All the Mikes: How Customers Shape Nasuni Technology

The most exciting and terrifying part of starting a technology company is that the first iteration of your first product is always a stab in the dark. The founding team and I took a long time to define exactly what we wanted to do and spent nine months building that first version. Then we launched.

Once your product is in the hands of customers, the equation changes. In the development stages, your technology is incomplete, amorphous, fragile. Without customers, the raw material that is product does not take shape. Once real people with real needs begin to use it, they find unexpected flaws, highlight unforeseen benefits, and ask for more. If you are smart, you adapt.

At Nasuni, customer feedback is the force that tempers and hardens the material that is product. Today, when I look back at the evolution of our company, I see customers having shaped Nasuni cloud services and engineering culture in three critical ways.

1. They made us realize we are a bank

Our customers taught us that we are the equivalent of a bank, except we ask them to entrust us with their data instead of their money. So, we impressed upon everyone in engineering, support, and professional services that people would need to have the utmost trust in us.

From an engineering standpoint, that started with building a bulletproof product. Yet it also meant taking a leadership role in resolving any problems. Since we are on the hook for the customer’s relationship with data, we have to be trustworthy partners and service providers. In the early days, this meant all the emergency lights went on across the company when a customer had a problem. Today, we have a much larger global organization, but important issues move just as fast and circulate just as high. We still treat customer data access as mission-critical.

The root issue may stem from the customer’s network, hypervisors, or a problem with their hyperscale cloud provider, but even if Nasuni cloud services aren’t the cause of the problem, we are in the best position to diagnose and resolve it, so we run point until the issue is resolved. One of the first questions we ask at our weekly leadership meetings is whether any customers have unresolved issues. This is one of the pillars of our technology culture, and I believe it’s one of the reasons we have such a high customer retention rate.

2. Mike and all the Mikes know best

As we’ve noted before in this space, we listen very closely to what our customers have to say. This is another lesson we learned early. More than a decade ago, Mike Driscoll, an IT leader at one of our first major customers, The Walsh Group, told us that Nasuni cloud services needed to synchronize data across sites. Adding this capability would be a major project, but we figured that if it was going to be useful to his company, then it would probably be useful to other large companies. Once synchronization went into production, our customers made it very clear that we needed to add a global file lock to avoid version conflicts, so we built that too.

During this same period, Mike came back to us and asked for a centralized management pane, so he wouldn’t have to manage 20 sites through 20 different windows. That prompted us to build the Nasuni Management Console, one of our customers’ favorite products.

What we learned from this feedback was that it really paid to listen to all the Mikes, the unsung heroes of IT. We started relying on our best and smartest customers to guide our product development. This was difficult work, requiring much of that customer-driven tempering described above, but the resulting changes steered the product to where it is today. We also hired Mike.

3. We never stop swimming upmarket

Initially, Nasuni was conceived to be a high-velocity, direct-to-business company. That model pulled lots of small companies onto our shores. Very quickly we realized this was the wrong market for the bulletproof, global-enterprise-grade product we were building. At one point, we had 120 accounts, but only two of these represented the kind of customer we actually needed if we were going to be truly successful. These two customers wanted something very different than the other 118, and yet we knew that if we could meet their needs, we would be able to operate in a very different and much better market.

We executed a radical pivot. This required huge leaps in functionality and performance. We had to change our sales and business model to rely 100% on partners instead of going direct. Our investors were wary since we prioritized the demands of two customers over the other 118. And we had to work very closely with these customers to get everything right and harden our product to meet their requirements. One of the CIOs pulled me aside before we launched across his company and warned, “This better perform.”

A decade later, that CIO’s company continues to be one of our best and most valued customers. We now have more than 1,000 customers like those initial two and we are still swimming upmarket.

This is the only way a technology company will thrive in the long run. You cannot stop, settle down, and operate in the same space. Rapacious, bottom-feeding copycats will eat away at your business from below. So, we continue evolving. Our engineering and product cultures are focused on improving the product in ways that allow us to constantly move up market. We already count many of the biggest and best-known global brands as customers of Nasuni cloud services, and in addition to partnering with more brands like them, we are working with them to help them manage more workloads, use cases, departments, and regions across their organizations. This is what the great technology companies do, and we aspire to nothing less. If you want to build and be part of something great, we are hiring.