[00:00:00] Chapter 1: Introduction & Setting the Stage
Mirko Novakovic: Hello, everybody. My name is Mirko Novakovic. I am co-founder and CEO of Dash0. And welcome to Code RED code. Because we are talking about code and red stands for request errors and Duration the Core Metrics of observability. On this podcast, you will hear from leaders around our industry about what they are building, what's next in observability, and what you can do today to avoid your next outage. Today my guest is Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. Berkay is the CEO of Actioner. A new AI customer intelligence agent for B2B companies. He's also the general partner of ScaleX Ventures. Before that, he co-founded Opsgenie, which was later acquired by Atlassian for $295 million. Berkay, happy to have you here.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Happy to be here, Mirko.
Mirko Novakovic: Perfect. Yeah. I mean, Opsgenie is a very well known player in the observability world as a tool that people use to get paged right when in the middle of the night.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: So not so loud, maybe.
[00:01:10] Chapter 2: Code RED Moments & Reliability Lessons
Mirko Novakovic: But let's start with my first question, which I always ask, which was your biggest Code RED moment?
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Yeah, I thought about it as I listened to your previous podcast. And so the question we didn't really have a very memorable code RED. When I was there, we spent a lot of time on reliability, like, much more than probably functionality building you know, the three principles of it like minimizing dependencies of the solution and having redundancies, but also trying to keep it complex, you know, these conflicting tools. So we used AWS and we accepted that we were going to depend on them, but did a lot of work around doing everything else. Even in AWS, we didn't use all services like we only use the core things that are stable, like SQS and dynamo. We knew we could rely on it and it worked like we didn't really have major outages, but it kind of became apparent that, you know, we were right about that after the acquisition which we can talk about later by Atlassian. You know, we were in a different environment and had to integrate with a lot of the Atlassian services, infrastructure services, which we wanted to like. We wanted to be able to use a class in identity so that users can log into Jira and Opsgenie with the same idea and so on. But that brought in the dependency issue, right? So we resisted for a long time.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: We always built whenever possible parallel systems. So like if that doesn't work, you know, we could fall off over to our own systems. But that's not always possible, which is in case of a doesn't, you know, identity. It wasn't. And after I left, Atlassian had a major outage, and even those Opsgenie services were up. Customers that used Atlassian identity couldn't log in and use the system for weeks. And that was like, more than anything I could dream of as an outage. Like, you know, we were talking about if we were out for, like, more than a couple of hours. We may not survive that outage because there was so much dependence on us being able to notify people that we considered that, like this has to be working all the time so that, like, our service not being able to serve for like, weeks was a shocker. I mean, even though I wasn't involved and out of the company by then, it hurts, like, you know, it's always your baby, so to speak. As. As I'm sure you know it was painful to watch, even from outside. Like a big, big nightmare scenario, I would say Sunday deleted some data, and the only way was to restore manually for each customer and so on. Just just really painful.
Mirko Novakovic: I can totally relate to that. Yes. How it feels. Especially if customers can't log in right and can't get access. It's kind of the worst case scenario.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I even had pings from customers, like, you know, I was the heart of the company for years by then. Like, what's going on? I'm like, nothing I can do. Like you know, because their systems are working. But we didn't have a way to get them to the solution, so they didn't. I should say not. Not for me by then.
[00:04:42] Chapter 3: Founding Opsgenie – From Turkey to the Global Stage
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah. I would love to understand more how you got started with Opsgenie, by the way. Especially because you're from Turkey, right? And you started the business in Turkey, which is not like the usual place where those kind of really big, successful startups I started. I think the only one I could read this is also Turkish, right? I think it is, isn't it originally? I don't know.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: No, I don't think so. I think he's Sicilian. Yeah. Okay.
Mirko Novakovic: But they're not so many, right? So. So how did you come up with the idea? How did you start? How did you get funded? Was that easy or not?
