Building Community

Mike: I'm Mike Belsito, co-founder of Product Collective, which is a community for product people and I'm one of the organizers behind INDUSTRY, the Product Conference, which is annual Product conference that we put together for product people that takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, every year. And now, also Dublin, Ireland.

Suzanne: Excellent. Take us back a step and tell us what is Product Collective.

Mike: Product Collective is really a community for product people. That's what I always say, but the reason I say that is it's a place where product people can connect with one another, can continue to learn as product people and also hopefully find some inspiration, too. We do that in a number of ways, and it all started actually from our conference, INDUSTRY. What we noticed is that people were coming to INDUSTRY because they wanted to, not just learn from awesome product people and find that inspiration, but also connect with people in the case of INDUSTRY, face to face. And when that happened that first year and people were saying, "This is awesome. We love that we're able to do these things." We started to think, "How can we do this the other 363 days when INDUSTRY isn't happening?

So eventually, what happened is, we opened up Product Collective to essentially be like a membership group. In it, people subscribed to our newsletter, so you know, every week we're sharing awesome product content around very specific topics. It's a different topic every single week, but beyond that, we also allow product people to learn through our product launch Q&A chat. Sometimes I call them webinars, but really they're live video Q&A chats. So we'll feature our product leader and I'll have a conversation with them, and really it's just like a video call, except there's usually 300 people that are watching live and also asking questions of their own and I curate that on the spot.

And then we have a Slack channel, where there's about 3000+ product people that are a part of that, they're constantly sharing ideas, best practices, looking for advice, that sort of thing. So when I say community, it's those things. Usually it happens online. It's either happening in Slack or it's happening in our Q&A chats, but people are connecting with one another all year round. And then, of course, we all meet in person at INDUSTRY when we get together for our annual conferences.

Suzanne: Right. Amazing. Sounds like there's a bit of a chicken and egg here that I want to parse out. One of your personal missions that you proudly broadcast is to help product people. That's your “why”.

Mike: Yes.

Suzanne: And so I'm curious to know, did you wake up one day and say to yourself, "I wanna help product people,” and then you thought, “how can I do that?" And then INDUSTRY happened or did INDUSTRY sort of formed first and then you realized, "Oh, that's what we're doing. We're helping product people." Help us understand how all of this stuff came to life.

Mike: Sure. It definitely started when me, and my partner Paul, we were both working together or at least kind of ... We're both friends, really. And we both had separate projects. I had a full-time job, Paul had a full-time job as well, but other projects, but we both didn't realize that we were product people. I wouldn't even we identified as product people quite yet.

What happened is ... Well, I'll give a little bit of background on me. I've spent the last 13 years in early stage technology startup companies. And in all sorts of roles, from being an employee number one where I'm wearing so my hats to being a co-founder, to really focusing more on business development type roles. What happened was, back in 2014, I had a startup of my own that was acquired, but I always call it kind of a failed sale. That wasn't the kind of acquisition where it's ... I'm sitting on the beach for a while and contemplating life. This was an acquisition where, "I need to get a job at some point soon."

I knew eventually I might start another company, it's just at that point in time it's not like I was working on anything in particular. There was a company, it was a ticketing technology company, in Cleveland, Ohio, which is where I'm from, that recruited me to be a director of product strategy. And I remember, first of all, when they reached out, Googling almost instantly, "What does a director of product strategy do?" Because I had no idea. And actually-

Suzanne: What does a director of product strategy do?

Mike: I still sort of have no idea. I mean, if you talk to 10 people at 10 different companies, that have that role, you'd probably get 10 different answers. That’s the reality of it. But it was intriguing enough for me to want to meet with them. And I remember in that first meeting with them, I was like, "Hey. I think this sounds cool. It's just, I don't know if I'd be perfect for it. I never went to school for product management." And they said, "Oh, Mike, nobody went to school for product management. That's not really a thing. You can't really do that. Usually people come into product roles from other adjacent areas." I'm like, "Oh, interesting." I ended up taking that role and it was interesting, it was fun, but I definitely felt lost. I was still trying to figure out what it meant to be a product person.

