00:32:39 · Jack
[00:32:39] S1: Mhmm. And then who does it go directly to the engineers? Like, what does it look like? If it's like, I I come in, I'm like, oh, well, can we do this? Or I guess I put that in Slack, say.
00:32:51 · Will Stewart
[00:32:51] S0: Generally, it starts with good docs. Right? So we try and have good docs, we have good examples, we have like one click stack stack templates with like pre created, like complex things that people can start with. We have some recorded videos that we share with some customers. And then generally in the onboarding, we sort of design out their architecture. It's like, let's understand your architecture. This is what it looks like in Northlink. So it's almost like we're training our customers to be their own internal solutions architects. And that is very effective because we want our customers, you know, a couple of people within within each customer to essentially do the internal, you know, internal selling to their developers like, how do you do this? How do you do this? And then, yes, over time, that means that in Slack we we then get very advanced questions, which is how do I do this? And then it's a question of, you know, trying to figure out is this possible, is this not possible? Building features, if we need to build features, we will build features, we'll put it on the road map, we'll say this is the timeline. And then we'll work with them to get things live. But generally speaking, over the last five years, you can imagine this feature matrix. We talk about feature matrix a lot at North Flank. Every single sale is a feature matrix because we're in developer tool. All of our customers are very very picky on exactly what they want. You don't meet, you know, you've got a thousand things and you don't have that one thing. Some people will not adopt your platform, they won't buy.
00:34:16 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:34:16] S1: If it's the one thing that [00:34:18] S0: Exactly. It could be it could be anything. Right? Some some customers are very picky, quite rightly. So we've always seen this as a feature matrix. It's our job to reduce the friction on that feature matrix. We can if we can meet them where they're at, they're much more likely to adopt and move as many workloads to us as possible. [00:34:39] S1: What do you mean by reduce the friction on the feature matrix?
00:34:39 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:34:39] S1: What do you mean by reduce the friction on the feature matrix? [00:34:42] S0: So if you can't do something, the developer's decision is, okay, well, I've gotta build it then. I'm gonna go and get Terraform, I'm gonna go and get Argo CD, I'm gonna go and build that platform because Northland doesn't support this feature, so we can't adopt So so we have to diffuse that situation. Right? This is everything we do. We do 99.99% of what what you need. So you can start testing dev, import workloads, get get started in, you know, a very short space of time. And then obviously, in these enterprises as well, we need this one feature. We need this one feature. And we start iterating in real time to win the contract. And then you build trust. Ironically, actually having a little bit of bugs means that they have to they have to talk to you and they have to come and talk to you. You have to be on the phone. You have be on Zoom. You have to oh, show me your environment. How does that work? And then they start telling you. And then you start building that relationship and then, you know, a few weeks later, they're running a thousand workloads on you. So so it's it's interesting that, you know, we're talking about bugs earlier. Sometimes that can actually allow you to talk to customers much more efficiently. And they sort of self identify, these are my workloads. This isn't working perfectly. So most of our enterprise contracts, you know, probably have come through support in some way or form.
00:36:00 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:36:00] S1: Okay. Strategic bug. Strategic bug. Exactly. Maybe you should like turn on like a bug. Like something that you could just fix it immediately and see this thing. [00:36:09] S0: We we had a actually talking about this, we we had like a we have a theming system and we built that early. That's controversial to build build a theming system, but we we created some like rogue themes. We were thinking of like just turning them on or like someone would sign up, but we I don't know, we we think he was snooping around the platform or something, let's turn on the pink theme or something. And they say, why is North Link doing this? [00:36:33] S1: Yeah. Wait. So like a capacity meeting? [00:36:35] S0: Oh, something like that. Yeah. We didn't do it in the end. [00:36:38] S1: Wild theme. Yeah. Okay. That's that's brilliant. And actually, so when like you share the road map with someone like I know this maybe it's getting really into the weeds, but it's something that I've started to have to do is like, you know, like what how do [00:36:58] S0: you do that well? So we This is counter to what most people do. Okay. Alright. We do not publish a public road map. Interesting. Because it's never what anyone wants to see. Right? [00:37:10] S1: They just wanna know their future.
00:37:10 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:37:10] S1: They just wanna know their future. [00:37:11] S0: I want my road map. Where's my road map? And like, your future is important. We're working on it. We're prioritizing this. These are the things we're working on that may be relevant to you. And then we're just very honest. Like like, we think we can do it in this quarter, it will be in next quarter. But also, if we we think it's like a highly important, like, this workload makes sense or this feature makes sense, we'll try and get it shipped in twelve hours, twenty four hours. So we may roll out the feature, feature flag, say, oh, hey, by the way, we managed to release that. So recently, we were trying to win a win a a deal that was important to us, and we we made critical changes to improve how we manage custom domains and generation of domains and importing, you know, wildcard certificates, whatever it is. We made some changes. A couple of days later, we win the deal. [00:38:05] S1: That's [00:38:06] S0: cool. So so making these changes, as long as it makes sense and it's in your, you know, wheelhouse and product vision, you should just make the change as quickly as possible because that builds trust, that builds a really important customer relationship. [00:38:19] S1: Okay. So you're basically saying like, don't don't worry about how well you communicate, when it's gonna come [00:38:26] S0: just by Just work on it. [00:38:28] S1: Just