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Well, I was working in, you know, in monitoring space for a long time, like, it's, you know, 30 years maybe now. And in the US, I worked for the vendors, you know, as a sales engineer, post sales solutions architect type of roles. I work for an enterprise. I implemented those tools, monetary tools. You know, I'm sure, you know, like, going back to these netcool and UniCenters, HP OpenWay me all those, like tools. So I came from that background like system admin, implementer of tools and so on. And the last company I was working for was a network management vendor called Smarts, and I was in Europe. But I'm back in Europe and you know, covering the EMEA like Europe Middle East, Africa region, working with a lot of partners, implementing for large companies. But we always had this college friends like, you know, wanted to start our own company. And eventually when Smarts was acquired by EMC, I was kind of like, well, this is the opportunity I'm leaving. And I left and started sort of a consulting business. I was doing a lot of implementations and so on. And then I convinced a couple of my college friends to join me so that we can build this back end some products instead of just selling time as a consultant. That was the original. They call like forward deployed engineer. Now, I was the sort of an original forward deployed engineer. I think I was in the field implementing stuff, and they were building tools that we can reuse in different customer environments.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: So we did that for, you know, 6 or 7 years. I think we had a, you know, a dozen customers paying us large sums, but we didn't really have a way to increase that number of customers. But we were working as part of those organizations, you know, seeing what problems they had and so on. And we built a bunch of different products that had, you know, two customers, three customers, that sort of thing. The development team ended up, like, very solid. I mean, they, you know, I would come up with a product idea based on what I was seeing and they would build it in a month or two, we would sell it to our customer, maybe another one, but never got it right. And the idea was, again, like, we saw something. The customer wanted a capability. We went out to the market and couldn't find anything because we would find the product and, you know, do the implementation, integration and so on. Typically system integrator type capabilities. We couldn't find anything for alerting notification management on the scale that they were getting thousands of alerts and how to differentiate what to do with all that kind of stuff. So we decided like there is an opportunity here and like, let's build something. And then we started talking to smaller companies and realized that they needed that as well.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Like if you this, you know, this time frame of the web is coming through mobile apps like this 24 over seven operations were becoming a thing, you know, cloud based services and that people needed some way of routing alerts to different times and escalating and so on. So we decided to build it. And, you know, we used some of the customers as design partners for them. At that time, I was still the only, I think I was initially living in Belgium. I moved to Switzerland. That's where I was when I was building the company. And the rest of the team was in Turkey, the technical team. So that's kind of how it started. And when we started building off Opsgenie, there was a very, you know, in beta and so on. There was a very big interest from especially companies in Europe at the time, only notifications were through SMS and each one was like $0.35 or something like that. Like it was ridiculously expensive. So when we built this tool and had the mobile app, which nobody else had, Pagerduty was our main competitor then, and they didn't have a mobile app. So when we built that and had a way of notifications, there was a big interest in European startups and so on. And so we had a very day one that people started using in a year. We said we were going to production, and a lot of them already became a paying customers.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: That's how it started. So from that point on, we just, you know, kept building and, you know, steady growth 10%. The month was, you know, without doing any marketing and so on, just, you know, making it work for the customers, see what else they want and so on. So that's kind of how it started. A totally bootstrapped I didn't even know you could raise, you know, funding from people like that. That was the thing. This was not, I mean, not just the years, but it wasn't just in my skill set. Like, I didn't know anything about that world. Company investors would call from once a while, wanted to get some information because they would hear us about us from their other companies. I would talk to them, but, like, you know, nothing would go. And I didn't really have it by then. Time to look for investment. And we were cashflow positive from day one. So it just went that way until 2016. Reed Christian, who is a partner now in CRV, he was an analyst in battery. He contacted me. And, you know, I kind of kind of gave him the rush off, like, I don't have time to, you know, do anything. So but he came and we talked a lot and he helped me with organizing some of that stuff. And that relationship ended up taking in the first and the only investment for the company about 2016, I think.
[00:11:11] Chapter 4: The Atlassian Acquisition – Strategic Decisions and Integration
Mirko Novakovic: It was two years before the acquisition or went.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Two years. Yeah, about two years and a couple of months. It was a pretty fast years. You know, I think we were 30 people when I took in the investment. There were 180 when we sold. So it was like a major buildup. And I think we were three people and it was like 90 people by the time we were done. So it was just, you know, build up to go to market once we knew that it was working just build up marketing, you know, STR and account Context is all that stuff. It, you know, it grew very rapidly and eventually led up to the acquisition by Atlassian.
