Episode 146: Building Your Next B2B SaaS Unicorn with Mikita Mikado, Co-Founder and CEO of PandaDoc
In this episode of Product Thinking, Mikita Mikado, Co-Founder and CEO of PandaDoc, joins Melissa Perri to share his entrepreneurial journey and the challenges he faced in building PandaDoc. Mikita also highlights the importance of working with talented people in the B2B SaaS world, embracing a growth mindset, and creating a strong organizational culture.
You’ll hear them talk about:
[09:57] - As a first-time CEO, Mikita admits that, as the company evolves, the skills required to manage its rapid growth and changing environment demand constant upskilling, especially in finding talent and building teams. Regardless of your company or experience, always surround yourself with experienced and highly competent people, leverage community wisdom, and use resources like podcasts and blogs to navigate the complexities of your role.
[19:32] - Mikita's initial perception of building a successful company centered on the product-market fit evolved significantly over time. While also important, the key to long-term success lies in nurturing a collaborative team and mastering the skill to work with people. Just as Mikita did at PandaDoc, it's essential to establish a cultural code for your company, which involves setting clear behavioral aspirations and holding each other accountable.
[28:53] - The significant growth of PandaDoc goes down to developing an intuitive and simple-to-use product in a typically complex market. This strategic simplicity enables the company to leverage product-driven growth and inbound marketing to reach a wider audience effectively. Moreover, despite exploring different directions and facing multiple failures, PandaDoc remained true to its core vision, allowing for consistent progress without losing sight of its foundational goals.
[37:40] - Every tech business must put down its culture code, where it will illustrate its core values and integrate them into the company's daily operations. If you're looking for inspiration, here are PandaDoc's four core values: continuous learning and teaching, making a positive impact, having fun, and fostering empathy. Not only will a culture code align the team, providing a North Star to follow, but it will also nurture a strong, value-driven organization.
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Melissa - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we're talking to a founder CEO who grew his startup to be worth $1 billion, that crazy unicorn number. And he's gonna share with us the lessons that he learned that helped get him there. His name is Mikita Mikado, and he's a co-founder and CEO of PandaDoc, an all-in-one document automation platform that has disrupted the way that businesses handle contracts, proposals, and much more. But before we jump into hear Mikita's journey, it's time to answer a question on our Dear Melissa segment, where listeners just like you can write me in any question they want me to answer. So go to dearmelissa.com and let me know which question you would like me to answer on a future episode. All right, let's see what we have in store today.
Dear Melissa, I believe tremendously in the value of UX research design and how they can impact and shape product direction. How can I make the case from a financial or P&L perspective to expand the UX team when we're already heavily above capacity?
So it sounds like you're a little stretch thin and you're trying to get budget to get more UX help. This always makes me a little sad because I wish people understood the importance of UX. UX is just as important as your product managers and sometimes even more important, I would even argue. Because if you can't use your product, nobody's going to use it. If you make a bad product that's hard to use, you're going to get no customers whatsoever. So I used to be a UX designer and a product manager, all rolled into one for a while until I found out there were two different disciplines. But I see them tightly, tightly intertwined. And the value of both of those things working together, product and UX is incredible and life-changing for companies. So. When you think about the value of UX, what you have to do is tie it back to how can we increase our P&O or our financial responsibilities and what's preventing us from doing that from a UX perspective. So this is the best way to make a case. What I would do is start to do things like a churn analysis, a new customer perspective, and try to figure out are people leaving us because our product is really hard to use? Are people going to competitors because our UX is not as good? Are people struggling and not wanting to pay for price increases or things like that because their UX is bad? All of these things. If you can tie it back to a reason why customers are unhappy with your service or maybe they're not super unhappy. It's just that you're not getting as many as you want. You're not growing as fast as you want or they're like, this is just the way it is. It kind of sucks, but everything sucks in our industry.
