Kondo

Building Superhuman for LinkedIn so your DM inbox sparks joy again. 

PS. have you seen Marie?

Cofounder

Beluga

Helped small startups find top engineers…by sending lots of LI DMs. Had less trouble keeping track of them thanks to v0 of Kondo. 

The whale still swims on, just without me.

HeadsUp

Sent a ton of LI DMs to prospects and had trouble keeping track of them. Maybe if I was more on top of stuff we would have made more money 🤔

HeadsUp helped product-led growth companies nurture and convert leads; raised $8.3M from 645 Ventures, Wing, Firstminute, Character, and execs at Miro, Drift, Algolia, etc. Was acquired by Hightouch.

Quantum Consumer Solutions: Insight & Design Strategy

Gave advice to bigggg cos on how to sell their stuff

Marketing

Like you, I've asked LinkedIn many times "please, fix the DM inbox...please?" And they said I should try their new puzzle games instead.

So I'm fixing it myself. Follow me as I share my bumpy ride bootstrapping a small SaaS business around a tool I love.

Kondo passed 500k ARR last month 📈

What has and has not changed since launch a year ago:

1. Early on, you had to do a 1:1 onboarding call to get access. I've done 1000s. It's still an option, but most self-serve. Don't do free trials anymore, so that leaves 10-15 calls / week with folks serious about our product.

2. Back then, we tracked activation by booking a follow-up call with users 1 month after signup. With ~100 weekly signups and ~1,500 customers, that's no longer realistic. So we've beefed up a lot on ANALYTICS and I now obsess over numbers like every proper PLG founder should (was slow to learn this 🫣)

3.  First 50 users came from outbound. Next 100 inbound from word of mouth. The next 1000 the same way. That's GREAT, but also a PROBLEM. We've tested a bunch of outbound and paid channels over the past few months, but still haven't cracked a scalable growth engine yet. Fingers crossed.

4. We grew our headcount from 2 → 3 by hiring Anastasia as our first employee. One of two best decisions I will ever make in life. Also brought on Gaurav as an advisor. Two of two. 

5. Still no plans to sell away chunks of the company to VCs. Not running a 🦄farm here. Trying to grow fast but profitably has been a great lesson because every $ we spend on something could be $ in our personal bank accounts (!!) so it better get us $ back fast (!!!). 

6. A year ago I would actively hunt for posts saying "LinkedIn's inbox is SOOO BAD HOW DOES ANYONE FIND ANYTHING IN IT." I don't do that anymore because folks now tag me on posts like that (thank you, friends 🙇‍♂️) so I just see where I'm tagged and run to the post and holler "Yo, I fixed it → trykondo.com" 

7. LinkedIn can still build a Kondo overnight with <10% of the resources they spent on Zip or Mini Sudoku but still has not. So, I am still here helooo 👋

8. Every time I read other startup founders' posts that start with "we hit 10m ARR in 3 months" I still feel sad because I realize I'm missing a few zeros : (  

Any advice for me for the road ahead?

Mitchell Tan 📮

I guess 9,996 is a fitting milestone for a startup founder to celebrate

So here's a little story about 9,9,6: 

For my first job out of college I was posted to Shanghai, where 9,9,6 was actively enforced by some Chinese tech companies.

I was expecting to see folks clacking away at keyboards all day and night.

One Friday evening, I sat at the bar in the WeWork finishing up a slide deck. And for 3 whole hours I saw a bunch of startup employees sitting around chatting, drinking beer, and playing ping-pong.

I was a little confused. Did they have no place better to be on a Friday night? 

If I didn't have a report to finish, I would be at a cocktail bar or at home Netflixing, and not stuck at WeWork. But in their case, they could not physically leave the office without being penalized in some way. So ping-pong it was.

---

I grew up in a culture where lots of people stayed in the office late just because they had to 'show face'. Folks would watch to see when their bosses left to know when they could leave themselves. 

And I think that's a bad idea.

Hard work is great, but it stops being great when it's forced. 

In fact, it might stop being work at all when it's forced 🏓

At my first startup, I brute-forced our way to 300k ARR.

On hindsight, that was a terrible mistake.

