First, tell us a bit about who you are and your career journey.

Initially, I started my business by selling my artwork which was quite fun. Then I taught myself how to write code professionally, and I was a software engineer for around a decade. Then I relocated to London and launched my first tech startup, which didn’t go well. So I switched to a technical product management consulting role and gradually expanded into many other areas. I was successfully helping clients in North America, Europe, and Asia, get users, customers and funding.

Today people consider me a Job-To-Be-Done and continuous discovery expert. I have productized my expertise over the years, and now, I want to make entrepreneurship and commercial innovation accessible to all.

 

Before we go into specifics, tell us a bit about ATHENNO, what it is, and how it benefits its users.

Athenno is a B2B SaaS platform and a modern UX research tool to help researchers with continuous discovery and JTBD analysis. It incorporates my own method, which I call the innovation triangle. This method combines some big ideas, works, and practices existing in the industry, for example, outcome-driven innovation by Tony Ulwick. The latter is quite a complicated scientific product focused on making JBTDs more practical. The platform also includes Opportunity Solution Trees (OST), created by Teresa Torres.

The first part of the innovation triangle helps UX teams to calculate opportunity scores to prioritize and measure customer needs, while the second part focuses on typical market research, competitive research, business modeling, and market sizing. 

You can also easily calculate essential metrics like customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and average revenue per user. Ultimately, you get a market score that illustrates how many people have the specific need, whether or not the industry is growing, and how much competition there is. 

The last side of this triangle incorporates the confidence score, which indicates easiness of executing the project according to your experience, resources, budget, political risks, requirements, etc.

Finally, you put everything together and make powerful business decisions based on statistical evidence and market insights. This is the primary goal of Athenno.

So does Athenno allow you to store all this data in one place, or does it also guide you in planning and executing the process? 

This is basically the central proposition of Athenno. It’s not just like another Notion or copy/paste. The goal is to do what Steve Jobs did with iPhones.

I want to make commercial innovation and entrepreneurship easier for anyone on the planet who is just starting a business.

To do this, I give them access to the same expertise and knowledge as Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and all these big silicon valley companies. 

So, if you don’t have half a billion to pay McKinsey or go to Harvard, you don’t have to. This tool has specifically designed features for continuous discovery and helps you define your goals, opportunities, and anything else after that.

 

It must have been tough to formulate how features work and how they are interconnected. How long did it take you to work on the product design of the whole platform?

Athenno is pretty novel; I can’t just go somewhere, find a mood board or get something for inspiration. Building MVP for a project means you might not know how exactly all these components work together, but you have to launch something and see how it will work. This is precisely what I did. 

After just one month’s launch, I could already see things I didn’t like; for example, how some things are connected on the UX side, something that could be way simpler or not needed for now. So, to summarize the question, it’s been around three years of doing it; it started slowly, and this year, things took on a different pace.

 

Being user-friendly and intuitive is one of the biggest challenges for any product, and as you mentioned, some features are entirely new to customers. So how do you make that intuitive for users? 

Making things more usable and understandable is achieved by running all kinds of experiments. Last year, even before Athenno was released, I was already testing and getting feedback around usability and different metrics.

Then you, of course, observe how people actually use it. My client and I were having some issues because I didn’t put much of a description on how to define goals which I thought was quite simple. But it turns out people still have difficulty defining some concepts, especially key results. So then I thought maybe I needed to bring more examples in the section where you define the key results, show how to make them more measurable, and define its metrics. 

So far, I do have some onboarding, especially around the JTBD section. When I have more time, I will integrate more short educational content and youtube videos.

To summarize, you can run many (10-20) experiments every week to improve these little things around different parts of your platform.

 

You mentioned you were determined to work on Laravel. Was that because you had experience with Laravel before, or was that specifically because of the kind of platform Athenno is?

Both are right. First, since I was a software engineer, Laravel became my main stack. This meant I could lead the team and do a code review occasionally, which is what I was doing.

The second reason is that the Laravel ecosystem is so amazing and huge, even way better than when I started. So if you have some technical background, literally in one hour, you can have authentication and a dashboard, which saves you so much time. 

You can’t imagine how often I work with clients that use Python, Java, Node.js, and all these languages and frameworks, and they waste two months on something you can get done on Laravel in one week. So for both of these mentioned reasons, Laravel is very important to me.

 

How did you come across Redberry, why did you choose us, and how did expectations vs. reality work out?

I found Redberry when last year they became official partners with Laravel; I found the profile on the website very quickly and then reached out and met with Gaga.

Generally, I don’t like middle managers in a typical agency case because I prefer to manage people directly. Also, I want to ensure that the person in charge also has some technical background, which is not the case in most agencies. For example, last year, I wanted to design something, and I was talking to the agency owner, and he couldn’t design anything.

Redberry stood out as a company that started small, and what’s essential, Gaga was writing code himself; he was around a similar age and understood my situation.

Overall, the factors were being official partners with Laravel, fantastic talent, the best price, and a founder with a technical background. 

 

I am very happy with my choice, and I now recommend Redberry to all clients I work with.

I didn’t have big expectations. Our goal was to build a scrappy MVP to get something out of the door. It was an experiment for everybody.

Initially, there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. But with a bit of my help and the Senior team lead from Redberry, we resolved these issues quite quickly. 

Even though there were many bugs and challenges, and things were moving very slowly in the beginning, things took on a different pace, and we are here, and this is definitely what matters.

 

How was your experience working with Redberry’s team? It must have taken much time to explain how everything works. So how did the collaboration process go?

As a professional product leader, it’s my job to make it easier for my team to understand business objectives, users, the JTBDs, and how they are supposed to work. So, initially, I provided the team members with a few short videos about job-to-be-done, outcome-driven innovation, and continuous discovery of these main topics. 

During the first few weeks, we did nothing but talk, learn, and understand the concepts. After that, they started doing the actual job.

Initially, we started with two calls per week on Zoom. We also set up a Slack connection. Then we slowly moved from two times per week to one time a week. Now, we no longer have weekly meetings; we know each other, and how everything works, so we text each other mainly on Slack.

 

So what are the big plans now?

The main goal right now for Athenno is fundraising, growing the Slack community, and providing a better experience and more value to more UX and research teams. The long-term goal is to bring more of an educational aspect into the platform and teach people about JTBDs, continuous discovery, and how to connect all these data from a business point of view.

Then I plan on growing Athenno globally in Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, the US, the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

In between, I plan to start a new brand apart from Athenno. I have 50 stupid ideas in my Notion table, so at least I won’t get bored for the next 50 years.