There's not an opportunity for you to be competitively advantaged against everything else that kind of sucks out there. You want to look for those types of reasons. And that ties it back to the P&L. So a good way that we used to do this before when we looked into UX problems, and I'll tell you, right now a lot of products out there just have massive UX problems, massive issues with usability and things like that. And changing those things unlocks so much value that it blows my mind when we get into arguments with this. So what we would do in these organizations is that you want to think of this just as you would for evaluating product strategy. You want to go out and say, well, how is our retention? Is it good or bad? If our retention is high, why? Is it because it's easy to use? Great more ammo to show that UX is working. We need more if you want to scale, if you want to introduce new products. Is retention bad? Why? Is it a UX problem? Right there, you can start to calculate things out like the numbers of customers leaving and the amount that their contracts were and tie it back to UX problems. So do the research yourself like that. Go and try to figure out from this perspective, do we have a competitive advantage if we can do better UX? Are people leaving? Do we have retention problems? Do we have growth problems? Do we have new sales closures? So if you have retention problems, those types of things can help you really look at getting more budget for UX.
If there's not an issue, because let's say you have really good UX, your team is just stretched thin, you need to start to show though that if you want to build more products and you want to go faster, you need more people to do it. So that's where you're going to start to outline capacity planning. You're going to look at the future roadmap. You're going to bring it back and say, hey, if you want X, Y, and Z features, we need this many more people to do that within next year or Q4, whatever you want to do. If you don't want us to release all three of those, then we can keep operating with the same people we do. But if you want us to go faster, this is what you need. Those types of conversations go over really well with executives. Sometimes they just don't understand the job that you're doing from a user experience perspective. They don't know how much somebody can handle. And that's why all of this gets very confusing for people who are not in product, who have never worked with UX before, never worked with engineers, when you have to go get budget from like a CFO or a CEO or somebody in that situation. So I would try those approaches and hopefully they help you. And you're also about to hear from Mikita, how their simple usability, their great easy to use product at PandaDoc really helped them grow. So maybe that will be some ammo for you too. Ever wish for total alignment with executives, the end to those never-ending debates, results that make everyone sit up and take notice, amplifying influence across your organization, the secret, it's not just about managing, it's about facilitating. Level up your ability to facilitate clear, powerful conversations with stakeholders through Voltage Control's facilitation certification program. Learn more and get $500 off at voltagecontrol.com/product. We'll be putting that link in the show notes for you as well. Hi, Mikita, thanks for being on the podcast with us.
Mikita - 00:06:27: Hi, Melissa.
Melissa - 00:06:29: So you are the founder and CEO of PandaDoc. You've been building this company now for over 10 years. What made you want to become an entrepreneur?
Mikita - 00:06:40: I wanted to have control over my destiny since I was a little kid. I thought naively that entrepreneurship is a way to get there. And coming from humble beginnings, I tried to do little side hustles from the times of elementary school. I washed cars for money. I sold berries on the farmer's market that my grandma and I picked up. A little tiny farm. And then I did all kinds of random things growing up. Since I was a kid, I was in sales, and I got into computer science school, and I wanted to do something in technology. I didn't know what, but I did know that I want to build things, start things. I wanted to learn, experiment, and have control over my future. I guess all that led me to entrepreneurship. And also lack of high-risk tolerance, and at times, stupid lack of fear.
Melissa - 00:07:49: Definitely necessary, I feel like, for entrepreneurs. It's not an easy thing to jump in and dedicate your life to this.
Mikita - 00:07:57: Unreasonable optimism, all of that adds up, and then you go and do something.
Melissa - 00:08:03: Good traits to have. So PandaDoc , tell us a little bit about what it is and how did you come up with it?
Mikita - 00:08:09: And PandaDoc is a software company that helps more than 50,000 businesses to streamline their deals. Deals that are made by that are moved by documents, quotes, proposals, contracts. All of those documents is what PandaDoc automates, streamlines, helps to get signed, notarized. You got to close a deal and that deal requires you to send some kind of a piece of paper. PandaDoc makes it all digital and easy and it's been more than 12 years for us on the journey of making it.
