Not sure what the market is for something like this but it's something I've been thinking a lot about since stepping down as CEO of my previous company.
My goal is two-fold:
1. Help teams make better, faster decisions with all context populating a source-of-truth.
2. Help leaders stay eyes-on, and circumstantially hands-on, without slowing everything down. What I'd hope to be an effective version of "Founder Mode".
If anybody wants to play around with it, here's a link to my staging environment:
Great idea! Great website! Terrible video. The 90 second format is great, this is how much I would like to spend learning what exactly your product does. But the whole video is just clicking some user interfaces with no result. After watching the video, I have even less idea of what it the product is for. I would love to see a video that goes through the "next, next, next" in the wizard and then shows the actual outcome.
Great feedback, I'll work on the video ASAP. I intended to immediately create a follow-up video that steps through each component of a newly created decision, got distracted, never circled back.
OK, it seems you are on the path of another 8 fig exit. Good on you. It seems like a great project and could possible save so much time if well executed and well integrated.
I've added it to SaaSHub saashub.com/orgtools. If you have an @orgtools.com email you can verify and improve the profile. Cheers!
This is a good nudge to choose the grammatically correct option, thank you.
I originally had "less meetings" before an LLM corrected me into using "fewer meetings". Then when talking about Orgtools to a couple people I heard them say "less meetings" and switched back thinking that sounds slightly more natural (but incorrect).
I co-founded Ambition (YC W14) and have spent the last 10 years serving as CEO before stepping down in December.
Upon hitting ~50 employees, started to think more about the push/pull between alignment and velocity. How can we maintain effective "founder mode" as we scale?
One of the first things to slow down was decision-making. Who should be involved? In what capacity? Is this worth a meeting? Turns out it's a painful process getting a start-up to even consider, let alone adopt, something like RASCI... even with growing frustration that things are taking too long.
So I decided to try and build decision-making software that might have helped, something that would have introduced incremental process in a more palatable way.
While there's certainly overlap with Slack, Notion, etc... in my head there's still a real need for something like this but I'm curious what you (and the market) think.
Thank you in advance for any thoughts, feedback, tough love.
Not knowing where you live / have lived... I think people in big cities forget how hard it is to find a taxi elsewhere.
I can remember a specific example several years ago in Nashville (which is quickly becoming a big city) where after waiting for 15+ minutes downtown I had to start calling companies telling them to send a car to my corner.
Before Uber came to Chattanooga (a decent-sized city) calling a taxi wasn't even a viable option unless it was for a scheduled 4AM airport pickup.
We believe that life is too short for work to feel small. Our software helps metric-based employees have more fun, be more productive, and compete outside the walls of their own office and company. Our data helps management coach behavior and measure the correct things at the right levels (much easier said than done).
Our stack is Python/Django, Postgres, and Extjs/React. We're scaling with growth and looking to bring on the following positions:
- Front-End Engineer
- Data Visualization Engineer
- Sysadmin
- Sales
If interested feel free to reach out to careers@ambition.com with a brief description of yourself and why you are interested. Interviews generally consist of a small project using anonymized data and our open-source libraries.
#3 is a very interesting point to be made and something that I (as Ambition co-founder) think about a lot. We've tried to make our product powerful in a responsible way but there's definitely the fine-line of "what's best for the company" and "what's best for the person paying for the product". We receive requests every day from managers asking for the ability to manually manipulate the (objective) data that we're automatically pulling in from CRMs, Phone Systems, Spreadsheets.
I remember talking to PG a couple months ago about how Ambition could potentially decrease office politics and thus "optimize work". Maybe it's a fool's errand given a company of X size or Y age.
Are you sure you want to spend your life catering to corruption? It seems better to resist corruption than to profit from it, both for your own personal life and for the lives of those your product would be influencing.
Someone's 3rd party tool is hard to game and manipulate, but something home grown can be screwed around with so the "right" people win, both preselected peons and preselected lower level mgrs. Don't sell an incorruptible black box, nobody wants that. Sell a toolkit, something where you can pick the winners ahead of time and then generate the "proof" you were correct.
On one hand, this is something people clearly want, and YC's mantra is "make something people want." On the other hand, your life would be subservient. Indeed, you'll be directly subservient in that you'll be answering to the will of those who are corrupt, and indirectly subservient in that you'll be perpetuating corrupt systems.
Ambition co-founder here, thanks for the interest and you're right that there are a lot of great projects/products/companies in this batch... it's been an incredible learning experience working alongside them for three months.
I'd love to tell you more about Ambition... I'll connect via email.
Just checked out InsightSquared, we're definitely similar.
While relatively subtle, the main difference seems to be that we're more of a motivational tool whereas they are more of an analytical tool.
We're trying to position Ambition to where it's primary purpose is to drive numbers, not just look at them. Yes transparency through reporting is part of that, it's just more passive and it's easy for people to become paralyzed by data.
You're definitely right that sales teams are motivated by commission. What we've come to find out, both working in these teams and managing them, is that the most powerful drivers still are intrinsic. Recognition, camaraderie, purpose, being a part of something bigger than oneself...
I think sales teams get a bad reputation because of the lone-wolves, most people working these types of jobs might be more "alpha" than others but still want to feel like they are making an actual impact in something, even if it's just getting their team a "W" for the week.
As a fantasy football player turned programmer.. it's great to see posts like this and I completely agree with the OP. It's fun, surprisingly logical (thus easier when playing against emotional people), and great conversation starter (co-workers, family, fathers-in-law).
My friends and I actually created what has effectively become "fantasy football for sales organizations" where managers can choose/weight metrics for employee-formed teams to compete over across seasons. It's early but so far the results have been impressive. The demo is here if anybody wants to check it out: http://tryambition.com
Not sure what the market is for something like this but it's something I've been thinking a lot about since stepping down as CEO of my previous company.
My goal is two-fold:
1. Help teams make better, faster decisions with all context populating a source-of-truth.
2. Help leaders stay eyes-on, and circumstantially hands-on, without slowing everything down. What I'd hope to be an effective version of "Founder Mode".
If anybody wants to play around with it, here's a link to my staging environment:
https://staging.orgtools.com/magic-share-link/5a917388cf19ed...