This next Gen AI tool can help you save up to 7 hours per week

Yash From Momentum (00:00)

Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for the show where every episode we bring to you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Zack from Dart. Dart is a next -gen AI -based project management tool that can help you save up to 7 hours per week

We're excited to hear their story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS. Hey, Zack, how are you doing today?

Zack Swafford (00:39)

Hey, Yash, doing great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for the intro.

Yash From Momentum (00:42)

Awesome. And thank you for joining in. So let's start by understanding what is Dart, what is a big bad problem that you're trying to solve for organizations today.

Zack Swafford (00:52)

Yeah, totally. So Dart is, as you said, project management using AI. So we got started a couple of years ago. My co -founder and I had both spent a lot of time building project management systems for our companies, building processes, and struggling with the old ways of project management using tools like Asana, Monday .com, these sorts of legacy tools.

And so we noticed that there was a problem. My background is pretty technical. It's in AI. got my undergrad and master's from Stanford in AI. And so it seemed like sort of a natural fit. We sort of saw some of the GPT four, three, four revolutions coming a little bit. My co -founder had a background with GPT two as well. I had worked with that sub actually. And so we...

saw that coming and thought, okay, can we apply these tools to the project management problems that we were experiencing? And we gave it a try. Users started to really like it, started to respond to these sorts of time savings that we could give them basically with GPT and AI revolutions and the rest is history.

Yash From Momentum (01:59)

And so, tell us a little bit about, it's been about two and a half years since that's been around. Is it two and a half years since you started writing the first line of code or is it two and a half years since you got your

Zack Swafford (02:08)

Good question. Yeah, I believe that the first line of code we wrote would have been in February of 22. and then we probably had our first, I mean, honestly, we managed to get it in front of friends and users within even a few weeks of that first line of code. So I would say by March of 22. I don't think we had paying customers until that summer though. So maybe June or July.

Almost exactly two years now probably of paying customers.

Yash From Momentum (02:38)

That's great. mean, so it typically, like for a lot of SaaS founders that I know, it takes longer to just build the MVP, right? And then show it to people and stuff like that. So that speed is amazing. And so what's the state of Dart today? So in terms of the size and scale of operations, whatever metric that you feel comfortable sharing, which will help the audience understand where we are today in terms of team members, in terms of MRR, whatever you think is fine.

Zack Swafford (03:04)

Yeah, sure. There's a few, there's honestly several metrics that are probably useful. So team size is about 10 people right now. We have folks all over the world actually. And most of that is engineers. We have some on the go -to -market side as well. We have a designer, but mostly we're still building lots of cool stuff. We did fundraise. So we did Y Combinator in 22.

around the time that we were getting started and we did a fundraise at the end of that during the demo day. So we had some funding from that. We have a lot of MRR, lot of users. think our latest weekly, our main two metrics are MRR and then weekly active teams. So basically how many teams are using Dart. We've mostly been focused on the growth on the unpaid side recently because we've, and this is one of those balances that we always have to be doing,

We know we can convert people to paid. We've kind of tested that out. We've proven that to ourselves right now, just past couple of months, we've been in an optimization phase of optimizing for further in the top of the funnel, basically. those unpaid users and there are always trade -offs we can be making between those things. So right now the goal is unpaid users and we've grown a lot in that sense, really honestly about a hundred.

A hundred percent growth in the past three months actually, in terms of unpaid users and that unpaid user number is in the thousands, close to tens of thousands potentially these days. Yep.

Yash From Momentum (04:33)

Awesome. That's really cool. so that sort of brings me to my next conversation point, which is, mean, Dart is a system of record, right? So which is sort of between system of record and system of engagement, but organizations do tend to invest significantly into their project management system because it has a significant impact across their complete workforce.