Melissa - 00:08:49: I mean, you've done pretty well. It's worth a billion dollars now. So that's no easy fee, especially because you get into that unicorn club, as we like to say in the SaaS businesses. Can you tell us about the early days? What was it like, you and your co-founder trying to build this? And when did you know that you actually had something?
Mikita - 00:09:09: The early days were tough. We first just built websites. That was our first business together. Then we built little add-ons and extensions for other web designers, web developers. Then we build a few different products that we just wanted to run online and have a higher level of control compared to those little add-ons we created and sold for. Systems of record, like the Comp Management Systems, WordPresses, and I think Magento, there were a bunch of other software products that we created add-ons for. And anytime those software products change something in their source code, our add-ons stopped working, which created a lot of headache for my co-founders, Sergey and I. And we just wanted something more stable and sustainable. And we've burned through a few ideas, some of which had potential, but we really failed to execute. And with the job, and Sergey is my technical co-founder, he had to build sales quotes and proposals for prospective customers. And he felt like this process is just too mundane and there's too much copy-pasting and a software product can help. That was the thesis behind PandaDoc. And we first aimed at just web designers, helping web designers to be more efficient, folks like ourselves, web developers, web designers. By the time we burned through all of our savings, and the first three years were pretty tough. It was very unclear whether this thing is gonna pan out really. And there's been a lot of fighting among two of us. Out things that didn't really matter colors of the buttons or where those buttons gonna be you or like what features and I think one thing that was a constant is that with every step we learn and we can month in year and five years and we kept learning and kept expanding our vision, our thinking and here we are today.
Melissa - 00:11:33: Did pretty well. So when did you, like you said, the first three years were pretty hard. What happened after that where you were like, okay? We've got like something's happening. This is good. These are good signs.
Mikita - 00:11:46: I don't really think we had that aha moment or that strong epiphany that he needed. Or one of us, you know, funding events might seem like those little summits that you climb up to from the outside, but from the inside, you work on that ground for a year. And then by the time it happens, you know, all about it, you've spent all this energy to make it happen. And you're pretty drained. So there's not much of the excitement or say the how the progress has been linear with some accelerations and decelerations. However, I think B2B SaaS is a pretty boring endeavor. And the ones you get like, right, it's repetitive and it's repeatable. And then you just keep learning and learning and set new targets. And then if you hit those targets, then by the time you hit them, you already have other targets in mind and just keep at it. You gotta love the process. There's something beautiful about the process itself. My co-founder calls this whole process a craft. And he's probably right. Inch by inch, you get better and inch by inch you progress.
Melissa - 00:13:01: So for you, what's the craft? What's your process that you're repeating piece by piece?
Mikita - 00:13:07: I think for me, it's learning and getting better in core competencies required in my job.
Melissa - 00:13:17: That's interesting. Like what do you, you know, especially for a first time CEO, you're a first time CEO. Right. Okay. Pretty sure. But I think that's like when I have a lot of empathy for people in that position because it's not like you went to school and got trained to be a CEO and it's like ta-da, here you go. Right? This is what you're supposed to do. And I think it's really nice that you're talking about learning here and trying to upskill your competencies. What types of things did you feel like you needed to learn about to be a better CEO to keep leading the company through growth?
Mikita - 00:13:51: I was not qualified to do my job. Since I started with this job, really. And every time I got this slight hint of a feeling that, hey, you're getting it. The company just, things changed, the market changed, the company outgrew, and internal environment changed. And then all of a sudden that slight feeling just evaporated and I was no longer, like, and a different feeling came up. You're not qualified again. So let's get back to work. And I think I hear that quite often because as long as a business growing and scaling at a high rate, things are going to change really fast. And it's very challenging to be, I think, in any leadership position, but add rapid growth to that and then you just have a, it is difficult. Now, what are those competencies? We're a software company and talent is the most important thing that makes or kills software companies, I think. So evaluating talent, finding talent, seeing talent, putting talented people in a position to succeed, all those, it is so hard. But I think that's one thing that I had to develop year over year, hopefully.