So I found myself reading books, reading blogs, and listening to podcasts. The thing is, the way that I love to learn most is through other people directly. Meeting them face to face, asking them about challenges that they've gone through, and I realized that there wasn't, where I live, a sort of center of gravity pulling product people together where I could do that in one place. There are definitely product people in Cleveland, it’s just there wasn't any single thing that was pulling them. And I remember right at that time when I was realizing this, I spoke at a local technology conference that my now partner, Paul, had put on. So it was this ... Not focusing on product, it was just general tech and it had a regional focus.

The topic I spoke on really didn't have anything to do with product either, but I remember he had asked me for a feedback as a speaker, after that conference took place. And I said, "I think everything went well. People seemed to like it. You had a lot of people there, the energy was good. But to be honest with you, there's a lot of these local tech conferences that are popping up. I'm trying to figure out what it means to be a product person and I really haven't seen too many product conferences actually taking place. You know what you should do? You should consider, as way to differentiate yourself, make it focused on product. Don't worry about the regional aspect of it. Just keep it broad about product. It just happens to be in Cleveland. That way you could get these product people." I'm like, selfishly for me, this way I could bring product people to me. And he said, "Well,. what if we were to do that together?"

That was the end of 2014, when we had that lunch, and that was the precursor for what ultimately became INDUSTRY and Product Collective. Paul already had some experience planning conferences, I was this new product person, really, trying to figure out what it meant to be product. That first year, that was the end of 2014, we had the actual first conference in 2015. It was the fall of 2015, and ... I remember, because we thought that this would be a conference that people within, say, a two hour drive might come to. So we're in Cleveland, so maybe we get people from Pittsburgh, or Detroit, but not really farther out from that.

That first year we had people from 21 states and seven countries. It was still 250 people. So it's not like this was this massive, major conference, but at the same time we felt like we're onto something. And it was something that struck a chord with us personally. It was something that I was passionate about, Paul was passionate about. So after that first conference, we dedicated ourselves, not quite full-time yet, but dedicated ourselves to making this even bigger and better than what it was that first year. And yeah, it really just started with us as new product people trying to figure things out and then the conference happened and then after a year or two that's when Product Collective opened up more as a community.

Suzanne: Wow. Yeah. I mean, I love what you're doing and obviously it resonates for me. A lot of your story, I think, is echoed in the journey that we have here at 100 Product Managers. Similar situation, right? Being based out in Los Angeles, watching this sort of burgeoning tech scene, beginning to understand that there's a different feel and flavor for what tech looks like and how it operates in southern California versus northern California, recognizing as an instructor of product management, recognizing that everybody seems to have these same kinds of questions starting with, “What is product management?” We joke about you not really knowing what the director of product strategy role was about and still not really knowing what it was about, I think all of that is evidence for why resources like 100 PM, resources like Product Collective, and resources like INDUSTRY are so valuable at this exact moment in time.

Mike: I totally agree. I mean, these types of resources, this is exactly what helped me when I was taking on that first role as a product person. I created Product Collective really as something that I wish had existed when I was first getting started, but now that it does, and now that there are things like 100 Product Managers and 100 PM podcast, all the resources that you have as well, these are the things that I think can really product people given that there isn't this formal education. It's funny, I also, as on the side, I teach one class a semester at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. And this semester I'm teaching ... It's the very first time they've offered an undergraduate product management class.

Suzanne: Wow.

Mike: But it blows my mind because ... I mean, on one level by the way, when you're teaching something for the first time, it's really low bar. You can't really say, "You can't compare to something that's in the past." So that's one benefit for me, but it's ... A college like Case, it's a great college, but it's the first they've ever had an undergraduate class on product management. This type of formal education doesn't really exist in product management. So it’s all of these other resources that can really help product people, they need to exist, in my opinion.

