How Ada CEO Mike Murchison grew Ada to $70.6M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

[Music] hey everybody um my name is Mike I'm the founder of ADA uh we help quickly growing companies automate their customer support and I have a question for everyone in the room today who's either building a software product or thinking about building one put your hand up if you are by the way who's building software or interested in building software okay just about everybody so my question for you is how do you know uh that your software is valuable that's supposed to be an emoji of something so one one way you might know that it's valuable or you might think it's valuable is because you have a user or maybe I'm just going to keep going maybe you have multiple users and you're excited about that and you think that that is a great proxy for value or or better yet maybe you have lots of users who are telling you that your product is awesome and it's because they're telling you your product is awesome that you know your software is valuable or better yet you know what maybe you have so many people who are using your product who are telling you that it's awesome and they're paying you you have Revenue and then you know the answer to the question is I know I'm delivering value well what I want to talk to you guys about today is I actually think that all three of those measurements all three of those proxies are actually very dangerous proxies for Value Creation in the early days of any software development and actually later on as well when when you're actually looking to improve that product it's okay I I'll work with this sh so the answer to the question in my opinion today what I want to convince you is that your software actually isn't valuable and that's that's the that's the Paradigm I I really think is is useful it's useful for us as a company it's a paradigm that I think will be useful for you as you look to make your software better and if you channel that Paradigm you look at Value creation through that Paradigm what you'll what you'll find is that and if you'll believe that software isn't inherently valuable and instead what you'll believe is that software is a multiplier of value that is created in the physical world that that is that's our definition of adaa of what software really is and that's what we think is really important for you to understand when you're trying to build a really kickass product and if you take that Paradigm and you apply it there's three learnings that I want you guys to walk away with from today the first is that you'll do things that are manually when you look to create value through software before you write a line of code you'll do things incredibly manually until it's painful actually really really very very very very painful um with Ada we actually answered thousands of customer support tickets a month manually before we wrote one line of code that was very very very painful and because of that what we found was that software when we went to write it actually became medicine and that's also a very useful way to think about software creation in our opinion you'll know what software to write you'll know what software to build because you were feeling the pain so intensely you'll understand the the value that your software is creating and it'll be so obvious what you should build and the final takeaway is that you'll realize that as you've solved that you've created that medicine and you've solve that problem you'll realize that um moving forward you need to embrace that analog past you need to recog you'll recognize that um the way you relate to your customers is by sharing stories of that physical pain that you experience the way that you sell to prospects is by communicating stories around how your software takes away that pain that you yourself experience that is your competitive differentiator as a company uh and that is what will help you grow your business or lead you a successful product launch so these are the kind of things that we think about today when we've gone from answering thousands of customer support tickets manually to now automating hundreds of thousands a day and it's the kind of thing that we think about all the time at Ada um Nick Nikita and Dan are also here from our team we'd love to talk to anyone about this love to help you guys think about uh building your business so feel free to send send me an email at mik dat. support uh we we'd love to help thanks questions yes maybe hi Mike Mike right here thank you that's a very um Innovative pitch that we just heard and also you've been featured as part of the tech Vibes the most upcoming firms in Toronto so congratulations for that um my question is does it follow um the algorithm that you have and again you don't have to give me the details I'm just curious does it pick up on words to answer the questions or how does it understand what I'm trying to ask which is repetitive oh are you speaking about our our product our own technology yeah yeah so short answer is yes it does I'm happy to talk to you more about ADA directly at any point perfect thanks hey uh what do you think about open source in that relation if you say your software is not valuable uh what do you think about sharing your software oh I see what do I think about open the question was what do I think about open source software um I I love open source software I think yeah I think it's great to share your learning and share your software and and build up on other people's ideas but what I'm trying to communicate to you is really just an idea but as you look to build new software it's valuable I think a lot of people assume that software is inherently valuable that if I if I and they don't recognize that software is a tool it's one way of solving a problem so if you really Channel that I think you if you're interested in building open source software you'll probably build much better more useful open source software with that Paradigm yeah I mean I'm already doing that and what I explained to people is hey the content is actually the valuable thing and the product that you built everyone can copy it like if you like went down the path and through all this pain and build a process for example someone can copy it really fast so I really like that approach thanks one last question um my question is about this space of making the these things more automated um do you agree with the general flow feeling going on around that in 10 years all of these things are going to be automated do you think it's going to take longer shorter what's your general Vibe on that um I think things have been being have been being automated for hundreds of years and that you know this this new AI wave is really yes it will be quite disruptive and it will it will Usher in a new era of automation but when viewed from a historical lens that that level of automation I actually don't think we'll be that distinctly different than previous eras thank you so much thanks guys [Applause]