YNAB

Mat Patterson (00:00):

This is a story about money technology, four secret rules, the Beastie Boys and a pretty cool club that I would probably never be led into. It's a story that begins with an Excel spreadsheet in exactly the way that most great stories don't. I'm Mat Patterson. This is the Supportive, and today we are talking to Todd Curtis from YNAB.

About that spreadsheet: It's 2003 and Jesse and Julie Meecham are college students. They're recently married and they're broke. Jesse has a deep trustworthy voice, the kind of voice that used to tell us way too much about the plot of the summer's big blockbusters. 

Jesse Meecham (00:45):

Hello, my name is Jesse Meecham. 

Mat Patterson (00:47):

He's basically the Don LaFontaine of personal finance, but Jesse also has a spreadsheet. He and Julie use it to budget their painfully limited finances together and it's that spreadsheet that will go on to become the foundation of the company, formerly known as you need a budget now called Simply YNAB or possibly Enahb if you're a bit more Nordic. In the early years, Jesse sold that Excel spreadsheet to other people who wanted to take control of their money and who also used the Windows operating system, which was probably a good call because the people buying Mac needed to send pretty much all of their money to Steve Jobs, but there was at least one Mac user who wanted to use Jesse's spreadsheet. His name was Todd Curtis. He was a school principal, a finance nerd, and in his earlier life a key member of a very secretive organisation. 

Todd Curtis (01:40):

I was part of a two first name club in high school though 

Mat Patterson (01:44):

Really. Do you remember any other names? 

Todd Curtis (01:47):

I should. Maybe in the back of my mind over the next hour, one of them was… Drew Born? Nope, he was two verbs. It was a confusing situation.

Mat Patterson (01:56):

It's an expansive club. 

Todd Curtis (01:59):

It was an expansive club. 

Mat Patterson (01:59):

As myself a Mathew with only one "t", I like to think that I could have made it into that club, but in my heart I think it would be just too common. But Todd, by now an adult man, perfectly happy with his name, reached out to Jesse to offer his services as a beta tester for any future Mac version, and that is how Todd's part in this adventure began. We fast forward a few years and Todd Curtis is a little bit more than just a beta tester. 

Todd Curtis (02:27):

My name is Todd Curtis and I'm the CEO at YNAB and the Head of Product. When I first met Jesse online as two finance people, as we used to do, I was a school principal and then I was an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for just a little bit in between. In the time I was working, both at YNAB and in education, 

Mat Patterson (02:57):

Todd didn't join YNAB as the CEO though that came later. At that time he joined a small fellowship of people that Jesse had gathered together, all of them with their own separate careers, but working on this budgeting side hustle, that group included Taylor Brown who initially wanted to help Jesse by automating some bank record imports into this spreadsheet, but would eventually become the CTO. The five of them were still working their day jobs and contributing to, you need a budget, trying to figure out just how far this budgeting app could go. 

Todd Curtis (03:30):

Six years into it, it was still just a side hustle for everybody involved and then we had this almost refounding where we decided let's become a company. It's interesting like that. There's a group of still five of us around that were in that very early formative period. I think when we were in that period, it was a little bit of deciding what to do with it. I also knew, and I think we all also knew that there was really something to it, that we were onto something. So I was going to do both as long as it took, as long as it took the company to be in a spot that would make it work for me. Yeah, 

Mat Patterson (04:11):

It's a very different story to the typical SaaS founding. There's no huge investment round. No, we're going all in on this to win big or flame out. It was in some ways a more conservative, more sustainable approach and Jesse and Todd found themselves in similar life situations and with similar approaches to work, 

Todd Curtis (04:29):

Both being parents of young children, husbands who really just wanted to make the right decisions, make the right choices so we could support our families, not just kind of in that moment, but really feel confident that we were doing things right for the long run. 

Mat Patterson (04:53):

Todd's early work at YNAB made good use of his combination of educational skill and interest in finance. 