Suzanne: Right. Let's go back a minute to before all of this started when you were working in tech. Because what I think it's interesting about this is you were an entrepreneur, you're in the tech space, and you yourself weren't a product person. Did you have product managers working in the companies that you were operating? Or that was just a gap that you didn't even know needed to be filled?

Mike: Yeah. It would be more of the latter, but I'll correct myself because it's not as if I wasn't a product person, but I didn't know I was a product person, or didn't really identify with being a product person, but if you really think about what needs to happen within the role, I suppose, especially for the start up that I co-found, there were only six of us, total. I really was feeling that gap as the needs that a company would have that a product person usually fills, but I wasn't ... Again, I didn't identify with being a product person necessarily. I think again, a part of it is, I just hadn't been exposed to product management as a formal thing.

Thinking back to my very first role, I worked for a company I was ... First, I was employee number one. So it was the first full-time hire that they brought on within the company. And I was there for six years. When I had left, there were about 120 of us, it was a company that was doing about $30 million in revenue. The cool thing was I got to be there and have a front row seat at all the growth that the company had, but even in that company ... I did at the very end. I guess my title had product in the name. It was like product innovation manager, but I remember even back then saying, "What does this mean? What should I be doing?" And they're like, "Yeah, just launch new products for us."

It wasn't really deeply rooted in, "Hey there's this thing Mike called product management, and there are frameworks that you could rely on, and there's people that you could bounce ideas off of" It really was just, "Well, keep growing in the startup and now I guess I have to figure out what it means to launch new products for the company." So in a lot of ways, even though I had product in my title, technically, I still didn't identify with being a part of this whole thing called product management.

Suzanne: For sure, yeah. I think that's a common experience. I mean, certainly, I have a lot of students wander in to my classroom, and I say, "So why are you here in this course?" And they tell me, "Well, I've just been promoted to the role of product manager, but I don't really know what that means." Or the inverse of it, which is, "I'm taking this course because I think I've been a product manager for the last three years, but I haven't had that title, but everybody that I talk to keeps suggesting that might be what I'm doing. So I wanna see if that's true."

I'm curious, so what advice would you offer to a CEO or really more appropriately, a founder ? What do you need to know or start thinking about differently, in order to be more successful as the founder of a product business and then later to be able to identify the kinds of people you need on your team to have success?

Mike: Yeah. I will say the good news is that now there are all sorts of resources that are dedicated to founders that really … You could change the word founder on the book and put product manager and it still would be totally relevant. The whole Lean Startup movement ... I actually remember when eFuneral, which was my startup company, when we had launched, there was a person at this conference we were at and I'm like, "Oh. That guy looks like he's hawking books. Who is that?" And somebody was like, "I think his name is Eric Ries." I'm like, "Oh. I never heard of him." Because back then, nobody ever heard of him. The Lean Startup hadn't really launched, yet. I think he had a blog and that was the only thing that would tie itself to Lean Startup.

But that whole concept, it's totally relevant for product people too. Obviously, there's differences if you're with a very established company, but if you're launching new products, there's the whole notion of building, measuring, learning, iteration, all of that ... yes, it's going to be a little different if you're that six-person startup to a 600 person company, but the whole notion of iteration and trying to experiment, that still is true.

What I would say, my advice to founders, is pour yourself into those books and resources as well, but I would also start to remind yourself that it's either you or somebody on your team is a product person, right? If it's not the CEO, which probably is the CEO, but if it's not CEO, maybe it's the CTO, but one of you is a product person. And really, just own that. What that means is, even if your title is CEO or CTO, you're a co-founder, you could join communities whether it's 100 PM, Product Collective, you could start reading books that are geared towards product managers because those are the same things that you're going to need to do with your product.

Obviously, at very different stage, but I'd say, the earlier stage that you are in a lot of ways, it's somewhat more beneficial because you have the ability to experiment, you have the ability to make changes much more quickly than when you are at larger, established company. That would be one part and the other part of it would just be to meet as many other people that are in a similar situation, that are maybe a couple stages ahead of you. Product people, maybe they're founders, but they're at a point where ... You know, we launched a few years back and now we're at that stage where we're finding product market fit. We're actually there. Now, we're going up the scale. When you start putting people like that in your network and in your circle of friends, that will help you immensely, too. I would also put people in that circle that do identify as product people.