Melissa - 00:15:15: One thing with that that I see as well when I talk to founder CEOs in your position too is... It's hard for them to know what good looks like. You have to go out and say, hey, I need a head of HR. Never hired a head of HR before. I know some founders who've never actually worked for a company that even had HR before. They can't just look over and say, oh, that's what they do on a day-to-day basis. So what do you do to kind of understand what good looks like? How did you learn about those things?
Mikita - 00:15:42: I moved to US with PandaDoc and I moved from Belarus, which has, when it comes to business culture and business environments, so different. It is very, very different. So it's fair to say that I came here clueless, like completely clueless. One thing that I've got right is I've been trying to surround myself with people who are more experienced than me, smarter than me, like people who are interesting and who've done things that I want to do or aspire to and who have qualities that I aspire to. And that learning through people, yeah, they're blogs, they're books, they're especially podcasts. But all those are great, like, and those are available to anyone everyone. However, I find learning through people and through my community to be the most impactful. It is probably the most customized one right to my challenges and needs. For me that that has been the best way to learn. And I think one thing that I got right moving into US and Silicon Valley was that I just tried my best to put myself in the communities and circles where I can learn.
Melissa - 00:16:57: So when you were looking for, you know, for founders who are out there listening to this, right, when you were looking to say like, hey, I need a hire ahead of HR, like, what types of people did you turn to in your community? Because I know quite a few people are out there like, I don't know HR people, who do I talk to?
Mikita - 00:17:14: Well, first thing we've done at PandaDoc was that we created a board of advisors. And some of those folks were immensely helpful. One gentleman, his name is Ragnar, eStonian guy, also from Eastern Europe. However, he co-founded the company that was a couple of years ahead of us, and the company was in our space. It was a CRM company called Pipedrive. I learned a lot from Ragnar in those early days. And he made a lot of introductions, and he introduced me to some prospective investors. Me how to pitch investors, how to prospect like he taught me a lot of things. And then finding folks like Ragnar, who I can learn from and get introductions to other folks I can learn from has been very, very helpful. So anyhow, like board of advisors, that was one tactic that worked for us pretty well. Then investors raising money from folks that understand your space and who you can learn from, who can make necessary introductions, I think worked for us pretty well. The employees in their networks, professional networks, there's a bunch of communities and groups and meetups and events and things that were relevant to end the dock that I try to get my nose into and navigate to and then friends and just people that surrounded me. I'm lucky because I live in San Francisco, CA, the area which is known for having a lot of folks versed in technology, right? So I'm lucky from that perspective because there's an abundance of people with deep knowledge in the areas that have been relevant to PandaDoc. I think San Francisco, CA Bay Area is not, it's probably the biggest, but not the only place on earth where you can build a community that can support your growth.
Melissa - 00:19:02: I think we've been seeing since COVID too, a lot more remote things taking over, which is nice. When I started in product management, the only place you could find product managers was San Francisco, CA and I was in New York and I was lonely. Cause we didn't have much there, but I'm glad to see it. It's spreading. I love this concept. What I hear from you is you're willing to learn and you're willing to ask these questions and go out and say, hey, I got to do this. I need some help, point me in these directions, which I think is a really great trait for a founder. When you look back on, you've seen pretty great growth here at PandaDoc too. When you look back at your, as your time as a CEO, now what do you think has been the most surprising thing about that role that you did not anticipate? Like if somebody said before PandaDoc , you're going to be a CEO and now you look at it today, like what are the things that surprised you?
Mikita - 00:19:49: I'll give you a thing that changed me rather than it did surprise me and it did change me as well. In the early days, I thought that building a big company is about finding this right pain in the market and then figuring out the best product or solution to solve that pain. And it's about getting lucky with that match. People call it product-market fit. And that match is the most important thing above all. I think with time, I realized that product market fit is important. However, in my position, learning to work with people, learning to find great people, learning to help them to do great is more important because markets change, products change, the fits also change, and I think mastering the latter helps to find former. And in the long run, you have not one, not two, not three years, but more like 30 in the long run, and more granny twins. That was a big shift for me personally.
