How I Convinced My CEO To Pivot From SaaS to Building Actual Tables

How I Convinced My CEO To Shift From SaaS to Building Tables

Now, we hear a lot of stories about how one brave product manager (or any cool techy role), influenced their boss to take the leap and catch the digital bandwagon. But have we ever seen a story where the exact opposite happened?

Well, sit straight because I’m about to tell you such a story. The story of how I (I meek product manager) convinced my CEO to quit the SaaS life and start selling custom-made productivity tables.

It all started on an average Wednesday afternoon. I was going over all the data the team had collected and had to work on my weekly reports. With three, long, and tedious meetings left behind me I felt like for the first time in 10 years of my career, the monotonousness of my job was getting at me.

So what did I do? Obviously, I did what every professional does, I buried myself in my work trying to shake off the feeling. Well, actually I didn’t do that. If I had, I wouldn’t be writing this piece. Instead, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went outside for a short walk.

I’ve worked for SaaS companies my whole life (even founded a small company that didn’t live long), and when you strip all the hype around SaaS it’s a business model that makes things extra complicated. I know this is the exact opposite of what we’ve been told but just hang on for a bit.

I envied the simplicity of businesses in manufacturing. They put all that hard work into something and they get a tangible result at the end. They can put a value on their product by just looking at it. What if I could take the best of two worlds and combine them to create the ultimate product? Digital products are all about user experience and personalization, physical goods are all about fine craftsmanship.

I probably skipped in my looong intro that I’m also a productivity junky and I constantly strive to optimize my work habits and especially my work environment. I was the genius to suggest stand-up desks at the office. No one uses them but stand-up desks by their nature can be used as the standard desks that you can adjust the height for. Well, I optimized the height of each and every desk in the office because why not?

These thoughts kept creeping through my mind while I was taking my walk and then it dawned on me. Our entire team is extremely experienced in solving problems, creating software that works, coming out with the most efficient solutions ever. What if we combined these with craftsmanship and could actually “create something”.

At this point, I also should mention that my father is a carpenter and I’ve grown up helping him out. There was no better outcome than making the ultimate productivity table. During that period we were working on a software product named JotForm Tables but what if we actually built tables? All of these ideas were buzzing through my mind and I had to try and convince our CEO. It was going to be a really tough task because he built our company from scratch and bootstrapped it to its current glory.

Anyhow, I gathered my thoughts into a presentation. I tried to be as convincing as possible and then asked for a short meeting with our CEO to present my idea. Many of the decision-makers were also going to be present. Fast forward to the presentation day, I was nervous, palms sweating, breath catching.

As you can imagine, no one was interested. But as my company is full of such great people, no one made fun of me either. That meant that I still had a chance. But I had to take the hard route. I had to build the first table by myself. Then they’d experience the greatness of my idea first hand. No one would be able to say no at that point.

Just as these were happening, the pandemic hit the world and we started to work remotely. I still hadn’t given up on my table idea, so I moved back to my father’s town and we immediately started working on it during my off-hours.

We created around 10 prototypes until we got it right. The next step was to add the most barebones features I could add on my own for example I added a very basic Bluetooth integration with the table. I already had presented what else I had in mind so that should have done the job.

Last fall, I was finally ready to carry out the next step of my plan. I talked with our office helper and convinced them that I had to swap our CEO’s desk with the one I made. The CEO had a meeting in the office next week. I packed my things and hit the road to get to the city I usually live in. As you can guess, that’s the same city our office is located in.

I sneaked into the office and executed the most flawless table heist you could imagine. All I had to do was to wait for the results. The day of the meeting finally arrived and that evening I got an email.

The email was like this:

“Hi <name censored for no particular reason>,

Was this your idea? Did you change my desk or was it someone else? If this was the desk you wouldn’t stop talking about it. I have a couple of words for you.

I LOVE IT! I had no idea a simple desk could make such a difference. Wow. You’ve really impressed me with the fine work you’ve put into this. Plus you didn’t give up when your idea was shut down. That’s some serious dedication. Let’s discuss this in more detail next week.”

I had to read the email a couple of times because I was pretty sure that I was in big trouble. Turns out my big idea was indeed a very big and exciting idea. The whole company was taken aback, after producing software for the past 15 years, our next big launch was a table? A table really?

Well, 15 minutes on my prototype desk convinced everyone that actually launching a table was a great idea.

As we are an environmentally concerned company (you know, replacing paper forms with digital forms etc…), we had to make our tables completely from sustainable resources. We will be using bamboo and maple to build our tables. We will be planting 1 maple tree for each table purchased. For context, we can make around 20-25 tables from a single tree.

This table was my most passionate work so far. I still can’t believe that this is happening for real. In fact, it’s so real that we launched it on PH today. It's really the best Table ever to be made by SaaS junkies. Link below:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-table