Suzanne: Yeah, I know. I think that's great advice for everyone as well, right? This idea of being in a room with people who know things that are different from you, not necessarily just people who know the same because that's different kinds of insights will surface. When is the right time to bring in an official product manager? So if all of this is true, right, you're a founding CEO or a founding CTO and you're the resident product person, and you're trying to get traction, you're trying to get to product market fit, you're trying to make the thing go. What do you think are the signs that it's time to bring in a dedicated person to be in that PM role?

Mike: Yeah. This is a tricky one. I don't think there's necessarily a right answer on this one. But from what I've seen work really well, companies, that at the very beginning stage, the founder that adopts that product role as long as possible until really you're at a point where you feel like you're ... Either you found product market fit or there's a path to it. That might be, "Hey, we haven't gotten quite there yet." Or "We're scaling, but we're halfway there. I can actually see it now in front of us. But I need to bring in a few more people on board to help get us there." One of the first folks you might bring on board might be somebody that is in a more defined product role. I'm much more in favor of that versus having the very first role you bring on board somebody that is product.

Let's just say there's two or three people that are co-founding a company and they raise a little bit of startup capital and they say, "We've enough money, we're going to bring a few team members on board." Rather than, let's say, "Okay. Let's bring on a designer, three developers, and a product manager and let's get that team cranking." I would say, don't bring on that product manager quite yet. You need to be the product manager. You, as the founder, because really you as the founder have to be, or at least you should be, the one that is in front of customers often, getting feedback from customers, understanding what their pain points truly are.

I just think the longer that you can be in that role and empathize with customers, the better off your whole company will be. Once it gets to a point where you're like, "Hey man, I'm doing this. I understand how to empathize with the customers, but the problem now is we're producing products that our customers so much that I'm holding the team back because of everything else I need to do." That might be the time when you're bringing somebody else on board. That might be a year, might be two years after you founded the company and your team's cranking before you're actually doing that. I think if it's much sooner before, again, if it's at the very beginning, you might bring on an awesome product first, they might do an awesome job for you, but I just think you then lose that perspective of being so close to customers, which I think it's really, really important at the startup stage.

Suzanne: Right. Absolutely. I think it's Brian from Airbnb who has that quote, "Don't hire for any jobs that you haven't already done yourself." Which I think is tremendous advice. When you really start cooking with gas, you start to feel like, "I need help." And so that moment of, "I need help," quickly leads people to the idea of bringing in bodies. “I need help,” bring in a body. “I need help,” bring in two bodies. And a lot of the times, what can happen is you bring in a role that you don't even know what is this role supposed to be for our company, which leads back to this conundrum of what is product management to begin with, right?

Because, first of all, a lot of the product management positions that are being advertised don't necessarily come with the title product manager, right? You have people advertising for business analysts, you have people advertising for UX designers, but what that company is really looking for is somebody to encompass more of that holistic thinking, they just necessarily haven't titled it that way.

And the gaps that you're being brought in to fill within any specific company are usually going to be specific to where are the gaps in that particular organization. It's challenging to say, "We need a product manager." And have that mean something universal and true in every instance, but I would say it's extra challenging if you yourself haven't been in that role or connected to what the product manager is going to be doing.

Mike: Yeah. I totally agree. When people are asking me about like the right time, you have to be far enough where you can be close with customers, like you feel like "Hey, I've actually done this role for quite some time." Rather than outsource a product role to somebody else.

Suzanne: Right, right. What's interesting to me is INDUSTRY, the conference, is a product. Do you think that it’s a product?

Mike: Absolutely, yes. Absolutely. We treat it like a product, and every year we're trying to figure out, "Okay. What features are no longer resonating with customers? What needs aren't we solving that are there?" I think, again, just us now that we identify as product people. It might not be your traditional tech product, but it absolutely is a product.