Melissa - 00:20:58: So focus on the people. I find that some of the fastest ways to kill a company is by having the wrong people in the wrong spots, let's say. And I've seen a lot of executive teams that are just frankly toxic. They have the wrong people there. They don't get along. They're not working as a team. It's everybody for themselves. They're not really collaborating around what's best for the company. It's instead trying to build their little armies. So when you think about building your team and structuring the right team and working with good people, how do you make sure you find the right people? And then how are you looking at it as a CEO to just enable them and not block them to say like, here's how I'm going to lift you up?
Mikita - 00:21:42: Sure. I don't really have a straight answer to this question or a formula that I can just flash out and it would work. I think the answer to the question in broader terms is it depends. Which is a no, it's not an answer. In our early days, I'd say we really struggled finding great talent, retaining talent, ensuring people get along. It was very, very difficult. And especially here in the US, I wasn't able to build this like to build collaborative culture, the notion you made about their teams that just don't work, the ones that dysfunctional, we had those and at the executive level, very difficult to get things done. And what we've done, that was 2015 or 2016. It was a long time ago. What Sergey and I have done, the co-founder and I have done is we had a long hearts to hearts conversation, admitted that things are not working and decided to try to fix cultural issues, team building issues, starting with ourselves. Because that's who we have more control of. What we've done, former engineer and then he was an engineer at the time. Something very structured with written down. Who we aspire to be and how we aspire to behave and work. Made it very, very clear. It was like a product spec. Called it our Culture Code. And then we started holding each other accountable towards the spec. To the features towards the features that we outlined. And then we brought it into our executive team. And the execs embraced that concept thing. They were relieved because that finally was clear where these crazy kids want and who are they and why do they behave the way they behave and so on and so forth. And, and then we've implemented that parts of the Culture Code and into our recruiting and talent, tension, promotion into our talent stretch. And I think that that did really help. It did help us to build a cohesive culture, a more cohesive structure, culture. Now, for all the humans, that specification that we've written for, to aspire to, we break that code. I mean, we do. But at least there's like something that's public. You can find it online, PandaDoc CultureCode, we published it. At least there's like a constitution that every Panda can hold us accountable to, right? And call things out. I think that sort of journey helped to steer company's culture and put us on the right track.
Melissa - 00:24:28: Nice. So that definitely sounds like it contributed to part of your success here. When you look at Pandoc's history for the last 12 years that you've been doing this, what do you think you really nailed, you know, either from a product company or like product perspective or a company perspective or customers or whatever? What do you think like really helped you grow to where you are today?
Mikita - 00:24:52: I think we were able to really build an easy to use product in a space where most of solutions are pretty complex. That allowed us to employ the cool things like a lot of product like growth and inbound customer acquisition and give the product in the hands of broader audience of customers. I think that worked pretty well for us and I think that's one thing that we've done fairly well. I think we also stay fairly focused. As any company, we ventured sort of left and right of our core vision. We made a lot of mistakes, we failed gazillion times. However, the core solution that PandaDoc brings to market and that core vision that Serge and I had, it's the very beginning of PandaDoc. It stayed pretty much the same. There's been some deviation and we've changed our mission quite a bit. We changed our vision quite a bit, but we didn't flip-flop too much. So on the one hand, we've experimented a lot and tried a lot of things and sort of ventured a little bit left and right from where we started and definitely expanded our TAM, expanded what we do, how we do it, and who we serve and why and so on and so forth. However, that core is still here.
Melissa - 00:26:17: I think that's really important for companies, especially when they start scaling, because you have like 18,000 paths you could possibly choose. And if you start to stray from your core concept too far, it can get really messy. So when you were thinking about holding people accountable to the core, making sure that you... I'm sure everybody does go a little left and right sometimes and have to course correct. But how did you explain that vision in that core so that it was memorable for people and you used it to think about how you wanted to grow and how you wanted to build?
