Nikola Mijic is the Founder and CEO of Matik, and he has one piece of advice of for anyone entering the start-up arena:
“When people ask me what have you learned through this experience of starting your own company, I would say how to ruthlessly prioritize because your users and your customers and prospects are gonna want the world, and it’s your job to be able to decipher what is valid and what is habitual.”
Building, scaling, and maintaining success is every entrepreneur’s dream, and there’s one way to get there. By consistently meeting customer expectations and finding product-market fit. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Nikola peels back the curtain on how he stepped outside of his comfort zone of product management and took a chance in launching Matik, a personalization tool designed to automate Google slides and powerpoint presentations with customized data points. Nikola also explains why customer success is dependent on managing expectations and how data-driven insights are not here to kill dashboards, but to assist them.
Main Takeaways
- Get Your Priorities Straight: When you’re running a company, prioritization is not just a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. When you are first starting out, prospects and clients are going to consistently be asking you to over deliver with your products and services. You won’t be able to do everything or meet every expectation, so you have to prioritize what is possible and be sure you can deliver on what you promise.
- Trust Your Data: Your products need to be rooted and consistently measured based on what your data is telling you. Is the user using the product? If they are not, use your data to understand why and get to the bottom of why a particular product is succeeding or failing.
- Not Here to Replace your Dashboards: Dashboards still serve a purpose of being exploratory while providing the ability to quick insights, but they don’t solve the entire problem of pulling all that data into a single place so that you can quick find those insights and make them accessible.
For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.
Article
Nikola Mijic is the Founder and CEO of Matik, and he has one piece of advise of for anyone entering the start-up arena:
“When people ask me what have you learned through this experience of starting your own company, I would say how to ruthlessly prioritize because your users and your customers and prospects are gonna want the world, and it’s your job to be able to decipher what is valid and what is habitual.”
Building, scaling, and maintaining success is every entrepreneur’s dream, and there’s one way to get there. By consistently meeting customer expectations and finding product-market fit. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Nikola peels back the curtain on how he stepped outside of his comfort zone of product management and took a chance in launching Matik, a personalization tool designed to automate Google slides and powerpoint presentations with customized data points. Nikola also explains why customer success is dependent on managing expectations and how data-driven insights are not here to kill dashboards, but assist them.
“We automate things like quarterly business reviews, renewal decks, and things that take two or three hours because you’re having to go to all these different data sources to pull the data and tell that story,” Mijic said. “We want Matik to be there so with the click of a button you have that deck voice generated and it’s customized to that particular touchpoint.”
From Mijic’s days as a specialist at Bluenose Analytics to his three years at Linkedin, the idea for Matik manifested naturally. He had experienced numerous instances in his career when customers were frustrated by having to pull data from multiple sources to compile a single report.
“It was one of the biggest feature requests that we got from our customers,” Mijic said. “This is a huge pain point for a sales team, where they were coming to us saying, ‘Hey, we spend all this time putting together these data-driven pitch decks, renewal decks, QPRs, and how do we automate?’”
One solution Mijic and his team came up with was a single source of truth to deliver customer intelligence. And you might think something like that would mean that tools such as dashboards would be eliminated, but but Mijic explains that actually the solution is a companion to dashboards and not an enemy.
“We’re not trying to replace dashboards,” Mijic said. “They still have a purpose. They’re exploratory and help you find those insights, but there’s always the last mile dilemma. How do I get those insights that I find and how do I then add it to a document (in this case being PowerPoint or Google Slides) on a continuous basis?”
So after running Matik now for almost three years, what parting piece of advice would Mijic leave with his fellow entrepreneurs that are struggling with finding the recipe for success?
“The thing that I’ve learned the most throughout this experience, it’s prioritization and data,” he said. ”I always found that you talk to the end users, not just you, but bring some of your dev team to those user research sessions, so they hear firsthand what your customers are telling you.”’
To hear more from the conversation with Mijic check out the full episode of IT Visionaries!
To hear the entire discussion, tune into IT Visionaries here.