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah. And how did that go? I mean, I remember that I was kind of surprised, right? Because at the time, I think I'm not sure if they acquired status page before or after obscurity.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Before. Yeah.
Mirko Novakovic: Before. So Status Page was basically the first time I saw them. And like, oh, they are taking something in the monitoring observability space. Right. And then it was OpsGenie. So at that time I was asking myself, okay, where are they going. Right. What are they building? And was it interesting move. Yeah.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Yeah, it was an interesting move. I mean, I think in the market, the Splunk acquired the company that was smaller than us, called Victor Ops. And they had talked to us as well. And then when they acquired the Victor ops, like, kind of people kind of woke up and looked at the field and saw that there were only 3 or 4 companies that you could buy. And it started moving. And I realized at that time that something was going to happen. But we had relationships with Atlassian, partner team, like we had built a lot of integrations, and I knew that they were also trying to build something in-house. Like from the conversations, it was kind of clear in that sense. So we knew them as well as many others in the market. So we had an inbound offer from another vendor, and it was attractive enough that I decided, okay, like there's, you know, we had said no a couple times before to various parties just to, you know, give people a like a the first acquisition offer we got was $750,000 for the company. So like that was an offer. So, you know, we came a long way from there to you know, saying no to a couple hundred million even before. But when it came to these levels you know, it's I, I know, I'm sure you went through the same things. It's like, when do you sell? Do you sell? Just like I didn't know anything about funding.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: I didn't know anything about exiting either. Like that was I didn't build a company to exit. It was just a, you know, something that I wanted to to build. But once I started, okay, like, what is happening? Like what is talking and stuff like it made sense to explore further. So, you know, I reached out to anybody who had kind of shown interest before, like we had an inbound offers. And, you know, we will look into it. So if you want to do something, now is the time kind of situation, which was which was the case. So a couple companies got involved in that process. And at the end you know, Atlassian looked like the best fit. Truly. Like, we you know, we were all product at Atlassian, kind of, you know, made that product stuff, and they had a lot of gap in this space, the operation space. I had found that a lot of things that I wanted to build in, if I wanted to continue myself, was going to replicate what they had. And I didn't like the, the strategic positioning in that sense. Like, I didn't want to compete with that last scene, you know, like replicate what they have. So in that sense, I said, okay, like, this is the right move. And we decided to exit. And there's they were you know, Atlassian looks at things as the work items.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: You know, the incident was a work item that they wanted to work on. That was their focus. Like when they looked at it we had the developer community and the concept of alerts and instruments and so on. With the hindsight, it was a lot harder than they were anticipating. Like, the field is much bigger than what it looks from outside, you know, like, just not just creating manual incidents, but dealing with lots of alert volumes and integrating with lots of tools. You know, there was OpenTelemetry and all that kind of stuff. So we were integrating with everything one by one and so on. So I think they realized that it was a bigger thing to chew than initially, but you know, there was still an opportunity, I think. Big opportunity. We all bought in to the idea. So it was a very rapid, you know, two months, like, everything was done. It's a blur. Like it was not the best two months of my life. Like the talking to people Australia. In California, it was like a 24 hour cycle. Lawyers, you know, lots of lots of things I had no, you know, knowledge or interest learning. I had to go through in a very, like, a rapid time frame, but, you know, it's part of it. Like you have to learn a lot of things that you don't want to. Yeah.
Mirko Novakovic: I had exactly the same when we had this process with IBM. It was three months and I was so exhausted at the end. Right. So exhausted. So when the deal closed, I always tell I was in my room and it was like I had no really happy feeling. Right? Because I was like, so done. And it was just a side. I was like, okay, yeah, yeah.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: You know, I, I still sometimes tell the story like, you know, it was a 300 million exchange deal. And we signed some things in, in a hotel room somewhere, you know, like the if this happened in Turkey, there will be 20 days of buying the paper. You know, I didn't like that. It just I told them it was electronic signatures. I bought it in, and there was a company in UK buying, like, all this convoluted financial arrangements to to acquire the company. All happened electronically, like, you know. We were all in different places. One of the Atlassian founders did come to Turkey for it. Like we did the announcement in Ankara to the office, and then we went to Barcelona to for the announcement together. So I was there. I was there a rough time because there was a deadline, like they wanted to announce in the user conference. They had so we had to rush to get to it, but there wasn't really enough time. And I like, you know, when like two months, like, what can it possibly take two months. That one I was making.