Mikita - 00:26:50: I don't think that has been a constant that changed the vision and the mission and the values and the Culture Code. Those we didn't set them in stone, but they're pretty consistent year, quarter over quarter, year over year. But then the personas, the products, the apps and solutions that has changed. Now one thing that, and I don't really think that this approach is any unique to Panda and it was primarily driven by just frankly like fear of failure.
Melissa - 00:27:33: You make it easy for people to do these workflows and to do the sales workflows and the quote workflows. And that's the core.
Mikita - 00:27:41: Here's how we went. Our first product, product that preceded PandaDoc, helped web designers build sales quotes. Then we learned that it's not good enough for web designers. They want proposals. We expanded that to proposals, proposals for web designers. Then we learned that the market is much bigger and there are way more industries, personas, than just web designers. And they have demands, they have needs. That made us think of PandaDoc and created a more holistic solution that automates not just proposals and not just for web designers. PandaDoc streamlines, streamlines quotes and contracts and proposals and signing or various industries, niches, personas, construction companies or software companies. Doesn't really matter. All of the above things in the back. Then we learned that some of those folks want these documents to be notarized, acquired a team that built the notary product. Then we learned that the some of the deals are more sophisticated and they require creation of a deal room, build a deal product. Then we learned that, and I can keep going and going like that, offer letters are not that different from proposals for contracts. And whenever a company hires someone, it is a transaction. It is also a deal and the back and forth is pretty similar. So we've created an HR solution. So it just like it kept growing around our core. Now, again, we can make sort of bigger leaps moving forward, but so far the total addressable market for what we do now and today seems to be big enough for us to be focused.
Melissa - 00:29:35: I think it's interesting because what I hear from you when you explain this to me is that PandaDoc really starts in its core is almost this job to be done. If we're going to use product management language, it's that job to be done of helping people execute on these types of documents that they would do some kind of deal, some kind of contract type thing and everything that goes with it. So it doesn't really matter who you are. All that matters is that you have this need and then you can really just scale from there. It's so logical, all these different things that you can add on and just keep making that job to be done more fulfilled with every single thing that you do.
Mikita - 00:30:12: Yes, that's correct.
Melissa - 00:30:13: Okay, so that's where your core focused. You talked a lot about this Culture Code. I'm very curious what's in the Culture Code.
Mikita - 00:30:20: I'll give you four values from the Culture Code. And we start every presentation within the company, every all hand, every all hands meeting with a slide that the state, the value when I learn and teach that's number one, when I make a positive impact on fellow pandas, customers, communities who belong to them. We want to have fun and want to be empathetic again to fellow pandas, customers, partners, also for values, learning, teaching, fun, positive impact and empathy.
Melissa - 00:30:53: I love those values. They sound really nice. I would like to work there. It sounds like a good culture. Good team. So when you were talking a little bit about it as well, when you sat down and wrote this with your co-founder to figure out what do we want to be, where do you think things were slipping before? You said, like, we've got to change ourselves. We're going to write down. We're going to do this Culture Code. What was happening at that time? You said people didn't like each other. The executive team wasn't getting off. Was it just from growth problems, the wrong people, or just not having a good North Star?
Mikita - 00:31:23: Everything. There's some smart and way more qualified people that categorize sets of issues that happen in the team environment. I read five functions on the team at the time. And we had all of them in abundance. Yeah, we had all kinds of HR issues and all kinds of team dynamics issues and all kinds of performance issues and management issues, leadership issues, like I've done so many dumb things. It's gonna be hard to like, it's gonna be impossible to list them all. But yeah, we had all kinds of issues.
Melissa - 00:32:00: So this document, it sounds like really helped set a lot of these things right. And I'm sure you did a lot of other work besides that to get it back on track, but help set the tone for what you wanted to build.
