Personal news: I recently wrapped up my time at Thread after two and a half years helping grow the product. I joined early to focus on a very specific problem. The market pulled us somewhere very different. Thank the software gods it did.
One lesson from that journey 👇
🧭 Your market matters (and your customers will show you the right one)
When I joined Thread, we owned a niche: create IT tickets in Slack or Teams when IT contractors who own them live outside of your company. A solid pain point and a differentiator IT teams could pitch their clients in a post-email, post-phone world.
But to some, this was a meaningful but non-existential problem. So we focused on driving adoption. When we pushed some folks to engage, we would hear this objection:
"I can't use tools like yours without restructuring our entire team first. We're too brittle, even if these things will make us money."
To service this, we leaned hard into helping teams better operate so we could make chat stickier. With no intention to do so, this side quest quickly became the main course.
We shipped products that used AI to triage IT tickets coming in and inbox tools that let techs work with one another in real time — so when chats came in, they'd be easier to manage.
Less tedious work would create more time to engage in active chat conversations, our main product. That was the hypothesis.
How did we do? Our chat customers grew, but so did IT teams using Thread for use cases that had nothing to do with chat.
In unblocking the thing we cared about, we stumbled into a separate legitimate problem/solution fit elsewhere and a larger market.
Today, chat is an optional add-on.
🔑 The takeaway: Listen closely, stay fluid, and explore adjacent markets when customers keep pulling you there. Larger opportunities are often disguised as a smaller speed bump.
Customers are actually pretty good at showing you when you should circle a different problem — if you're willing to watch long enough.
I'm deeply grateful to Matt and Mark for inviting me to Thread; to the Thread leadership team for your partnership (Michael, Stephen, Bobby, Paralee, Samuel, Laura); to the PD team (Kristof, Amine, Ricardo, Julie), PDE leadership (Vyacheslav, Luiz Pedone, Gabriel, Bositkhon, Ziad), and investor partners who helped see the path forward (John, Michael, Jacob, David, Adam).
More to come on what's next.