[00:18:10] Chapter 5: Opsgenie’s Fate and Product Integration
Mirko Novakovic: Actually, I was at that conference, by the way. Oh in Barcelona. Yeah. Because at the time I, my company, my first visit, we were a large Atlassian partner. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think and I was at that conference, by the way, the first time I met Mike and Brooks, one of the founders. Yeah. 2001, I was at a conference in Boston called the Server Side Conference, and I'm having breakfast in the morning sitting with a young guy with a white t-shirt and on it it was JIRA 1. So I see that's where that's where. Mike. I think it's only Mike and the other co-founder in the company at the time, and they were releasing 001 at the conference. At the time.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: He's doing the making.
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah, yeah, that's really good. And the nice guy now, I think. The richest Australian. Right? Huge successful business. Yeah. And interesting enough to finish that journey, I was very surprised that now it looks like OpsGenie is going out of business. Right. That's what we hear from a lot of customers who are using OpsGenie, and now they are looking for a replacement because it looks like it will go out of business. Is that true?
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: I don't think so. I mean, I don't really have any internal knowledge, but what they wanted to, they didn't know what to do with OpsGenie. In general, they will offer tools they don't really care much about. It seems like, you know, the Bitbucket is sitting there, but there's an active team, you know, a fairly large size team working on and off. What they've been working on is to put it inside the service management product. So all the capabilities there, like nothing went away. But you have to buy JSM instead of OpsGenie. So it's more of a packaging difference I think. But you know, it's JSM is a like a JIRA product. So there's, you know, some people love it, some people hate it. You know, like they don't want to you know, interface. It's slower, like, it feels outdated and stuff and not this cool developer tool kind of thing. So I, I mean, I, I always thought they were gonna have a big hit if they retire of OpsGenie brand and go with it. I mean, they thought the same. That's why they didn't do it this long. I was in favor of doing it right away, like you know, make it a Jira ops or something like that, and and go for that. But they didn't want to do that at the time. So now they're basically doing it. But yeah, the marketing around it was done poorly. I think that I get a lot of, you know, I heard of Opsgenie got turned off. You know, sorry to hear that. That kind of stuff from friends, old colleagues. And which doesn't seem to be the case, but that's how it's perceived in the market.
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah. I'm just reading. Right. I'm just reading what? The announcements that it says. 5th of April 2027 Atlassian will discontinue support for discontinue support for OpsGenie and access to the product will be shut down. All data is not migrated.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: To that it is available in JSM. They announced the shutdown. Like you know it's.
Mirko Novakovic: Exactly
Mirko Novakovic: All data are not migrated to JIRA service manager or compostable by the date will be deleted. Right. So it's essentially in the second sentence that it's now part of your service manager. Yeah. But that's the way it goes right. With products. And then you turned investor right. I did pretty much the same. And then founder again. So tell me about your investment story. So from, from not knowing what venture capital is to becoming a venture capitalist.
[00:22:09] Chapter 6: Becoming an Investor – Supporting the Next Generation
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: So, you know, just continuing in the not knowing anything about anything. You know, train, so to speak, like after the acquisition, you know no one knew us in Turkey, like the even the companies who were using OpsGenie didn't know that you know, we had a major presence here and built a product here. So then, you know, obviously, exit made a big news in this part of the world, Eastern Europe and as well. And so I started meeting a lot of founders that kind of wanted to talk about, like how we did it because, you know, going from here to global, you know, being successful in us, it's pretty tough, like to make that transition. Especially, you know, earlier it's getting more common. So there's more information. But there was a lot less in our time. So I was talking to them, you know, helping them as much as I could. Like what we did, how we did what they can do, introducing them to investors and so on. But it was always tough because they had this you know, they were, for example, a few of them in Turkey. They were successful making a few million dollars from companies here that they had to kind of stop serving them to be able to focus on which is kind of what we did. You know, we when we focused on off Opsgenie, one of our guys took the legacy business.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: It became his business and we continue with our Opsgenie. But we funded for a while the development from that company's revenue. But that's you know, we pulled it off, but it's a very hard transition, I'm sure, you know. So they were asking about all that kind of stuff. What became obvious that without capital, they were just not going to be able to make that transition. And capital is very scarce still in this region in Eastern Europe, as you know. So, you know, and I was working with a investor, Dilek, who became partners my partner later we decided that, you know, like, if we can provide the capital to, to make the transition, you're just, you know, talking and it's all talk. And that's kind of how it came around to solve that problem. Like, if you want to become a global company, you have, you know, technical founders, something that differentiates your core product. Like we wanted to provide the investment so you can make that leap. That was the investment thesis, and I became an accidental investor, so to speak. You know, started the fund with the lake over five years ago now. That's how I got into this investment business became a VC, moved to the dark side.