Suzanne: Absolutely. So 2017 conference, that was the third year?

Mike: Yes.

Suzanne: Was that the year three?

Mike: That's right. Yeah.

Suzanne: We're going to be heading into year four. You'll do it again in Cleveland, in 2018. But you also are introducing this Dublin version.

Mike: Exactly. Yeah. INDUSTRY-

Suzanne: So you're "Dublin’" down on the level of effort associated with these conferences.

Mike: I love that. I haven't heard that one yet, so that's great.

Suzanne: So you heard that here first.

Mike: But yeah. Really, it was kind of a factor of a couple of different things. One, we've grown considerably since we first launched. So the very first version of INDUSTRY back in 2015, was 250 people and they did come from all over, although I would say, especially from the Midwest. I think that first year was like 70% were from the Midwest. Not necessarily from our home state, we had a decent amount of people from Ohio, but it was people from Illinois, and Indiana, and Michigan, you know. Just different places within the Midwest. 2017, so two years later, we've almost tripled in size from that first year. So it was about 700 people this past year from 37 US states and 13 countries, so coming from even more places. And at this point now, it was about 50% from Midwest, still definitely a big Midwest contingent, but we're seeing more people come from outside the Midwest even, coming all the way to Cleveland.

As we look ahead to 2018, we want to continue the momentum. We want INDUSTRY to be a place where people are coming from all over. It's not necessarily our goal to be the biggest, but we want to be the best product conference. We want people to have the best experience as product people. But one of the things that we've noticed is, we had people within Product Collective, our community, from Europe. And in some cases it's not as easy to make the trip all the way out to the US if you're a product person in Europe and you're working at ... maybe it’s an early stage company, or ... Even larger organizations, there's only so much budget you have to go to conferences and such.

People were asking us about, "Hey, are you ever going to do a road show? Are you ever going to come to Europe?" And a couple of things. My partner, Paul, he's from about 50 minutes drive ... actually no, I think it’s a little longer than that, but not too much longer from Dublin, Ireland. So he was originally from, I believe, it was Tipperary. He's an Irish fella. He's been in the US for a few years, but if you were to talk to him, you'd hear right away that he has an Irish accent. But the thing is, in Dublin, it also happens to be the home of a lot of European headquarters for major tech companies, whether is Google, Airbnb-

Suzanne: Oh, really?

Mike: Yeah. A lot of the major tech companies have their European headquarters right in Dublin. So we thought a combination of Paul knowing the neighborhood already and the fact that if we're going to come to Europe, we prefer to do it in a place that already had a pretty strong tech base. And Dublin seemed to be just that. Yeah it made us excited enough to launch INDUSTRY Europe, which will take place in April 2018. And our goal for that is really drawing the same, roughly same number of attendees we drew our very first year of INDUSTRY.

It won't be the thousand people that we'll have for our annual ... Our global conference, if you will. It will be more 250 to 300. More intimate atmosphere, but the quality of the speakers we're bringing in and the product people that are already a part of it, that doesn't change. That won't be diminished just because it's a little bit of a smaller group than the main conference.

Suzanne: Exciting. How would you, in your words, differentiate INDUSTRY, the product conference, from maybe more well established conferences like Mind the Product, which are having events all the time, and fairly large scale annual conferences? If I were a PM with a small budget available, and I could choose one or the other, why might INDUSTRY be the product conference for me?

Mike: Yeah. By the way, I love the work that Mind the Product has done, and there's a handful of other awesome product conferences that exist in the world. Not hundreds, though. There's really very few. Mind the Product would be one of them. I actually just spoke at a conference in Lisbon, Portugal called Productized. That was a really nice conference as well. But I think with INDUSTRY, we approached it not to necessarily compare to other conferences, but we tried to create something that we wanted as product people. So we were thinking about, "Hey, if we're going to spend time away from the office, what might we want that to look like?"