And that's why you also have a lot of competition. So you have competition from Monday, ClickUp and so on and so forth. And after a point, one of the things that we've also seen happen is that it stops to matter as to how good a platform is. And then it starts to matter how big of a microphone do you and your competitors have. So if your competitors have the ability to just hammer their message,

you know, back to back decision makers and influencers of our prospects and customers will tend to look at them far more often, will be trusting them and so on and so forth. So how do you make sure that people are paying or prospects are paying more attention to you? Is the free sign up or getting free people part of that strategy, getting them used to it? So tell us your thoughts around that.

Zack Swafford (05:44)

Yeah, totally. man, I have a lot of thoughts actually. I think one, so one thing that I think really helps us specifically, and I think can also help lots of companies these days, is that we both message and truly are the first AI native or AI first project management platform.

Yash From Momentum (05:47)

Yeah.

Zack Swafford (06:05)

And that's something that we hear from users and buyers and a lot actually is the thing that attracts them to us. Because if you're looking at Asana or ClickUp or these sorts of things, very powerful tools. They do have more features than Dart, although we're catching up very fast. Not that many new important features now, but they, a lot of AI features feel tacked on to people and they feel like they're not, they're not.

as emphasized, they're not as useful as Dart's AI features. And since we've been building this this way from the beginning, way I would think about this is that we're riding a wave. We're riding the wave of AI. And I really don't think that incumbents can, a lot of times, incumbents can't catch up with startups on these waves. One of our reference points in the project management space is that Jira replaced

whatever came before it, nobody really knows what that was. That was a really big company before, but Jira was the first to go into, use a SaaS model and be on the cloud. And so Jira wasn't the first to market in project management. And now it seems like it was because now it's the oldest one that we still remember. But these big technology see changes like AI, like SaaS, like the cloud, like mobile.

Yash From Momentum (06:57)

Yeah.

Zack Swafford (07:20)

These are waves that startups can ride and they actually really can replace incumbents. It's not like incumbents are insurmountable when you're riding a really big and impactful wave. So the problem for startups then is just like, and the problem for us is just being really confident that the wave that we're riding is big enough to actually replace the incumbents. And I think we had a lot of personal, we had a lot of conviction just based on what we know about AI that this one is really

Now that's all kind of general. And I know that it's probably more useful to say like specific things, as well. so one thing that we do at Dart is that we offer, we do our our very best to offer really good customer service. And that's just something that big companies in general can't do. And big PM tools are almost famous for not doing. And so, so many of our users.

Yash From Momentum (08:06)

Yeah, yeah.

Zack Swafford (08:09)

love the fact that they can just get in touch with us with email and someone, real person, oftentimes one of the co -founders, but either way, someone who's very helpful, very knowledgeable about the product, very able to help them is on emails with them within an hour and actually really cares about helping them, solving their problem. We get on a call with them, we meet their team, we listen to their needs and respond to them. Sometimes we'll ship.

a feature that someone asks for. If a bunch of people have asked for it and then someone else asks for it one day, sometimes we'll ship that feature by the end of the day. Right. And that's, that's something that, that incumbents just obviously can't do. And so we've developed, I would say thousands really of loyal customers. It doesn't take that much to just be better at customer service than an incumbent because the bar is so

Yash From Momentum (08:56)

Yeah, and so this is something that I, so two things on this. So first is, is that there's something that I strongly recommend that if you have a large competition, go to the G2 page and then filter all the reviews by three stars or less. And if you read all of those reviews, you'll see, you know, poor customer service, poor customer support written all over it. And so, and so this is, this is like a really big challenge that is across almost all large incumbent SaaS platforms.

that for whatever reason they are just not able to crack their, I mean, it's even on the Zendesk, it's true even for Zendesk, right? So it is a support platform in and of itself. that's one. And the other thing is I sort of agree. mean, it's a great, while it was general, but it's still a great insight, which is where if an older incumbent, which with a larger,

amount of capital is now bringing in a new wave. So in this case, AI, it does feel like retrofitting. So it does feel like it's the difference between having an old car and then making it smart versus buying the smart car. So might be a little valuable for people who've been using those platforms for a while now. However, for people who are now starting their search for a project management system for their teams,

for them it doesn't seem to quite work. It works but it sort of doesn't. makes sense. And so, the other thing that I also want to understand is that project management in a way applies to almost all like a very large amount of companies in the world. And so, how do you figure out what, so one, how did you define your ideal clients?