Todd Curtis (04:59):

2009, I was helping Aaron in particular develop the education and support materials, the knowledge base in essence for the first cross-platform version of Wine A. And then once we released that, yeah, we ran live interactive workshops back then. They started in 2008 I think. So we ran those, gosh, I mean at first maybe it was five or six a week. I think it got to be several dozen a week at one point. And we also did one-to-one coaching sessions at the time. So as a much smaller company with a smaller user base, people could purchase a one-to-one coaching session. So I did some of those as well. 

Mat Patterson (05:44):

Through those sessions and his direct customer support work, Todd got to understand why A was really serving people who wanted to make their money work. 

Todd Curtis (05:55):

I think people approached it really earnestly. It was a fun activity for me because people did, they just came to it so earnestly trying to do this thing and feeling like they had made a good attempt and it should be working, but it wasn't and really wanting it to. So that was a wonderful experience. People really showed up to those sessions. 

Mat Patterson (06:21):

And when in 2010, Todd left his career in formal education and joined YNAB full-time, he started out leading the support function. 

Todd Curtis (06:33):

We were doing email support only at the time, which at first was classic just in a Gmail inbox. And then we were doing our software development in FogBugz. I don't know if you remember that old tool from Fog Creek. 

Mat Patterson (06:45):

FogBugz was bug tracking software for developers. Fog Creek was founded by Joel Spolsky who'd also go on to co-found Stack Overflow and Trello. 

Todd Curtis (06:55):

We were doing our software development and FogBugz, so we actually ran our support out of fog bugs as well. Each email from a customer would show up in FogBugz terms as a case. Winab was a side hustle for most of the team, and support was a side inside the side hustle for most of the team. Everybody took part. 

Mat Patterson (07:15):

If you've listened to the previous episodes in this series, this part of the story will sound familiar. Wistia, Help Scout, ZSA, all of those founders spent plenty of time working closely with customers in the support queue early on and they had their other non-support staff doing the same. Todd explained YNABs team-wide Monday morning routine. 

Todd Curtis (07:38):

So we did at one point have one full-time support person and so he would kind of manage the business hours Monday to Friday sort of support. And then we did a thing where on Monday mornings everyone would come in and we did what we called “five case Monday”. 

So we were calling the conversations with customers cases, what they were in FogBugz, and everybody at the beginning of their Monday would grab five out of the queue that had built up over the weekend and answer those. 

Yeah, so that was our early routine, one full-time person and then everybody else chipping in that way or just when he would raise his hand and say, Hey, I need some help. I think we got, I want to say we got 60 or 70 emails maybe a day around that point in time, so it was manageable for one person. 

Mat Patterson (08:27):

Boy does that depend on the type of cases that you have. 60 or 70 emails might've killed me in my last job, but that version of we NAB whole company support lasted for some time. 

Todd Curtis (08:41):

We had a retreat, a companywide retreat in 2014 where I think we had an additional, I want to say three part-time folks. So by that time we still had our one full-time core. The folks who did prominently primarily education would also always do some support and really at this point it was more of a triaging more technical oriented things often to either our QA person at the time or if needed a developer. So yeah, we had more than one body at that point, but still only one full-time person. 

And then we ended up back down at one part-time person; just things change quickly. People who were doing it as a side hustle but actually were a meteorologist somewhere decided “I have to go do that”. So we then started rebuilding the team with part-time folks. 

First we had a tradition of during our winter break everyone at YNAB taking a day in the queue so our support specialists could also get a winter break for a long time, maybe up until 2019 or so. But at that point for those last few years, it really was kind of that once a day 

Mat Patterson (10:19):

At You Need A Budget, customer service was about more than just answering the technical questions from the very start. The team approached their business as an educational system as well as a software tool. 

Todd Curtis (10:31):

You're very close to the way we actually used to and sometimes still do phrase it that “we are an education company that makes software to keep the lights on”. 