One of the things is, again, given that the vast majority of the people that are going to our conference, they're not from our area. I know some conferences they take place in the Bay Area. If you're in the Bay Area, it's really easy to cut out for the day and head there for a few hours and come back and you're at your desk the next day. For INDUSTRY, people are making the trip out for this. They're turning this into a multi-day trip. You have to fly in for it, unless you're really close to Cleveland, Ohio. Because of that, INDUSTRY it's two full days. The main conference is two full days, it's not a single day and it's done. And then even beyond that, we have a portion of the conference you can come to for a third day for more intensive workshops.

Part of it is we want people to really spend as much time while they're going to be traveling anyway on growing themselves as product person. That's part of it. The other part of it is, again, every year we're trying to create new features that can benefit product people. So there's little things like, for instance, in this past year one of the things we introduced is for people that registered, we sent an email out and we said, "Hey, we know that a big part of coming to this conference is to connect with other product people. Let us know. Is that something that's important to you? If it is, if you want to connect with product people at INDUSTRY, tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you're looking for and what type of product people you want to meet and we'll make the introductions for you."

We created this little survey and we went through individually every single response that everybody sent. We had hundreds of them and we personally matched everybody to a couple of people that we thought would be interesting for them to meet while they're at INDUSTRY. For us, we take a lot of personal time to make these connections, to pay attention to the details. The other part of it is, we try to build out the experience for three groups. The attendee, which to me is the most important, because without the attendee experience being solid, no other part of it is going to be solid.

But then there's also the speaker experience. There's the sponsor experience. And for us, we're trying to ... The big questions, "How do we maximize all three of those but keep the attendee experience as high as possible?" One of the things that we did is we had this whole product village, what we called it. And Suzanne, I know you were there, so you got a chance to see it. Everything is all in the same room. The stage where the speakers are speaking, and the seating, that’s in one part of the room. But in another part of the room, that's where we have our product village. Where we have different vendors that are demoing their products to folks. That's where the happy hours are, the lunches.

We really try to keep it all in one place so people can really take in the entire experience all at once. Not say, "Okay. In this room, this is where the speaking happens. And then downstairs in the small little nook, all the vendors are crammed in over there too." No. We want the vendors to be a part of the experience too, and we want the vendors to help make INDUSTRY even better than if they weren't a part of it. It's hard to compare INDUSTRY to other conferences, but just in terms of how do we differentiate ourselves and how do we make this as strong as possible for product people, that's just an example of some of the things that we like to do.

Suzanne: Yeah. I will definitely echo that as a visitor to the conference, I think you absolutely succeeded in creating that community feeling. I mean, first of all, the quality of the conversations, the speakers, were excellent. The hardest part for me was having to duck out and conduct interviews when I really just wanted to be sitting kind of front and center and hearing everybody's talk, but … beautiful old theater ...

And it didn't feel, for me, like that typical exhibition floor, either. It really felt like everyone was hanging out and talking about product. And sometimes the nature of those conversations were a little bit more consultative sales based if somebody saw a really cool analytics platform, like Amplitude, they wanted to hear more about it. So there was that kind of conversation going on. Or it was just like hanging out over coffee and talking about cool product ideas.

I think you did a great job. I loved it. I'm going to be back. I don't know if I'm going to get to Dublin, I guess I'll have to check my calendar, but I think you're absolutely doing a great thing and I really hope certainly more of our listeners will have the opportunity to come and check it out in 2018, as well.

Mike: Thank you. I mean, you saying all that really means a lot because we definitely put a lot of our own personal touch into it, right? When we get feedback from folks afterwards … We want the critical feedback. That's really actually what helps us the most, when we get that critical feedback. But we had a ton of feedback this year, kind of echoing what you said, and it really meant a lot to us. Just a good feeling when you put a lot of your own ... Not just time and effort into it, but your own personality into it and it resonates with people. It's just a good feeling, so thank you for that.

