[jamesmcintyre]

Needl looks really cool, congrats on the launch!

Wondering if you could speak on a few topics in the spirit of hacker news / yc community:

1. Wondering if you've run into any friction yet where employers block the end-user from integrating with their apps? Just curious to what level that is or is not a common practice for enterprise users?

2. After using previous products that promise similar "search across all apps" functionality I soon felt the early excitement/novelty wear off and returned to old behaviors (ie, searching using each app's search). No doubt this is just a testament to how hard new habits are to build (and the old to let go of) but I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the human behavior / psychological aspect of products that have characteristics like this? As a tangential example, recent blogs posts featured on HN talked about how perhaps a chat-gpt conversational interface is not actually ideal to replace various UI/UX as it may take more cognitive overhead for the user to think of how to describe what they want when normally the UI/UX is what previously assisted them to arrive at that data. Basically I'm wondering how congruent (to existing behaviors) or novel your UX is and to what extent you believe this presents challenges to your team when designing (and perhaps marketing) the product?

3. Can you speak on your YC journey?

Thanks and good luck!

[MaxKeenan]

To the first point -- certainly some friction here. In most cases the employee is able to integrate the app and flags arise to IT after the fact. Then the employee connects us with IT and we resolve the issue by going through a security questionnaire / showing our SOC II. The majority of our current users are SMBs, where they don't have significant IT oversight, we're one of the few products in the space that's truly self-serve.

To the second -- very good point and something we continue to experiment with. Our basic thesis is -- if your search is really good, people will learn to default to your app. For many of our users, the unification is less so the value and more so the better search quality, especially compared to Gmail and GDrive. Another good point that writing things as a question is often a worse user experience than just using Google search esque terminology. For our Ask Needl feature, you can still get value without writing an entire question. Ex: website total budget --> $1000-1500.

Our YC journey was certainly formative. Much of the advice given was counter-intuitive in the bull market of Nov 21 when everyone was spending and growing as fast as possible. My biggest takeaway was the focus on solving hard problems with small teams and only caring about what your users think of you. Would highly recommend - the culture is unparalleled.