Mat Patterson (10:39):

I was listening to an interview with you and I think you talked to Jesse on his podcast about being frustrated by some of the bureaucracy in the educational system from the teacher's perspective of we know what needs to be done here and what is the right thing to do, but we're not able to do it for structural reasons or for resourcing reasons or whatever. 

And I wonder how much of that did you bring in with you when you were thinking about how the support team runs? 

Todd Curtis (11:06):

That's a great question. I tend to think a lot. I always discounted it. At first, I tended to look at my education career and then software as completely separate, but the more I thought about it and the more honestly that other people would point it out to me, there's a lot of either parallels or things that drove me to do something the way a different way in the software world. So I think as young startups would do, you just do things in any way that they can get done at first and you have these different habits that sort of get accreted onto each other and you end up at one point and say, what are we doing? 

But when we sort of broke the support team back down to one person and broke down all of our processes to go with it, there's a tremendous amount of freedom in there as far as just knowing what the goal is, what's the outcome we want in particular for the customer, but obviously also for the company as well. 

(12:12) And then let's just accomplish that in whatever creative way we can think of. And that really most often was not the way that you could do it in education. So for me personally, being able to approach this really interesting problem on a blank slate and working, I like to talk about that the best solution for any problem is the best group of people you can gather. And so to just get together with that really great group of people and say, what are we going to do about this? And let's build it together. 

So the first thing we did was decide what was actually, we wrote a document called the support ethic, the YNAB support ethic, and said, these are the four most important things. How are we going to get there? 

Mat Patterson (12:56):

I love that idea and I did ask Todd if he still has a copy of the original support ethics document. If he does, I will put a link in the show notes. So check that out. But you can have all the measures and the metrics you like, but if you don't have that shared understanding of the type of service that you want to provide, you're not going to be moving together as a support team support at YNAB do have that basic tech support job to do. Of course, plenty of it, but they're also responsible for helping people follow the monetary planning system that YNAB offers. 

Todd Curtis (13:30):

Still to this day, we fight against the stereotypical idea out in the world of what customer support is probably particularly for a technology company, a software company that people tend to imagine it is, I forgot my password or my sync isn't working, can you help me with these technical problems? But I think by and large, our support specialists love nothing more than a question about those mindset things, those spending decisions, sorts of questions. 

Somebody who will write in about how they manage taking this on in the context of a relationship. So teaching far and wide, not just the YA method itself, but even how to implement it in your life, in your role in your family. They do quite a bit of that. It's really great. 

Mat Patterson (14:24):

Yeah, I think it's probably more common than most people would think in every business. There's so much ad hoc consulting that gets done by support people 

Todd Curtis (14:35):

And if you have the right support specialists, they're really passionate about the mission and the problem that we're trying to solve. So it takes care of itself quite naturally. If someone would ask or finding the way, even if someone hasn't asked to offer that of advice at the end of a conversation that started out about something else, is a really skillful thing to be able to do. 

Mat Patterson (14:59):

The thing that stops some people from doing it, some support people I think, is that they are measured in a way that makes that sort of work where you're essentially expanding the conversation beyond what it originally started at that makes it something that they get dinged for in their metrics. So is that built into what the role is at YNAB? 

Todd Curtis (15:19):

We have changed the metrics we use and the performance measurements and things for support specialists over the years, many, many times in service of trying to get in part that balance, right? Because you do have to take account of the fact that we have inbound volume that we don't control that does have to be responded to with that other side of it, which is that the person who has the more involved question, who could use the coaching, who could use the teaching, they deserve that as a customer and it's also good for the business. So I think maybe that last part is what a lot of folks might be missing. The company who says just respond to this many conversations in a day as the only thing that's important might be missing is how good it is for your business to take time and treat those people with some time and care and attention. 

Mat Patterson (16:24):

Yeah, it's much easier to measure the volume that you're getting through now than it's to measure this person who's now going to stay around for another two years worth of subscription because they had this deeper understanding. 

