Founder Feature: Jeff Whitlock (PingPong)
Pivoting from Unbird to PingPong
As part of our Lessons Learned from Student Founders project, we caught up with Jeff Whitlock, founder, and CEO of PingPong, to learn more about his experience pivoting his company from a customer feedback platform to a collaborative video tool for dynamic teams.
In our interview with Jeff, we asked him to share the important lessons that he has learned while taking his company through this transition. It is our hope that sharing Jeff's experience can help early founders, and other members of Campus Founders Fund, to navigate the challenging hurdles of building a startup.
Founder
What is Ping Pong?
Jeff Whitlock
Asynchronous video collaboration for in-person and remote teams. Think "Marco Polo for Professional Teams". Send video, voice, and screen recordings to your team whenever you like at the click of a button.
Current Company Status:
Jeff started building Unbird in 2018 as a platform to help aggregate and organize feedback for product management teams. After nearly 3 years of building out his product and team, Jeff came to the difficult conclusion that he needed to pivot the company. This pivot led Jeff to start PingPong which is now part of the Winter 21 cohort of Y Combinator.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
If your future child was going to start this same business, what advice would you give them?
I'd challenge them on every single function. There's so many features we put in there that are just not that important. It ends up taking a lot of time if you don't need it. One of the things that I think about is the bigger your scope is, the harder it is to hit table stakes.
I would encourage them to try to do a little bit more of validation upfront before just diving in. I think some people feel like you have to go full-time to be successful. And they go full-time on the start-up way too early. Going full-time really early sometimes causes you to skip steps that are important. I would encourage them to think, "Are you gonna go full-time on this? Or are you gonna see if you can build a customer list, get some early validation, and find the right co-founder before jumping in?"
Can you name one thing that has almost killed your company and how did you survive?
Although this wasn't a single crisis moment, I'm not sure we were the right team to solve the problem we were trying to solve. I wish I would have spent a little more time to consider team/problem/product fit.
We started with way too much scope. We were testing multiple hypotheses with the first version of our product. And we really should have found a way to break it down into a much smaller scope to test a smaller hypothesis.
In regards to building your team, would you have done anything differently?
I would have delayed hiring much longer. Hiring too early can be counterproductive. It causes you to skip steps and it makes it harder for you to make fundamental changes. It's like the more resources and investments you make, the more you're sort of stuck on a path. It just gets harder to fundamentally change when you have some path tendency. When you start pushing a boulder down the hill in one direction, it becomes a little harder to change the direction.
What customer/market insight have you discovered that you weren't expecting?
There's just so much hesitancy for a lot of people to adopt new software these days. Maybe it was always that way, but I don't think so. I think it's becoming harder and harder to get people to adopt software. I think that the expectations are much higher. And that people know what is good software. I mean even if you just go back five or six years ago, you would still see websites that were just like Janky 1.0... Web 1.0 websites with just horrible design. You don't see those so much anymore. The bar is a lot higher because people are very familiar with software now, they know what good software is, they know what bad software is.
Secondly, there's just a lot more of it out there and it's easier to build, so the existing tools have bigger and bigger scope, and so it becomes less and less an incentive to adopt point solutions. There is this sentiment with a lot of users that you hear that's like, "I don't want another app." But for me, it's like I don't care how many apps I have, it's all the same operating system. If it does something better I'm gonna use it, but a lot of people don't feel that way, they just fundamentally don't like another app.
What has been your biggest success or failure? What's the thing that either made you the most excited or has been the hardest thing to swallow?
I think the hardest thing to swallow is just that like our original idea, as we conceived, it is probably not quite right. Just being able to come to terms with the fact that I put a lot of work into this and I have to like look in the mirror and say, "You know what? We gotta pivot."
You really hope when you start a product that that first thing you build is gonna work and people are gonna like it. And we just kinda learned... And we kinda learned that our thesis was wrong.
📅 Interview Date: January 30, 2021 (This interview was edited for length and clarity)
Campus Founders Fund is a student-run venture fund focused on finding and funding the best entrepreneurs on campus. To date, we have backed 35+ university-based startups which have collectively gone on to raise over $80M in additional funding. CFF is powered by Kickstart Fund.