Mikita - 00:32:11: Yeah, it helped us to steer our decisions. And here's the thing, like as a CEO, or my co-founder is the CPO and CTO, as the CTO, it doesn't really matter how great you are, how experienced you are going to make that decisions. Now, you know, you're a human being, you're not an AI. And even AI makes mistakes, right? We all know. So I think what's important is have get the percentage of the right decisions among the important ones higher than the wrong ones, all while having enough of the runway making those decisions so that you get a compounding effect. Like year over year, you just multiply the good ones over bad ones. And then all of a sudden, you look back 10 years and you have something to show because you've made way more right decisions than the wrong ones because the right ones were compounding. The Culture Code was not one of those like night and day type of moments that changed everything all of a sudden. No, it just like, it helped to slightly steer the direction of the company. And then so as every new hire, every great hire helps to steer the direction of the company so that every positive event in the market helps to steer the direction of the company and so on and so forth. But yeah, like if I was to start over, I'd try to do it earlier and try to align it, not just within the company, but also with the board of investors and try to be more rigorous without following that specification PRD that we created.
Melissa - 00:33:52: Your blueprint. I like it. So when you're thinking about you've been doing PandaDoc now for 10 years, what are you excited about for the next 10 years? Like, what do you get excited about? Why do you still go to work every day? Besides the fact that it's your company.
Mikita - 00:34:06: I like the job. Like I like the process. Really like it. I like coming up with the vision. I love selling the vision I love and that works. I love inspiring people. I like to analyze different parts of the business and try to find patterns, try to find discrepancies, try to find interesting or challenging parts of the business. I like the job. That's what I'm excited about. And I really like watching how not just the company, but you know, probably more importantly, people in the company or people that were part of PandaDoc and then how they progress and how they grow and like how they're doing. And there's this like wonderful match of they're doing great and they say, Hey, you know, the time of PandaDoc taught me something and I really loved it. When you know, when they're doing their job and like it progressed in the company and they're loving it and they're killing it and they're just happy. I just like watching it because that's positive impact. And that's pretty fun.
Melissa - 00:35:13: Sounds like definitely a fantastic job to have. So thank you so much, Mikita, for being on the podcast with us. If people wanna learn more about you, and also PandaDoc, where can they go?
Mikita - 00:35:24: In order to learn about pain to doc, you can just go to www.pandadoc.com. Panda document.com. Why Panda? You want a true story or marketing story? Forget both.
Melissa - 00:35:35: True story.
Mikita - 00:35:36: The true story is that we got into a market with a bunch of enterprise, corporate, boring, and my new sounding players. And we wanted to be different. And wanted to be memorable. And at the time, there were companies like Mailchimp and SurveyMonkey. And we thought it's a really cool idea to have a mascot, to have an animal in our name that would make us memorable. And then we thought, well, you know, contracts and they're kind of black and white, sort of, kind of, like pandas, pandas are black and white. So anyhow, like we thought that would be a good idea.
Melissa - 00:36:14: I love it. Okay, that's a cool story.
Mikita - 00:36:16: That was one of the very few options with a $10 a year domain name that was available in the dot com zone too. The marketing story is pandas are endangered to deforestation. We have the world to go paperless, thus saving more trees for the pandas. There's a flaw with that story. What is that flaw?
Melissa - 00:36:37: The eucalyptus that the pandas eat?
Mikita - 00:36:39: They eat bamboo.
Melissa - 00:36:40: I got it in my yard. They can have it. So I can't get rid of it. That's great. That's a fun story, though. Yeah, I'm thinking of koalas with eucalyptus bamboo. Great. Good story. Well, I'm sure everybody will go to Panadoc.com to learn more about the company. And where can they find you? Can we find you on LinkedIn? Where do you hang out? Where do you talk?
Mikita - 00:36:59: I can be found on LinkedIn or Instagram. Mikita Mikado.
Melissa - 00:37:04: We'll link to all of those in the show notes for you guys to go find and keep track of PandaDoc's progress and Mikita's progress. And thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode and a fabulous guest. We'll also be answering your questions for the Dear Melissa segment. So make sure that you write to me at dearmelissa.com and let me know exactly what questions you have. You can also find all the show notes too at productthinkingpodcast.com or dearmelissa.com. They go to the same place. So check those out too. We'll see you next time.
Mikita - 00:37:36: All righty, thank you, Melissa.