Todd Curtis (16:38):

Of course. So we will try to celebrate those almost. It's not a form of measurement, but if we just make sure we're saying, look what an amazing job cat did with this customer, then we know we're reinforcing that side of the balance too. 

Mat Patterson (16:57):

So YNAB works on helping their support teams expand their role into a broader definition, maybe touching on a bit of customer success, but they don't stop there because support folks are also directly involved in other teams. After himself starting out heading Support, Todd then went on to lead product development and in 2021 he was named the new YNAB CEO. And that specific background, no doubt played a role in his efforts to connect support and product teams more deeply. 

Todd Curtis (17:28):

One of the things I'm really most proud of at YNAB in my history as the CEO is that we've had support specialists embedded as primary members of our product teams since 2017. I think. 

Mat Patterson (17:45):

What does that look like for them? 

Todd Curtis (17:47):

It's evolved, it's changed. At first it was kind of occasional advice and liaison. It was as much a communication function as anything else. Let's make sure support knows what's happening in product and let's make sure product benefits from the person sitting there who happens to talk to 80 customers a day, that sort of thing. And I think those are still absolutely two of the primary functions, but they're involved in a lot of our discovery research about customer needs and things comes via support, and those support specialists are a key in providing that on the product team. 

They're able to do a lot of work, many product changes are disruptive to the customer as much as we want them to be helpful in the end. And I think they're a key part of our teams in not only having the insight into how that's going to happen, but then also formulating the communication including with our product marketers about how we're going to talk about that, how we're going to describe it, what we're going to say about it to best communicate it to our customers. Yeah, it's a lot of different roles and contributions they make 

Mat Patterson (19:07):

And the embedded support person then is it part of their job to go back and talk to the rest of the support team about what are you seeing in this area or could you collect information about this particular problem? 

Todd Curtis (19:18):

Yes, they really are the owner of the implications of this product change with respect to support as it relates to support's needs and the customer's needs inside of support. 

Mat Patterson (19:34):

Does anything come to mind when you think about it, “we just wouldn't have known this if it wasn't for having that support voice”. 

Todd Curtis (19:41):

Two things, I think: How customers talk about something and describe something so there's a way that they can interpret what people are saying because of the volume of conversations that the support team is exposed to. 

And then I guess this is the same thing in a way, but just a lot of the nuance. So if you have a support specialist who spent a couple of years in our queue talking to people in conversations related to credit cards and then they're working on a feature related to a credit card improvement, they just understand the nuance of some of the problems at a really deep level. And our product designers, our engineers, our product managers get that from direct interaction with customers and discovery interviews and things like that, but it's just a different source that's been generated in a different way. 

When you put those two things together, it's not so much the singular contribution of any one person, it's just it's that triangulation. It's a leg of our stool that we use to really understand the customer that I think benefits us every time. 

Mat Patterson (20:52):

Sometimes I think of that as a weird sort of prophesying skill that support have looking at the proposed design and saying, I can tell you the questions we're going to get when you release this. 

Todd Curtis (21:02):

Yeah, I mean it's a little bit tangential, but I love thinking about intuition and the role intuition plays in decision making and things. And sometimes people will say like, oh, well describe intuition as a gut feeling or as if it comes from nowhere. And it comes from years and years and years of data, so to speak, that you have collected just by working in your company, working with your customers, working with your product. So it's not baseless. Intuition is most often not baseless at all. It actually has the richest data source of anything you could possibly do. And that's what those folks who are in support can bring. In a way, the base is tens of thousands of conversations with customers. You have to be careful because it's a slice of our customers. Some customers will never write into customer support no matter how amazing it is. And so you have to remember things like that. But yeah, it's priceless. 