And then how did you figure out that, I'll go after, let's say, 11 to 50 agencies in North America versus like 200 plus companies and financial services or something like that. Like, how did you define your ICP and then figure out that this is the one that I'm

Zack Swafford (10:48)

Yeah, it's a great question. It's one we think about a ton here at Dart. It's also one that my advice might be a little bit unorthodox and it also may not apply to startups in other industries. So I'll just caveat with that to start. But the way that we think about

the project management space and customers in the project management space is generally divided actually just into two groups. Those two groups are engineers and everyone else. And that is both the way that we segment the project management space and actually the way that as far as we can tell, pretty much all other project management tools do as well. And you'll see it in the fact that tools like Jira or Linear

or a few others shortcut all appeal primarily to engineers. And then the other ones, they have pages, they do a little bit lip service to engineers, but primarily they're actually, their ICP truly is almost anybody else in the world. And we decided early on that we were gonna go the non -engineering route. And I could talk a little bit about that decision, but once we made that decision,

Yash From Momentum (11:37)

Yeah.

Zack Swafford (11:57)

It actually is very interesting. It has been hard for us to segment beyond that. And that is, it's a good thing actually, the way I think about it, because we do have a lot of users in a lot of different ways and we just have more users because of this. We've tried many times over the years

suss out the patterns and say, are we appealing to a lot of lawyers? Are we appealing to a lot of marketing agencies? Are we appealing to primarily to engineering teams? Who else? And group our users. And the truth is, just always been useful for everyone. And as you say, is a broad space. It's a big space and it's kind of useful for everyone.

Yash From Momentum (12:16)

Yeah.

Zack Swafford (12:36)

We've leaned into it. It's actually a great position to be in because it makes our market bigger and it also means that within a given company, our product -led growth motion of growing within the company is actually applicable to more people within the company. So, blessing and a curse to have a broad ICP. It also means we can't focus as much, but it's been really...

Really good for us so far. And I think it's, kind of how it works for us. So we've done our best to define a more narrow ICP hasn't worked as much just because lots of people love us. And so we just lean into that

Yash From Momentum (13:12)

That's a great problem to have. Our product offers a lot of value to a lot of different types of people and that doesn't allow us to define our ICP well. Yeah, absolutely. But that is a blessing and a curse because almost all advice that you see, like even Sam Altman famously said

Zack Swafford (13:14)

I know.

More narrowly,

Yash From Momentum (13:33)

Almost every one of our breakout success was acquiring a very large percentage share of a very small market upfront and then sort of slowly going from there. But I'm sure that there are advantages of having a broader ICP as well. But in case if you have a broad ICP, like how do you then make product decisions? Because the way, let's say, a city planning commission would use Dart versus

Zack Swafford (13:42)

Absolutely.

Yash From Momentum (13:55)

and even management company would use that, is going to be very different. So how do you like, what's the process of figuring out, okay, here are the five things that we're including in the next split. How do you go

Zack Swafford (14:07)

Absolutely. And this is also something we spent a lot of time on. Luckily, it's something that both I and my co -founder have a lot of experience with. I led an engineering team at my last job and was generally in charge of making a lot of those product decisions. So I've got kind of both the product and the engineering side covered. We talked to a lot of users.

and we try to talk to a lot of users from across the ICP. I don't, I wouldn't like to say that our ICP, that we don't have an ICP. It's just a little bit broader than most startups. Yeah, exactly. And so we just, we just, I think it just makes our job a little bit harder to that. have to talk to a representative sample from a broader group. let's say in order to make a product decision,

Yash From Momentum (14:39)

broad. Yeah.

Zack Swafford (14:54)

The good news is that for productivity tools, there are just some common needs. The city planning commission, just as much as the engineering team, just as much as the marketing agency needs to be able to schedule their work. They need to be able to communicate their plan to their team, to external stakeholders. They need to know what's coming next.

