Railway tests its own ideas before checking the market

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 9:46

   So one thing about you that I have noticed in our few conversations now is that you're almost allergic to knowing how other companies have solved the problem that you're facing. You love solving your problem yourself. Walk me through that. Like what led to that philosophy overall? It's kind of, to me, it's almost like cheating on your homework. When you go and look at like somebody else's solution, you like pollute your own like brain with whatever that is, right?

2. 10:09

   And so I personally always try or like, you know, push people internally to be like, listen, if somebody else has done this, like, you know, if this is how Stripe does this, or this is how Cursor does this, or this is how anybody else does this, like, I don't want to hear about it. I just don't want to go in and hear about it until we have a good reason to say, oh, no, that's why they do it exactly like that.

3. 10:27

   That's like why, right? And same thing with people who are like, oh, this is how we used to do it at this other company I worked at or whatever. It's like, okay, but does it work here? Like the answer may very well be yes, right? But we should have a good reason for those things, right? And I think a lot of people are kind of just like, oh, cool, that's awesome. I see that like, you know, that thing is working really, really well.

4. 10:43

   Let's just like go in and copy it, right? And I think that just like, we are in the very, very early innings of all of this like agent stuff. What is the form factor? What is the experience? What is whatever, right? And like, you know, in the early internet, like we, you know, it was DOS and then it was like browsers and then it was like mobile and it was like all these different form factors that you couldn't possibly like comprehend as you were kind of going and doing that.

5. 11:07

   So if you think that you have found the like perfect form factor or anything else like that, like, and we also believe that we're in the early innings, like you're just wrong. Like there's so much more experimentation to go in and do. So like try and go and experiment. Right. And you may just end up with the same conventional answer that somebody else ended up back. But, you know, is there the other side, which is somebody else?

6. 11:26

   You don't need to reinvent the wheel on everything. You're already reinventing the wheel in terms of infrastructure for coding agents or a coding agent world. Do you really need to reinvent the wheel on how enterprise sales is done or other aspects of the business can be run? Yeah. So, I mean, it's like the classic like build versus buy philosophy, right? Like, so I think you should you should really pick your battles.

7. 11:45

   I think the folks over at Tailscale have this like wonderful concept that they use called innovation tokens, where there's like, where are we going to use our innovation tokens? Right. Because if you're just like, I'm going to build on everything from scratch, I'm going to do all this other that you're just going to end up with this like mountain of things that like aren't yet completed or like, you know, maybe you are kind of reinventing the wheel or anything else like that.

8. 12:03

   And so the moment you realize you've kind of like made that kind of first full circle, like that's that's a point for you to stop and be like, OK, well, all right, great. Like, let's examine what we've got off the shelf and what we can kind of go in and fit in here. Do you also then gut check, let's say you arrive at a solution on some business problem internally. Do you then also do gut check that, hey, this is the best way based?

9. 12:23

   Is there some market check on how others are doing in a way that could be better than what you arrived at as a conclusion? No, we check with our users. Like we built tooling internally to go in and talk directly with our users to go in and get feedback. Everything is like layered into this thing that we call central station, which will automatically go in and aggregate sentiment, feedback, feature launches, all of this other thing.

10. 12:46

    We've built a whole like CMS in this machine as well to go in and do launches. We got to check with the users. We get to check with ourselves. We want to use like the product and make sure that the product is really, really good and we're like proud of it. And we're like pushing something out that we're like, great, we would use this. I will use this every day, right? Because we dog food a bunch internally.

11. 13:04

    Not enough right now. And we're pushing a lot more on like, hey, how do we go in and use all of these? like cloud agent primitives, all this other stuff, like nobody should be running anything on your machine, right? If we cannot model this thing on this like infinite virtual computer in the sky, we have to figure out a way to go in and do it. And I think dogfooding is just like one of the most important slash impactful things that you can go in and do, right?

12. 13:23

    And there was a period where we just weren't doing enough of it, right? And you can just see it in the product, like people who use their own product, right? So user feedback makes sense on the product side, but what about pricing? What about sales related or go-to-market related things? Like, do you at all feel like, hey, if somebody like a Notion or Cursor or somebody else has solved a pricing and packaging problem, you want that as a final check on your solutions or?

13. 13:47

    Yeah. So I'm not going to say that, like, we're just going out here, like putting our head in the sand and being like, hey, like, you know, like we know what we're doing, all this other stuff. Right. Like we have a, you know, channels internally like Market Intel and Water Cooler and stuff like that. Right. Like recently, like Turbo Puffer did a really, really great like ad with the cow. I don't know if you saw it or whatever, but we're like, oh, OK, cool.

14. 14:04

    That's really, really good. Right. And so I think for things like, you know, marketing, whatever, like we go in and say, like, which companies are inspiring us to go in and do these things. Right. Like, and what about those things are kind of like inspirational. Right. You know, I think Ramp is on that list. They do an exceptional job at a lot of these things. Right. And then we go and we try and reverse engineer like what is the way that we want to go in and do it. Right. We say internally a lot like what is the rich taste we want to go in and do into this thing. Right. Like, why are we doing this slightly a little bit different. Right. Like, OK, for if most people are doing X, how can we do just like something that's like just like we'll stand out a little bit more right there's other aspect where you're slightly different not unique but slightly

15. 14:40

    different than a lot of the conventional wisdom is you're a solo founder and you have a very unique