Mirko Novakovic: And mainly also in Turkey. Or where did you invest?
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Not in Turkey, but we invest a lot of people like me, like Turkish founders who lived in Europe or us a few others as well, like the but maybe less than half hour in Turkey, I guess. But like, they have some connections to Turkey like the one of the founders are Turkish. The others might be, you know, from US and Europe, building a team in Turkey. That was a big competitive advantage for us. Like there was a rich high quality engineers, developers in Turkey, and there wasn't a lot of industry for them. So like you know, that was probably the success of like, we tapped into it and, found people we had no business of attracting any other way. Right. Like they were they came in because, like we were really the most attractive company. There wasn't a lot of like us. And that that was the, like the early time, you know, with the team was like this. It's the high that I'm trying to hit, probably. Right. Like, that's the you have a group of competent people all rolling in the same direction. It's magical. And so yeah, like, I'm trying to get back to that, that feeling like, you know, like with the with the team and then go for it again. But that was the, you know, that was founders like that, you know, wanted to build a team in Turkey or they had they were trying to go to the US an or UK try to compete globally and funding them was the kind of idea.
[00:26:36] Chapter 7: Returning to Founding – The Drive to Build Again
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah, it makes sense and I can totally relate also to the fact that you found it again. Right. And like I can understand the feeling. Right. Bringing a team together, working on something, building a product, how good that feeling is. Right. And I mean, you probably missed it, right?
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: I did. Yeah.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Yeah. I mean, I talked about what to do a lot and that, you know, I after a while I felt like, you know, it's just and I felt like, you know, the world is changing. So I didn't want to give too much advice in terms of, like, we did it this way, but, like, things are different now. Like, maybe I wouldn't do it that way. So I felt like in time my experience was my differentiator, and it was degrading, you know, like, because the market was the world is changing. And with AI it was both like, it's this magical new world. Like when it came in, I really got excited. I was, you know, when I finished college and moved to us for grad school, it was like 1990. Beginning of 1990s. Just the internet was coming through. So, like, I lived through that, and then, you know, the mobile and the cloud and stuff like this felt like all of them combined, like, very rapid, like world changing stuff. So I'm, you know stop when people are indifferent to it, like it's this is, you know, everything is changing. So, like, in that building new products, like, it's very exciting and you know, building with a team that you click like, that's like, there's nothing like it, I mean. So, yeah, I went back to a building. Building something which I'm happy about.