There are all sorts of common patterns and yeah, I would say it's a marginally harder product motion. We have to talk to more people. We have to make more harder decisions than if every one of our customers was saying the exact same thing. But I don't really believe that every one of our customers would be saying the exact same thing, even if it was a Monero ICP. So I don't think it's that much harder than normal.

Yash From Momentum (15:37)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's exactly true. Because before Momentum, I was one of the co -founders at ClientJoy, which was a CRM for freelancers and agencies. It was very specifically targeting agency owners of 11 to 50 digital marketing agencies in US and Canada. So that's a very, very tight definition of an ICP. And all of my customers were still not

Seeing the same thing, because a creative agency in New York versus a company that does websites for restaurants, while both of them qualify in the ICP definition, they still have different requirements. So it's still a challenge. All the product meetings were still a lot of debates and arguments and things like that. So the other question I have, yeah, no, sure.

Zack Swafford (16:17)

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, and just, sorry, one thing to add there is just, I'm glad you mentioned the size aspect as well because size is one area where we've been able to segment the customer base a bit more. Dart right now is primarily useful for teams of let's say about one to 100. We don't, there are needs that you get at the upper end of the market that we're building towards, but it's easier to serve.

just as an earlier product, it's easier to serve those small teams. So we actually do segment our customers by smaller size teams. And there are obviously also niches that we target as well in the groups. We don't just blast our ads to everybody as well, but maybe get into the details.

Yash From Momentum (17:01)

Got it.

So from a GTM standpoint, what are like top two or three channels

Zack Swafford (17:14)

Totally. Well, gotta start with word of mouth, of course. That's the golden standard and generally what we're going for. We do have a lot of referrals and a lot of people are excited enough about us to tell their friends. We always really appreciate that. I think that we've also had a lot of success with the kinds of channels which sadly don't scale all the way up. And I say sadly, I actually probably should

It's actually nice that they don't scale because otherwise, because I think that's part of the beauty of them. the big, the bigger teams can't, or the bigger products, the bigger names can't launch on product hunt. They can't have YouTube videos all the time on little channels where people are really niche communities that are really excited about AI. generally speaking, we've just been trying to find, those niche communities where.

people are enthusiastic about AI and where people want early adopters, AI early adopters, and find those places where people are communicating and congregating and curious about ways that they can improve their work and their lives with AI and project management, productivity in general is one of the first things that people think of in those kinds of places. And Reddit communities or

YouTube videos, newsletters, all these kinds of things are great, great channels for us.

Yash From Momentum (18:31)

Interesting. Here's another thought on the pricing piece that I want to understand a little more, which is there's a generous free forever plan for 4 people or less. However, if I want to add the fifth person, it starts at, I think, $8 per user per month. More often than not, what we've seen is that the starting plan, which

more often than not, is useless in other platforms. It constrains you so much that you have to go to the second plan for sure. But they start off anywhere between $3 to $7 per user per month. So they want to start off the journey easily. What's the thought process behind having an $8 price point?

Zack Swafford (19:16)

Yeah. Good question. Well, I think I mentioned earlier, we're generally focused now on growing our unpaid user base. We know we can convert people to paid. We've seen it a lot, basically when our users get excited, they stick with us and they're willing to pay. So we are trying to grow our unpaid user base and just get more users, get more feedback, get more.

of a community and a groundswell and a grassroots movement of people excited about Dart. We want more people to know about it and hear about it and use it and be excited about it and stuff like that. And so we're at the point where we can offer the more generous price. We do have a lot of folks that pay because they are bigger teams. And yeah, generally we feel like that's pretty fair. We also have generally a lot more

AI features available than most platforms do. We just foot the cost for a lot of the AI for like the open AI bill basically for our free plan because the prices of that are going down and they will continue to go down over time. so we think that our business model of cheaper based on cheaper AI, but giving it to more people and allowing

more people to use it and benefit from it will pan out in not even in long run. Go

Yash From Momentum (20:31)

Yeah, and especially if you have Word of Mouth as one of the channels, it's going to be useful to have a lot of users checking out the platform and using it as well. So they get to experience it, and then they spread the word, converting your free users into marketing people for Dart.

