Building an Automation First Startup | Adrian Albus from Opsmate

so adrian is the co-founder of opsmed which is an automation for startup so let's listen to his journey on building an automation first startup and about the opportunities and challenges that they are facing right now they didn't owe to you hey guys nice to see everybody i'm um i'm really excited to have the chance to chat with you guys um for a lot of reasons but mainly because i am uh i'm a business person so the question is like what the hell is this like mba doing at this amazing meetup with this like huge room of technical talent like it's almost like that party in college that you walk into and you're like i'm not supposed to be here but i like it here and how do i make more friends so that's sort of my lead up into this um you know i've nan has been on my radar um really since october when uh when i met this uh this gentleman that lives in edmonton canada that i think that a lot of you other uh folks know mr jason betters um and and i have to give him like a huge shout out for introducing me to what is happening in business automation beyond zapier so let's just set the scene that way

so a little bit about me um you know like what do i want to be when i grow up i would say that i'm still very much trying to figure that out but part of what i do for a living is sales so let me try to sell to you a little bit about why this person who has this kind of like plain vanilla business background like reform management consultant like mba but i don't really use that for a living i worked for a corporate strategy team for a big cpg company and then i think that my life really changed in 2014 when i started um working for a tech company in business operations um and then was able to uh lead a uh a tech startup from seed to exit as ceo so um you know i learned a lot about how to build grow uh in scale companies but i think that the number one thing that i learned and what's most relevant for

for this conversation is how i felt after i sold my last company and it's not like how it looks in the movies like it's not wolf of wall street where everybody's you know drinking dom and the 100 bills are coming down from the ceiling right the way i felt was just completely burned out and like a marathon runner that couldn't go another quarter of a mile beyond the finish line so i've been spending the last year of my life it's been about a year since we sold the last company and really thinking about why i personally felt just so burned out after that experience

and i think that part of it is that i really thought i knew i want what i was doing and i was just doing things by the book right it's like what i was taught at the consulting firm and in business school and one of the things that you're taught in the book is that internal operations all you have to do for that is to buy sass you hire smart people and let them figure it out it's sort of the uh the ethic that uber has made very popular um all around let's just get a bunch of smart people let's get them working 18 hours a day and let them just kind of figure out how to run the company and what we're building at opsme is really i think my answer to a different way of building scaling internal operations at high growth companies because like let's just face it the reason why there's so much vc money going into tech is because the margins are outstanding so and and what vc's hand wave is that as long as your gross margins are good revenue minus you know direct costs of goods sold as long as that's like a 60 maybe a high 50 we're good you can have all the cash you want but what's buried underneath that gross margin line in sg a is all of the operations people and whether that's marketing ops or sales ops or finance ops or customer service ops all of the manual turks that are operating companies today with very little technology and i know that resonates for a lot of people in this room because we are after all at like the best automation tool that's out there um and a lot of people using their evening on a friday to participate in this

so as a business operations person like this is what i see when i look at a company that you have product and engineering building customer facing product this is what the customer sees and uh you know bespoke you know that full stack engineering effort usually goes to building customer facing product and that's exactly where it should go like no company is thinking about how do i differentiate versus competitors based on internal operations maybe there's some conversation in customer service hey it should be a revenue channel get that but the reality is that there's all this hidden effort which just kind of goes on the back of operations people to just operate manually like your seven sas apps your five spreadsheets priorities changing oh there's a board meeting next week let's drop everything because we need to create all these reports manually

and i think that this is sort of how i would describe what the status quo looks like and as a founder you can't go wrong just doing what everybody else is doing and is let's just build a v1 of ops like i think about ops is having mvps too that looks like slack emails spreadsheets maybe a little asana and then there's a point where uh the business starts to scale and just what people do is that they add sass they add higher they add outsource but what people don't i think intentionally realize by following the status quo is that more unconnected tools adds more complexity so the whole reason why we love tech is it can scale very fast but the product can't scale if operations doesn't scale along with it and my experience has been manual operations often holds back a really amazing product from scaling as quickly and getting into as many users hands as it can so like we're at the nan meetup like i said like we're smart people that are comfortable being contrarian so what if the status quo sucks i think we all can see that and i think that many of us have experienced that like what does another option look like and and really you know we're building ops mate to be that other option and not to say that people shouldn't follow the status quo that is an option today but what we're building is another option

where instead of just adding sas and adding labor that once you've evolved beyond kind of the v1 operation stage that this is exactly the time to begin contemplating automation and what can that look like what is the work we're doing let's do something fairly shocking and like write it down like nowhere i've ever worked has had workflow diagrams and you know why because i never thought to do it because every nobody else was doing that and that just seems so pedantic in like a fast moving tech world like hey everybody let's not do any work for a week and write down workflow diagrams about the work that we've been doing but when you look at things through an automation first lens it just makes sense because if it's hard to automate things if you can't see those connections and i think another huge thing that particularly jason has taught me is all around infrastructure that like at my first job ever out of college if i was home doing work i had to dial into a vpn to hit a on-prem network that was in a little closet in the building that i worked in and what i'm seeing from clients particularly clients that work with a lot of pii is that they don't really understand the risk that they're putting customer information through by just like say sharing public links over slack so that that's i think you know really i think we're all in because i'm at time which is i think that everybody in this uh in this meeting has the same end goal in mind like how do we initiate this macro change and how work is done and i think my goal in this talk was just to kind of give the business ops perspective a very non-technical perspective about how it looks when you're the ceo of a company and you have a decision to make about how to build ops and i'm very optimistic that the next generation of founders the founders that are using you know bubble to build their sas and using notion for knowledge management and using pipe um to securitize some of their mrr so they don't have to sell part of their company um for capital that this amazing new breed of founder is going to be embracing a very new way of building internal ops that's really you know like the title of this presentation an automation first mindset so i'll stop there thank you all for the opportunity to talk um and uh yeah appreciate i'll kick it back to you hershel thank you so much adrian uh this was really helpful and

yeah i see a lot of people in the chat also agreeing with me and agreeing sorry agreeing with you uh and i have a question i know you have to uh jump off to another call so just one question that i came across in the chat is how do you explain this to the business and not let them stay in the old habits it's an amazing question and i'll tell you how like we're handling it at ops mate is that we are talking to companies very early in their cycle like we're talking right around the time that they're about to raise the seed round and trying to hit them right at that inflection point where it's like we know what we have doesn't work like we don't even have basic tools and to provide them with a product that they can use in lieu of buying everything separately and having all these non-connected apps so i just summarized i think that as an industry we need to think about even earlier in the maturation process to get companies building automation first so that when they're scaling you know past the hundred million dollars of arr that there is already that infrastructure and ethic it's just how we do things thank you so much adrian for answering that i don't want to take more of your time uh thank you again for being in the meetup and sharing your story with us cool nice to meet you guys and if anybody has any follow-ups hit me up on twitter um at adrian albus