[00:28:16] Chapter 8: The Birth and Vision of Actioner
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah, it's called action now. So tell us a little bit about what you are building.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Yeah. We're calling you know, we're still not sure about the exact positioning, but the core problem was something you know, I call it a customer intelligence product. In underneath like in the, I think last 20 or 30 years, we built the industry a lot of despair products for different silos. Right. Like, the marketing has marketing even in monitoring. As you know, there is a monitoring for this and monitoring for that, like, there's, you know, ten different monitoring tools, network monitoring, ATM monitoring application monitoring service, all that kind of stuff. And I think primarily maybe it's because the buyers buy that way. Like if you sell something that's appealing to multiple teams, then they have to agree on something and the sales cycles go crazy. And it fails somehow. So, you know, the industry built products for each one, but it's the product management, product marketing, product, CRM and all that kind of stuff. And the data, customer data is like fragmented into those products, very much silos. So it's not available to everybody in a easy way in context of what they need to do when they're making decisions. When I was in OpsGenie, I read every support ticket, you know, like every support conversation. And it was like, I didn't understand how product managers can work without doing that. Like, which was a big contention after the acquisition it was a different world. Like I literally read for a long time, I would read every conversation and the following support issues was not supports problem or customer success problem. It was all the team like you would bring the right engineer to solve it and all that.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: And I thought it worked well and we kind of tapped into the what the customers want. And when we have conversations and you reach out to the customers, Then they talk to you. But if you don't talk to them when they need you, they don't want to talk to you and you need them, right? So I had built all this business intelligence system, like, you know, I had very good engineers and had the bandwidth, sort of like, you know, put together 3 or 4 people. Team that took data from all those places, put it into a data warehouse, build a BI system on top of it. And so we had all that kind of system, which I used very aggressively. And I couldn't really imagine how to operate without it. And then, you know, I realized that, like, well, this is not, you know, the case everywhere. I thought everybody had that kind of stuff. Like in Atlassian, I realized that nobody had it. Like, you couldn't get information about a customer. Even in a month like that. There was no apparatus to give you that. So he came from that. Premises like this is fragmented information You need to be able to know what's going on with these customers in all aspects. You know how they're using the product, like what is their support experience with, what are they talking about? You know, which part of the product they're using, not using. Is it going up or down? And every communication like, you know, are they happy.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: You know, all that kind of stuff. So we need to bring this all together. So we kind of went around and designed a unified data model that brings all this informed, opinionated way, like, you know, this is how it should be. And, you know, so that I can understand fully what the data looks like and it can query it and get the data and we can query like, process all the customer data. And we can tell you like, you know, what was the all the interactions, you know, what's going on, all that kind of stuff and decided to focus on customer success as the persona or the, Entity to target because with the financial markets changing and the money no longer free. Customer acquisition is very expensive. So retention became much more important. Like we had 130% of senior, which was awesome. And now I think everybody has to kind of strive for something like that. You know, 100 plus percent, because it's, again, the acquisition costs are very high. And what is missing? One of the biggest things is that the customer success, you know, you throw people and hoping that, you know, just because the customer has somebody to talk to, it will solve their problem, but they don't know what the customer is doing. You know what their objectives are. You know, are they happy? Like you're reaching out to them, but you don't know that they have a ticket that they're very upset about. So we decided to, like, bring all this information and make it available with AI assistance.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: And you know, if you give 100 accounts to a customer success person, they're not going to be able to keep track of all that. But we can have I look at every customer every night or every week, whatever. Look at all the data and decide whether you know where it should be in context with their financials to like, is it a big customer or small customer? What is the error like? What is the potential error? Right. All that can play into how you prioritize where your CSM spends the time and just provide them the tools to. Minimize, if not eliminate the busywork like updating systems and all that kind of stuff. I think we can do all that you know, in a much more automated fashion using AI. And it's working better than I was thinking. Like the AI is getting better at a faster pace than I thought when we started. I mean, we kind of bet on that, that the stuff that we couldn't do then it's going to be able to do in six months, a year, but even faster, I think it's getting there. So that's kind of what we are building, like a intelligence platform that brings all the information and makes it available in context wherever you want to consume, and not just our product, but browser extension. So when you're writing an email, you can or reading an email and so on and wherever else you may want to consume it that's the gist of it.
[00:34:49] Chapter 9: Customer-Centricity, Lessons Learned, and Product Philosophy
Mirko Novakovic: Yeah, it makes total sense. By the way, before I started Dash0, I was thinking about building something very similar. I can send you my notes afterwards. I will send you my notes because it's a true story. I also had the team dedicated at Instana, and we built something. We called it the Instana portal, where we also had the data warehouse and a full application on top of it, because we also wanted to know everything about our customers. Right. Are the users using the product? How are they using it? Do they figure out any problems? Are they expanding? Are they growing? What support tickets are open. All these things we wanted aggregate. And then we had the. And we didn't use AI at the. At the time, we had a very simple rule based engine where we had certain rules, right? Where we said if they don't have X, y, z dashboards or if they don't have these and are set up, then they get points. And then they had like green, yellow and red lights right where we knew if something yellow or red, we could reach out to the customer and make sure they get happy again or get the value out of the product before they turn right. So I totally relate to that and I agree with you. I looked at many products. There are some like CRM products for PLG like Pocos, but they are all more around the sales process and less around the customers and understanding them. And so I really haven't found a product that can really do what I wanted. So put me on your early customer list. I would really love to test it.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: You got a deal? Yeah, definitely.