Zack Swafford (20:41)

That's right.

Yash From Momentum (20:48)

I also want to talk to you a little bit around agent -based future. So I will not qualify this question word, but I just want to understand what does this mean? What is it that you building towards?

Zack Swafford (20:54)

Yes.

Yeah, totally. So this is the future of Dart and I believe of project management and perhaps work as we know it. But basically right now, Dart can do a great job of organizing your work and we help you organize your work with AI. We can even do a little bit of your work right now for things that AI can do like

summarizing content or writing a blog post or these sorts of things. This work in the dropdown, can either, if you say write a blog post, you can either say assign that to my marketing teammate who's in Dart, or you can say assign it to Dart AI and Dart will crank out a blog post for you. It'll be of AI content, AI caliber. So we probably know.

It's not perfect, but human work isn't perfect either. Now in the next couple of years, there's going to be a lot more AI agents, which is sort of term of art right now, but that just means an AI tailor built for a particular purpose. Basically there are already developer AI agents, designer AI agents, SDR doing your cold calling, let's say emailing agents.

They're not perfect yet, but in the, let's say, short, medium term, there will be way more amazing AI agents out there. And Dart will be the Zapier for those agents, you can think of it, or the project management platform where AI agents and human agents, human people, coordinate their work. so half of a project might be right

All of your project is done by humans. It takes about a month to ship a new big feature in your software team or to ship a new better example, be to ship a new website for your marketing agency. As we have more and more agents that can plug in at parts of those process and can help the people out, I wouldn't say replace the people, but can do steps in that process to free the people up for higher leverage work. Dart will be there.

plugging those agents in and half of the tasks in your project, in your epic, in your sprint will be assigned to AI and Dart will coordinate that. And the other half will be humans and they'll all work together in Dart to coordinate and accomplish the project in half the time or a 10th of the time or a 1000th of the time depending on how many agencies.

Yash From Momentum (23:08)

the agents.

That's interesting. So essentially, if I'm, let's say, as an example, running an ad and building a landing page for that, for building the landing page, I'll have my copywriter, who's a human, and then I could have an illustrator, who's AI. And I've assigned some tasks to the AI agent, who I am treating as a person who's contributing to the project.

Zack Swafford (23:42)

That's right. That's right. And just like a human, you'll probably review their work, make sure it's good, give them feedback. If they don't do a great job, maybe you need to find another one. Yeah. It'll all be an open marketplace of agents that can help you with your work. Absolutely.

Yash From Momentum (23:46)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow, this is exciting. I don't know what to say because it's like my mind is just thinking of all the possibilities that could happen because this is every day for us at Momentum as well. So that's great. But this brings us towards the end of our conversation. One of the things that we do towards the end

is that I ask you a question that was asked by a guest that we had previously. And so our previous guest was the founder of a company called Mindsmith. His name is Ethan. So Ethan from Mindsmith. They basically are building an LMS with AI. So it helps you create your content significantly faster.

and then give it to your teams and stuff like that for internal learning tools and platforms. It's for an organization. so it'll help you create videos, create quizzes, create things to read chapters and summarize and stuff like that. They are on the journey of building a sales team. doing a sales -led motion, which is outbound. And within that, his question that he's trying to currently answer for MindSmith.

is should he go ahead with a senior salesperson who can figure out the strategy, who can figure out who do we go after, what is the process that we follow, what are the things that we review, what are the CRMs that we use and the reports that we create and stuff like that. Or should we go with an upstart, couple of years of experience, like a person who just gets into it, starts making the calls, and then see what's what.

What do you think? What are your thoughts on that?

Zack Swafford (25:29)

Yeah, absolutely. I have, I have so many thoughts. I think it's a great question. I think anytime you're hiring between two or even more people, there are so many factors to consider. I would, I would have to know in order to make a total decision about that. think you need to know everything about the company and the candidates in order to make an absolute decision. But, my general answer, I do have a general rule of thumb.

