And also, who was going to be responsible for them, which was important that Arvid knew what he was responsible for, I knew what my responsibilities were.

And, and so I think part of the the issue with priority is that we don't always know what the work is, we don't always have this clear understanding of what is this role? And I know, I need to work on marketing, but like, what does that mean? I don't know. So, getting really specific about what the marketing role is, or, you know, the content writer, or all of these different, who's posting to Instagram, all of these different little jobs, even, we're little roles that our company had. So we were very, we had a very clear picture, visually, to consult to when things were getting a bit overwhelming, then we could just look at this and see what needed to be done.

Michele Hansen  6:47 
That's so fascinating. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a two person company. I mean, it's it's ingenious, and, and it sounds like as much as it is defining what the roles and tasks are. Because I think that's a challenge I definitely face into a lot of other people. face too is, you know, figuring out what even needs to be done. And you're also defining what that role isn't, right, like you defined 52 roles, but not 100 roles, like -- there you are, you're scoping the company itself. It's, it sounds like, not just tasks.

Danielle Simpson  7:27 
Absolutely. And then this also became kind of the the structure of who do we want our first hires to be? You know, this role is taking up so much of our time, is it time to bring somebody in, of course, long story short, we never ended up hiring anyone. But you know, we had that layout that structure so that we knew where we could possibly, you know, substitute ourselves out and put someone else in.

Michele Hansen  7:57 
That makes a ton of sense.

Colleen Schnettler  8:00 
So when you guys were this far along, were you both full time by this point?

Danielle Simpson  8:05 
Not quite. So we did this for months after launching this big, you know, 52 person...