I was an early employee. My boss said go make us some ARR, so I: 

- Sent tons of emails and DMs
- Filled the founders' calendars up
- Ran 10 POCs in parallel 
- Obsessed about every tiny implementation detail
- Pulled all sorts of tricks and stunts
- Closed a few deals
- Made some ARR 

I felt happy with myself. I had zero experiencing selling SaaS previously, and made some ARR. Hooray!

But on hindsight, pulling out all the stops to hunt down deals was the biggest mistake we could make...

Because if we had picked a painful enough problem, and built a good enough painkiller, it would have been 10x easier to close those deals.

In early stage SaaS, the game is not to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to make ARR, but to find a product with its own legs in the market.

That's how I try to think about things now running Kondo.

If we have to pull out every conceivable trick to make people want to use and pay for the thing, we're probably building the wrong thing to begin with. 

So, no brute-forcing ARR this time round. 

Even if that means waiting longer for ARR to show up.

Am I thinking about this correctly?

Made a post last Friday, got a bunch of connection requests.

In the past I'd have to click "Accept" a dozen times (just let them all in is my philosophy) 

These days I just:
- Go to my invites tab in Kondo
- Hit Cmd + A 
- Hit Y

It's a nice feeling when your own product helps you do your own job faster 😎

At the end of September, we stopped shipping any new features.

Long story short: TECH DEBT was piling up and LOAN SHARKS 🦈 were starting to smell blood.

So, we spent all October fixing stuff. There were 70+ tickets in our triage queue, we resolved most of them, still a small handful left. Still cracking away. Getting there.

I have been thinking A LOT about breaking and fixing things:

1. If you move fast you will break things. So you have to weigh the cost of moving slow vs the cost of breaking things. 

2. If you are a small startup and don't move fast, you are basically dead. So you have to break things. 

3. Breaking things is ok, so long as you fix them as fast as you break them.

4. There will always be some things broken. Choosing carefully what to leave broken and for how long is the finest skill you can learn.

5. 💭 Imagine for a minute you are LinkedIn. Breaking things is VERY expensive. 

Because, ads. 

Therefore, in the face of many demands from your power users for a better inbox, you would rather take decades to make it better rather than risk breaking anything. 

And in the meantime, you will instead build Mini Sudoku. 

Which is why a Kondo exists 🔻

6. A DISCLAIMER TO CURRENT / FUTURE KONDO USERS 

(thank you for your support ❤️)

- We are a tiny 3-person SaaS startup 
- We believe in moving fast and breaking things
- We likely will be more buggy than big company software
- We CANNOT promise we will fix everything all the time very fast
- But we CAN promise we will be highly responsive, try our very best to help, and to care a lot more about the SaaS than any big company ever will.

Is that ok?

Honestly, I didn't want to BUILD a Kondo, I just wanted to BUY one.

It was 2023, and I was hustling at a recruiting firm I started. We were sending a ton of LinkedIn messages to find engineering candidates for early stage startups.

It was a NIGHTMARE ^ 100 to keep track of who to follow up with, who had replied, who were were targeting for which role, etc.

For a while we slogged through manually updated spreadsheets.

We tried some chrome extensions and lightweight CRM tool thingys that added buttons and panels over the LinkedIn messenger to help add labels and notes, they helped a bit but were kinda clunky.

We ended up hacking together a little internal tool that helped set reminders on follow ups, detect and label replies, and auto-sync data to a bunch of Notion databases. 

But I wasn't too happy using that for hours a day either.

ALL I WANTED was to have a Superhuman - the thing I used for years to inbox zero my email quickly and happily - but for DMs instead. 

I looked all over for it, and found that others had looked all over for it too. 

Leading up to Kondo showing up on the internet, there is a whole breadcrumb trail of Tweets and Reddits and LinkedIn posts asking "is there a Superhuman for LinkedIn and where can I swipe my credit card for it?" 

Since there wasn't anyone who was willing or able to sell me a Kondo, I decided we could just try building it and see how it goes. 

Worst case, we get to use the thing for ourselves.

As it turns out, building a Superhuman for LinkedIn is way harder than buying one 🫠

But if there's one thing that makes it worth I guess it's that I get to do my DMs just like I do my email, i.e. real fast, and without wanting to rip my hair out.

With some help, I convinced Kade Hinkle to try Kondo out.