Yash From Momentum (25:46)

Yeah.

Zack Swafford (25:53)

for this kind of situation, which would be that I would always go personally, I would always go with someone who is more geared toward getting stuff done and execution and making things happen and less geared toward reports and process and formality. And, you know, has a bunch of experience and expects maybe to

A small cog in a wheel, sorry, a small cog in a big gear, that kind of thing. As a startup, you need people that can just get stuff done in order to iterate quickly. Basically, you need to be trying millions of things. And for that, you need people that can just execute on one thing, execute on the next and the next and the next. It's usually, I would say, not always, but usually it would be too early at a stage like

ours or like Ethan's, believe to. Right. Right. So my belief is that it's probably too early to go with someone who is building process. and you know, founders can also take a lot of responsibility as well. Founders can founders can set that strategy. believe founders need to know how each part of the business works. And in some sense, I believe it's the founder's responsibility

Yash From Momentum (26:45)

this is similar stage yeah.

Zack Swafford (27:08)

Set the strategy, figure out what we should be doing for sales. Even if you don't have a sales background, I don't have a sales background, but I need to learn enough about sales that I can lead sales and understand it, set the strategy, that sort of thing. So I don't know if that's great advice for Ethan's situation because I don't know more details, but that would be my general rule of

Yash From Momentum (27:20)

Interesting.

So I also don't know whether this is great advice, but I know that I agree with this, that a person who's an upstart is significantly better. mean, creating processes and having reports and all of that, they are great problems to have. So let's get enough deals in place that we are not able to track what's happening. And then let's solve for that. And we know that the world has solved already for that. know that we'll be able to find the right tools and we'll be able to find the right templates and people to be able to do that.

Zack Swafford (27:51)

And you can talk to your friends and you can read online and you don't need a whole person, a whole role to make a report. can, once you have the deal flow, well, you can hire someone then, or you can Google it once and set up the reports the way the internet says. You don't need a, you don't need a whole role for

Yash From Momentum (27:51)

So great, what's,

What is your question, what is something that you are currently battling with at Dart

Zack Swafford (28:13)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I am very curious to get your next guest's thoughts on the balance between.

building things that people ask for and maybe that you know you need to eventually versus building visionary new product that might change things more fundamentally. And this is a very

I, it's probably obvious just from our conversation so far that this is always something that we're thinking about. And I think it's probably something that all founders are thinking about or should be on some level because all, all products are, there are some baseline things that you probably need. And then there are some visionary 10 X features that are going to change the world. And at Dart, we're always struggling with and grappling with, I probably should say.

the question of do we build things that make us a bit more competitive with our competitors, but maybe aren't that interesting, aren't that game changing? We can close more deals with those because we have another checkbox in a deal. Or do we build more of an agent -based future that is going to change the world but is still

a year or two away and so it's harder to get feedback on it. It's harder to build for right

Yash From Momentum (29:34)

This is a brilliant question and I'll tell you why. So I love it when my guests make it very hard for the next guest. Like it's extremely difficult to answer because the question I do essentially is how much should we work on getting the horses faster and how much should we work on designing the car? so I know for a fact that there's no right answer to this and I love to see.

Zack Swafford (29:51)

building the cars. Exactly. Totally.

Yep, I also know that.

Yash From Momentum (30:00)

Yeah, and I'd love to see my next guest struggle trying to come up with that. So that's going to be interesting. And so with that, come to the end of this conversation. thank you. Thank you for joining in, and thank you for sharing your insights and the things that you're building at Dart. Extremely excited to see the agent -based future. And for all the people who tuned in, whether you've been watching this or listening to this on YouTube or Amazon Music or Spotify, you'd be able to find a

Dart's website in the description of wherever you are watching or listening. It's itsdart .com. I encourage you to go ahead, check out the product, check out the platform, and start on your journey of saving up to about 7 hours a week. Thanks again for joining in.