Mat Patterson (22:01):

Todd's correct there. It's such a common trap for support teams to forget that they're not speaking to every customer. We're hearing mostly from the ones who are running into trouble. And so what feels like a huge issue to us in support might actually be tiny for the vast majority of people who are not running into it. But keeping that perspective, it's hard work for support teams. It's like knowing that dark matter is out there everywhere, but you never actually get to see it. At YNAB, support also functions as a feeder for lots of other teams in terms of employees, Todd explains 

Todd Curtis (22:36):

Our best hiring pipeline for a lot of other functions in the company is our support team. I think we have over 20 people on other teams in the company who started with us in support. Three of our product managers delight, our in-person events leader, product ops, person marketing ops, our email specialist, most of our people ops team, I think, I dunno if most is a hundred percent accurate, but either way, just so many people who help YA run so well and like I said, got their start in support and I think everybody who comes in the front door is pretty customer centric to begin with, but they really bring that unique experience with them to other parts of the company.

And of course they have to do some hard work about unlearning some things and knowing that it is a different role. It's a different function now, but I think it's a huge benefit to the other teams and to the support team too. Knowing that they support is so often misunderstood. The youngest sibling in a company, and I think everybody at windup knows that's not true, but boy, a visceral reminder of that doesn't hurt knowing that there's all these sort of support veterans out there in the rest of the company. 

Mat Patterson (24:12):

And if you are a support pro listening right now, just imagine what a relief it must be if you go to talk to some other part of your company about getting a product issue resolved or asking for help and the person that you have talked to has come from the support team, you'd be so happy. It'd be like suddenly seeing your friend in a foreign city in a language that you don't speak right at the moment you need help. Why don't more companies do that? I mean, I think it's probably because it's quite hard. You first, you have to hire people who you value enough to give them the time and the space to learn those new roles. You need to trust them to do that learning on the job. And you need a company culture that supports all of that happening, not as common as it used to be, especially in the age of hypergrowth models. 

Todd Curtis (24:58):

One of the things that's great about working at YNAB is you have the opportunity to do things you have no business doing, which is a quote I got from Mike D of the Beastie Boys. I think 

Mat Patterson (25:08):

He di! Because in 2018, Mike D told Vulture, “I'm interested in trying to do things that I feel like I have no business doing, because that was part of what we did as a band. We weren't afraid to try shit.”

Mike D of course had his finances sorted out way back in 1989. 

Mike D: “The mic stands for money and the D is for diamonds. “

Todd Curtis (25:33):

It's not that you have no business doing that in the negative sense, I have no business doing this, but they're going to let me tackle it and own it and try it and fail and try again. So I think by the time someone does leave the support team, they've already been working with people outside of it in lots of cross-functional ways. So often we're just putting someone officially in the role that they've already grown into when that happens. So I think it's not a process capital P process, but it's just a way of saying that we should give people opportunities to try those things to get mixed up in things with teams that aren't necessarily, it doesn't have to mean the world, it's just this experience you're going to get. 

And so by the time they make that move, yet they, they're ready. And then of course the more job specific technical training might come in at that point. 

Mat Patterson (26:38):

Do you think that's a reflection of the hiring process that you've hired these people that you trust and that you believe in the capabilities of, and so it's less of a risk to then allow them to do some other things? 

Todd Curtis (26:50):

I think so. This varies by role of course, but for every role there is at least a significant part of our hiring process that has nothing to do with technical skill unless you think about things like effective communication as a technical skill. So we're hiring people who are bought in on what we're trying to do that are aligned with our core values that are good communicators, that have a good sense of ownership, and then ask whether they have the technical skill, but would much rather hire for the former because the latter. You can always, somebody who's a good learner can always learn what they need to learn. 

Mat Patterson (27:40):

It's back to teaching again. 

Todd Curtis

Yes. Yeah, it is.

 Mat Patterson:

Having support people everywhere in the company, huge win. But not every customer interaction happens in a support queue. Some of them, for example, happened on Reddit where I had seen Todd was venturing out to talk to customers, many of them at the time that I was visiting a little upset, and I asked him about that experience. I will 

Todd Curtis (28:03):

Say first that our subreddit is actually quite an amazing place. There are so many threads there about people who change their financial lives, stop smoking because of YA, I mean it's amazing. And so there's a lot good to read there. So I don't so much think of it as Reddit or our subreddit or things. 