Suzanne: Absolutely. I know that you're a super positive guy, so this might be a difficult question for you to ask, that's why I want to ask it. We're talking a lot about ... it's like rainbows and unicorns right now. Like, "Oh, product managers, need resources. We're going to do this conference year after year and it's amazing. It's all good." What about the less glamorous side of this journey that you embarked on to, maybe you didn't know what you were fully getting into. What has been really, really challenging for you in standing up this community and in standing up this conference over the years?

Mike: Yeah. First of all, by the way, this whole journey for me is rooted with a lot of lows in addition to highs, too. First of all, it all started with my startup failing. So that wasn't a very awesome feeling, right? I'm like, "I need to get a job now, so what does that mean?" But then I did get this opportunity, this product opportunity. What I should say though is that first role for me was a challenging one. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel like … they were really happy with me and my efforts, but to me I felt like, "Gosh. I feel like I'm faking this. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing."

And I remember my boss constantly reassuring me that, "We think you're doing awesome." But it never felt right to me. But again, I think a part of it is, I didn't really have a lot of resources and people to turn to and help me through that. That's a part of why we're building this. I felt like if this existed ... Not to say it would have been rainbows and unicorns by any means, it would still be really hard and challenging, but it might have made that experience a little less painful for me.

Now, with this specific experience of building Product Collective as a community, and INDUSTRY, the first two years ... Keep in mind, for us, I was part-time. And my partner was part-time, Paul. Right now, there's two of us that are full-time. It's not like we're big media company and we have lots of employees. It's two of us, but this has been 100% bootstrap from day one. It was our own money that went into it in the very beginning. The very first year, and this is the case with a lot of conferences, your first year won't necessarily be profitable and we were no different. We didn't lose a lot of money, but it wasn't some like big, major profitable thing for us.

I guess one of the hard things was because of that, we had to make that call, "Hey. Should we keep doing this? Should we plan a second year? Because we have less money in our bank account than when we started this whole thing." And that was hard, because it's not like either of us are well off and we both had full-time jobs and we both have families to support. I mean, both of us have two kids and they're young kids at that, but I think what helped us make the decision to continue forward is just immediately after that first conference, we started having attendee interviews.

And most of the attendee interviews were really positive. And those that gave us lower than 10 out of 10 or anything like that, things they were giving us feedback on that we knew we could immediately do differently the next year and make a better experience for everybody. These weren't insurmountable things. We eventually made the call to press on with a second version of INDUSTRY, even though that first version, that wasn't this profitable venture where we could have kept moving forward.

And by the way, when I say not profitable, I meant that’s without even paying ourselves anything. Now, I stepped in full-time after year two. And Paul stepped in full-time about six months after that or so. Still before this past INDUSTRY 2017. And this isn't something where we're paying ourselves the most that we would make on the open market if we were just employees at other companies, but it's enough where we feel confident about our mortgage payments coming through on time and we're able to build a community that we feel like it's something that's rewarding for us and it's actually helping people.

It definitely has not been rainbows and unicorns. And a lot of it has been really hard, and a lot of the decisions we had to make, they're tough calls to make, but ultimately that's how it's played out for us. Now, again, even though yeah, I probably could make a lot more money and salary on the open market if I was a director of product strategy. Again, whatever the heck a director of product strategy does. But this was, to me, I couldn't imagine a better situation than the one we have right now in that we're able to create something that we wanted ourselves, that's actually helping people, and we're able to be sustainable for it. Without ever having taken outside investments or anything like that.

Suzanne: Yeah. I mean, first of all, congratulations. I think a lot of folks listening in, especially ... anyone who's ever done side projects, which we advocate for, anybody who's ever launched their own business with their own capital, that moment where you get to step fully into something that's been a side project or a passion project for years, that's a really big milestone. I want to acknowledge you in that and congratulate both you and Paul for doing that. And in three years. That's really exciting.

Mike: Thank you. I appreciate that. And by the way, I totally agree with you about the side project thing. Actually, I don't think there's ever been a part of my life where I haven't had some sort of thing on the side. Even now, this is really my full focus, but teaching is kind of a side project, in a way. So I love always having some sort of side project. So I just wanted to share that, too.

