Company: Dovetail
Founder: Benjamin Humphrey
Website: https://dovetail.com/
About Dovetail
Founded by Benjamin Humphrey in 2017 (ex.Atlassian), Dovetail’s mission is to improve the quality of every thing through the power of customer insights. In only six years, Dovetail has grown to drive research innovation at over 3,700 organizations including big brands like Harvard Business, Universal, Deloitte, Porsche, Starbucks, Shopify, Atlassian, Shell and more.
When did you start?
I founded Dovetail in 2017. I came from Atlassian as one of their lead product designers and held design roles at Loop and AVOS, a company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. It was at Atlassian, working with researchers, that I noticed a gap in software to help companies better utilize their product research to improve their customer experience.
What challenges have you overcome?
One skill you have to get good at as a CEO is pushing accountability down, as you can’t decide everything. What I’m trying to work on at the moment with the leadership team is driving accountability with them and sharing the load. You hire senior people because they’re good at their job, but they also bring a huge amount of value because they can take things off your plate and not buckle under the pressure of a fast-growing startup.
There’s a lot of pressure to continue to grow personally as the company grows, so you need to always have a growth mindset. You need to almost ‘fire and rehire’ yourself every few months to keep up with the changing requirements of the business. There’s a lot of context switching on any one day. I might have back-to-back meetings where I give product feedback, deal with a leadership team conflict, interview a creative director candidate, talk to a journalist, write an internal blog post, review a marketing project, pair with a designer, and prepare slides for the next company all-hands. Context switching can be very draining, but it is something you need to get really good at.
What impact on the SaaS industry has the company had?
Dovetail helps teams turn customer research and user feedback into actionable insights to improve the quality of whatever it is they’re working on. We’re addressing a critical pain point that many enterprise companies have: teams all over the world rely on insights from their customers and the market to deliver groundbreaking products and services that people love. But connecting with customers is harder than it should be. Whether you’re a marketer, salesperson, designer, or product manager, finding the right data to make the best decisions means hours trawling through drives and wikis, navigating endless spreadsheets of feedback, setting up meetings with sales or support, or negotiating red tape to get in front of a customer yourself.
Companies that have seen value in Dovetail’s software have a high volume of data generated from multiple sources, and want to centralise and democratise that data so that it’s possible to share with different teams easily. We work with many large companies that do a lot of customer research and want to ensure they are getting the ‘biggest bang for their buck’ when it comes to that research – including some of the most well-known brands like Atlassian, Harvard Business Publishing, Canva, Deloitte, VW and more.
We’re a rapidly growing company, reaching a $650m valuation within five years. We’re used by product, research, sales, customer success teams and growth experts, and we’re helping brands really listen to their customers and understand their needs.
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