Sometimes when I'm having a little angst about it, I just kind of more say like, oh, that's the internet. But I think that what you're referring to probably was when we changed the name of the tab in the mobile app from budget to plan, which was this spring. And yeah, change is hard, especially, it's almost paradoxical change is hard, especially when the thing that's being changed meant so much to you. 

So I understand, I said on Instagram shortly after that, somebody had asked if it's a plan, not a budget, are you guys going to be, you need a plan, not you need a budget. And part of my response was, it's never been about the acronym. 

Mat Patterson (29:20):

You Need A Budget had reasonably recently renamed the whole company itself to YNAB and stopped using the word budget, replacing it with plan. 

Todd Curtis (29:29):

We would've a lot of conversations where we would say, you need a budget and immediately try to follow it up with no, but it's not what you think. It's not that thing you think about that you've heard about that you don't want. It's not restriction, it's not control, it's not lack of choices. We're talking about something different. And at some point you have to accept that the word means what the world think it means, and rather than trying to change the meaning of the word budget in the consciousness of the world, we would just stop using that word. 

And I think those people even who resist the change, know that, right? They're passionate because they probably experienced some meaningful change in their financial life with YNAB’s help, but also because of the work that they put into it. So I just mostly just try to understand that that's the way it is, that's the way it goes. I'm a human being too. 

Mat Patterson (30:32):

And it's such a big part of your life that it's hard not to be emotionally involved with that. 

Todd Curtis (30:37):

It is, and it's a big emotional part of your life. And for too many people, it's a part of their life that they feel like is just sort of happening around them. It's something that happens to them. They don't have any agency in that deal to use a word I like when it really clicks that turns around and it's not something that's happening around you anymore. And it just opens up. I mean, we often used to talk about how the true benefit of YNAB is sleeping better at night. 

Mat Patterson (31:07):

Although if they had become you need a plan, then their acronym would be yap. And that would really sell that benefit. YNAP? when you can sleep all night. But here's my hot take: I don't love naps. 

In any case, making a big change to the company name and also to feature names within the product. It does create a lot of support work. 

Todd Curtis (31:28):

I mean the support team at YNAB maintains more internal and external documentation maybe than anyone else, and they produce more public facing words, whether it's in print, in a chat, in a video that they record for a customer, which is one of my favourite things that we do. And so there's the changes you have to make in all of that documentation. And then there's the changes you have to make dozens of times a day when you get to that point in conversation where you might say budget and train yourself to say something else. 

It's a lot of work. It's mentally very draining. And I think it was important for us to not expect that in particular support specialists and social media folks could turn around the next day and be perfectly fluent in saying things differently on point every time. So it required a lot of being open to feedback, oh, I heard this. Can we write this differently? And not even really knowing how to do it. We said we were going to stop using the word budget before we knew exactly what would replace it. 

Mat Patterson (32:42):

It's easy to be cynical about companies spending time and money changing their logo or their tagline. Sometimes it feels a little bit deck chairs on the Titanic, but for a company YNAB where the products are at their core, an expression of beliefs about how money should be planned and spent getting that language right, it could make the difference between people giving up on the process or succeeding and genuinely changing their lives. 

Todd Curtis (33:09):

We all get attached to things, but I think not talking about budgeting anymore, but talking about asking people the question, how do you want to spend your money is so much more wide open for a wider group of people to be open to. It's a much better invitation. A budget for too many people that I have spoken to is a last resort or almost a punishment. Well, I tried five times, I guess I have to budget. Whereas the opportunity to learn how you want to spend your money and align your decisions with that and make better decisions and easier decisions is a real invitation. 