Mirko Novakovic: Because I love it. I really also obsessed about it, right? Because I feel bad if I don't understand. If the customers get the value I want them to get.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Yeah. Say, man, I mean, and also, you know, again, not because I was some kind of genius, but you know, we didn't have marketing in sales early on because I didn't really know at the time how to do that stuff. But we did like focus on the customer, what they want and the like. All that. And it paid off. A lot of the customers came from referrals that we didn't even know about like that. They would say, you know, why they use and all that kind of stuff. And when they ask something as a capability will turn around and do it if you can. If not, we would tell them, you know why or what we plan, all that kind of stuff. So having seen that work, you know, when you're close to the customers, not the. You know, sort of a slogans about it, but actually staying customers and not then moving into an environment where support, for example, is considered the overhead and then also outsourced to another company. It was crazy, right? Like I lost my mind. Like I'm like, how can you do that? Like I and I want to talk to the customers.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Right. So I think OpsGenie team kept it. We had a chat based support intercom all the way till like last few months. I think they had it on till that announcement. Only Atlassian only OpsGenie. Customers got chat based support. To what? What they were doing. But I think now it's it's completely over. So to me that is a very, you know, big differentiator like when customer can reach out to you. I mean, we had an idea percent, you know, satisfaction like in they they could vote after every interaction. And the customers who had the. The problems came higher in their customer satisfaction survey. So like if you have a problem and you know they care about you and solve your problem, it's better than the ones that don't have any interaction with you. Like they appreciate the help and that you're not leaving them, you know, on their own, so to speak. So it's important to me.
Mirko Novakovic: I think it's, by the way, one of the most important advices I give founders exactly what you just said, because a lot of people don't get it right. If, if, if a customer has a problem, you can still turn that into something positive, right? The way you deal with that problem, right? If you are proactive, if you are helpful, if you solve the problem, and then after that you ask the customer, even if he was super angry about the problem, if you dealt with the problem in a really good way. It will turn into a positive interaction because at the end of the day, every customer knows that every tool on this planet will have a problem someday, right? There is no I mean, that's Murphy's Law, right? You will always have issues and there will always be bugs, but it's really about how you as a vendor deal with those problems, right? And if the customer feels hurt and I by the way, I also love to treat every customer very similar if it's a big or small one, because I even if a small customer has a problem that could turn also into a big problem for a large customer, right? So I think the way you deal with customers is really a cultural thing, and it must come from the top. And then you can turn that.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Even as a, you know, self-interested way. Right. Like the one of our breakthroughs came from a company, a startup, founders, you know, a German startup, founders that found our product, you know, from a commercial opportunity. It was like an eight people startup, right? Like, how much money can you make? But he probably told 50 different customers after that. Like, I could track the end like some lineage of a third, like third, a third of the customers to that one person. And he was in a small company. We also saw people move jobs from a small company, go to a very large company that would never find us otherwise. So it's a you know, you can't differentiate in that sense. You have to help them. And that's like a I think of it as an opportunity. Every interaction, not a burden. Like, that's the biggest. Like, I think larger companies that I'm spending this much time like this much money and how do I pay less like instead of. And then having research teams like, try to go do surveys to figure out what the customers want this way or that way. Like. That's to me, that was nuts. And so I give the same advice. You know if my grey beard is anything maybe that makes some mark somewhere.
[00:41:27] Chapter 10: Closing Thoughts and Farewell
Mirko Novakovic: And I think that that one ages pretty well, right? Definitely. It's advice that it's always kind of true. Very good. Advice also for founders here was super fun talking to you. I wish you all the best with. And I hope you give me early access and I would love to test it and get the hands on that because I just love the topic.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu: Thank you, I appreciate it. Great talking to you.
Mirko Novakovic: Thanks for listening. I'm always sharing new insights and insight and knowledge about observability on LinkedIn. You can follow me there for more. The podcast is produced by Dash0. We make observability easy for every developer.