Suzanne: That's a nice segue for the question that I wanted to you. You shared a little bit what's on the Product Collective roadmap. Launching the next conference, obviously iterating on the existing conference, continuing to build out the community. What about Mike Belsito's personal roadmap? You accidentally happened into this role, you're going to do this teaching thing. Do you have an idea in your mind about things that you want to accomplish in the next two or three years around your career in product, or just more broadly?

Mike: I will say this. If in the next three years Product Collective is in a place where our community's growing, INDUSTRY is seen as the best product conference that's out there and it's grown as well, we're having a regular cadence of Cleveland and Dublin, sort of the two, the global conference and the European conference. I will be the happiest person in the world. I mean, for me, this isn't something where it's like, "Hey. In two or three years, let's exit the business and then we move up." For us, I could be doing this for the next 10 years and still be really excited and pumped for it.

And honestly, I don't know that there has ever been a point in my life where I could have said that about something. Even eFuneral, which is my startup from the past, where we went the opposite route. We raised outside capital from angel investors and venture capital, and once you take outside capital, you're trained to think about an exit and I think for us it's just a lot different. I don't know what the future looks like for me, personally. Yes, there's some side things whether it's teaching or podcasting ... I've gotten to love podcasting, too. But for me, I can't imagine my full-time focus not being Product Collective and INDUSTRY for the foreseeable future.

Suzanne: Awesome. Well, then, we'll have to stay connected. Before we wrap here, Mike, tell our listeners how they can get involved. If they're tuning in and they're just meeting you for the first time and hearing about this community for the first time, where can we send them so that they can start getting engaged?

Mike: Yeah. The first place is Productcollective.com. There, you'll be asked to sign up and it's free to sign up. It's just, all signing up on Product Collective does is you'll start to get access to our resources, like the product brief newsletter and you will get invitations to the webinars. You don't have to attend those, but some of them might be of interest to you. And then, also you will get an invite to our slack channel. I love that. I mean, it's kind of tough to connect with thousands of other product people in one place. So the Slack channel is a really cool place, where there's all sorts of different sub channels, whether it's advice, feedback, hiring. Some people have found jobs because of connections that they made through the Product Collective Slack channel. That's the first part of it.

Certainly, if you want to check INDUSTRY out, there's a link to it through Productcollective.com as well, but you can just go to Industryconference.com and you can learn more about it there. Also, we have our own podcast as well that we just got started with not long ago. I think we're on Episode 11 or 12, or something. But it's called Build Launch Scale. And that's where we sit down with product people too and very similar to this. It's just getting to chat with product people and getting to learn from them, that's never a bad thing.

For us, I would say for people that want to learn more about what we're doing, those are the best ways. To connect with me personally, I am on Twitter pretty regularly. It's just @belsito. And Product Collective has a Twitter, too. It's just @prodcollective. If sometimes the language sounds like it's one and the same, it's because it is. I manage that account, so does my partner Paul. If you see on the Product Collective Twitter there's more Irish terms, then you know Paul is charge of that at that moment. But yeah, those would probably be the best ways to get ahold of us.

Suzanne: All right. Well, I apologize in advance if you end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of folks pinging you on Slack individually and saying, "Thanks, Mike, for being on 100 PM and being so open and making me feel invited to reach out to you directly for personal advice, etc." But you are on a mission to help product people, so you can't turn back now.

Mike: No. I would love that, in fact. I will take it one step further. If there is something that people, they wanted to connect with us but they didn't want to join quite yet or they didn't want to ask a question that was on Twitter, just email me. It's just mike@productcollective.com. So I definitely am on email still, too.

Suzanne: Awesome. Mike, thank you for being such a gracious host to 100 PM at the 2017 INDUSTRY conference. Thank you for being a part of the podcast and really looking forward to staying connected with you and watching all of this unfold.

Mike: Awesome. Thank you for having me, Suzanne. I really appreciate the support.