Mat Patterson (33:50):

You can learn all about the YNAB method from their website. I'll put some links in the show notes, but I asked Todd whether those values and methods are not just pushed out to customers but used internally too. 

Todd Curtis (34:02):

Yes, absolutely. Quite proud to be bootstrapped profitable debt-free it not only because it reflects our philosophy on money that we would like to teach to people, but what you get out of it, what you get out of operating that way is that I used the word agency earlier, the agency to be creative, to break something down, to come in on a Monday and say, you know what? I think we made a mistake on Friday, let's start it again. And so that absolutely is a parallel, an analogy to sort of our views on spending and personal finance and how we operate. 

Mat Patterson (34:50):

And you're missing that pressure to attack growth at a particular moment or to be pushed by someone else to do something which maybe doesn't feel like it's aligned. 

Todd Curtis (35:01):

Yeah, I mean, I'll take a push. I like a good push from someone sometimes it's always good to be provoked and knocked out of your comfort zone. So I'm not opposed or negative towards operating in a different way. People with investing partners and things like that, it's a fine way to, but to know that the primary people that you're working with have all sort of been there since the beginning and are aligned in a lot of those ways is a real luxury. 

Mat Patterson (35:36):

So a has the opportunity to proceed more deliberately, to take the time to keep everyone aligned so that their stated values can be seen not just in marketing copy, but also in their business choices. And one example I noticed was that when you sign up for a YNAB trial, you don't automatically get charged at the end of that trial. And I asked Todd about that. 

Todd Curtis (35:59):

I think a lot of things, my sweet spot is if it's aligned with values and a good pragmatic choice. So I think that is aligned with our way, what we want the customer experience to be, which is that I can just enter into this free trial and not have to worry about that end of it. I can just explore what I am trying to learn, what these folks are trying to teach me, how this product works. Practically speaking, I think that helps more people. It removes a bit of friction from that early process. People are just more likely to give it a try. 

So I think it works out in both ways. I think whether it's the product side or the marketing side or the support side or whatever side it is, we just don't always want to get focused solely on, you mentioned this earlier when you talk about metrics for measuring support specialist performance, you could do the same thing at a larger scale in the business and get focused, oh, on just this one metric or on just this one side effect, this business growth or the other end. No, everything completely is customer experience and forget that you also need to run a profitable growing business on the other side of it. So I think always reminding each other that these are all important factors and some of us own different ones to different extents, but making sure that they're all in the system is what I would say. 

Mat Patterson (37:40):

It sounds to me that Todd's approach to YNAB's growth is all about balance. Like a good budge, sorry, like a good plan. That's a good way to lead your business life if you can. And huge thanks to Todd for spending that time with me, particularly for sitting through the bit where my daughter arrived and told me about her nightmare that had Voldemort in it. But what did we learn today? 

YNAB is a customer focused company. It's not just selling to their customers, it's trying to change the way they manage and even think about their own money. And that's a really big goal in a very touchy area for people. So Jesse, Todd, the whole team deserve a lot of credit. Although they'd probably not want credit, they probably want a good emergency fund. So they deserve that. Customer service at YNAB is deeply embedded in the company. 

(38:27) That plays a huge role in shaping how the whole organisation values their customers and the experiences those customers have. And we learned that win a hires for alignment with core values and communication skills over just straight technical skills. I see a lot of similarities in how YNAB’s early team followed the similar principles that they teach to their customers in the way that Wistia doubled down on their own video marketing and the way that teams at Help Scout and ZSA use their own products every day, staying close to customers. It's easier when you are your own customer. 

Stay tuned for the next episode in this series where I will find out whether Oscar McMahon, founder of Sydney-based brewery Young Henrys is also his own customer and drinks his own beer spoiler...he does.

 For links, transcripts, show notes from this episode, visit the website, it's in the episode description. If you've enjoyed this, please rate and review it. It really does help. I'm Mat Patterson. This has been the Supportive and I'll see you next time.