A few days after setting him up, I asked how it was going. 

He said he had gone through all his old chats within a few hours of using the tool, and booked 2 meetings by following up on conversations that got buried.

Crazy thing is, Kade didn't even have to pay a cent at this point, he got a free month from a referral link delivered to him by 🐜 Mike Haimowitz 🐜 🐜's ants.

If you want to book more meetings, here's a tip:

Look deep in your DM inbox, who knows what you'll find 🫣  

And, if you want to do it the fast way and for free, now you know at least 2 people you can go bug for referral links : )

Anyone can sign up for Kondo on our website, I can't stop you.

But strongly suggest YOU DO NOT SIGN UP if you:

1. don't think there's any $ to be made in the DMs

2. don't have or plan to have a copious amount of DMs

3. don't value saving a few hours of your time at more than $30

4. want to automate all your DMs away end-to-end with da bots

5. hate your laptop, hate your monitor, and hate your keyboard, and want to only send DMs and voice notes from your phone, all the time 

6. can't be bothered to learn how a new tool works no matter how much it’ll help

7. love tracking all your DMs and follow-ups manually on a spreadsheet or notepad

8. love having your Sales Nav and regular DM inboxes separate so you have one extra thing to check for replies every day

9. rather play Mini Sudoku and Zip all day than do any DMs  

10. think the LinkedIn native inbox is just fine and needs no fixing 

If any of the above applies to you, please don’t sign up. 

But if you really want to anyway, I can’t stop you so go knock yourself out.

protip: Spacebar scrolls down any webpage

more protips...

- Shift + Spacebar scrolls up*
- Cmd + Down / Up arrow scrolls to top/bottom
- Cmd + Option + Left / Right arrow moves between tabs**
- Cmd + W closes a tab 

*generally Shift + something does the opposite of it. For example, in Kondo, Tab moves down to the next split inbox and Shift + Tab moves up.

**unless you're in Arc browser where that instead moves between Arc Spaces, to move between tabs you would Cmd + Option + Up / Down arrow since tabs are vertically organized.

If you liked this protip please leave me a tip below
If you did not feel free to say something snarky below

Many of our users believe (correctly) that keyboard shortcuts will help them do DMs faster. 

But if you don't already use Superhuman for email, or shortcuts in other apps, it takes a while to learn and remember them. 

We try to help with emails, tooltips, and a friendly shortcut menu (which has its own shortcut of course, "?")

But every now and then someone asks me if we have a printout. 

So I asked a cat to make us one 

(yes, they hate mice too) 

get it here: https://lnkd.in/g8X_QpSh

Meow?

We revamped our signup flow. 

Notes:

1. Added Sign in with Microsoft, which was effortless with Supabase. So now 95% of all users can one-click SSO sign up. 

2. We could have skipped one more step if we removed email verification. But we chose not to in the end.

3. OTP is better than confirmation links for verification. Links are problematic, learned the hard way.

4. HDYHAU is the best 80/20 attribution with 0 extra dropoff. 

5. Team growth hack: detect if people have similar domains and suggest they join existing teammates accounts, that way they skip all billing steps and find their friends.

6. We load your messages in the background while showing you the connect account button, it makes your brain want to go do something about them, so you keep going.

What else would you change here?

It's Inbox Zero Day today! 

I asked ChatGPT who came up with this fake holiday, and it told me it was a marketing thing invented by Superhuman in 2020. Of course 🤣

Having onboarded 1000s of users onto Kondo, I've become very good at explaining what Inbox Zero means:

Basically you treat your inbox like your to-do list.

- E to archive chats you're done with 
- H to snooze chats you want to come back to 

Do this for all your chats and you'll be done for the day. 

Each day, new replies and reminders you've set will pop up in the inbox, fill your to-do list, and the process of clearing it out will ensure you *don't miss any replies or follow-ups* 

If you're still not doing this, a good way to get started in Kondo is to hit Cmd + K -> Clean Up which will help you clear out all your old chats.

What's your inbox count at? 

---

ps. to celebrate at Kondo, we've been spending the past week or so trying to Inbox Zero our Linear Triage Queue that has been piling up for quite a bit. 

Unfortunately we can't just Cmd + K -> Clean Up that one 🫠

Taplio

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Taplio

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