Founding Tools: Dani Grant (Jam)
"I honestly think the best tool for sourcing great talent is Twitter (X)."
Meet CEO Dani Grant, co-founder of Jam, a tool for one-click bug reports, used by over 100k developers worldwide.
Dani started the company in 2020, during the thick of shelter-in-place, with her former Cloudflare teammate Irtefa (co-founder and President of Jam, inspired by the Stripe and Cloudflare leadership models).
Like their user base, the 20-person Jam team is globally distributed across the US, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Serbia, and Argentina.
This is an honest account of the software they chose, why they picked it, and how they feel about it now (including early mistakes and what they would’ve done differently).
💼 BUSINESS STACK
Can't Live Without
Meeting Recording - Grain: Dani decided to start using Grain (for sharing customer insights at team and board meetings) after getting valuable advice from founder Mike Adams: “At Grain, there was a stretch when all we thought about was product market fit, and all of a sudden we realized we hadn’t thought about PMF for a while. Somewhere in there, we hit it.” Throughout our conversation, it was clear that an incredible founder plays a huge role in how Jam co-founder Dani picks software.
Automation - Zapier: When they were ready to move past a Google Sheet with all of their user feedback, co-founder Irtefa used Zapier to create their own customer feedback system that takes in data from Intercom, Grain, Slack and email, puts it into Zapier, and tracks it in Coda. This centralized tool "drives everything at Jam."
Social - Typefully: Like Google Docs but for social posts. They use it to see exactly how X threads will look when published and collaborate as they come up with their content. They took this rec from freelancer and friend of Jam, Jason Levin.
Honorable Mentions
Talent Sourcing: X - The Jam team found a non-insignificant number of candidates through the artist formerly known as Twitter. Dani would go down rabbit holes of who follows who, looking for people who love their craft, and are well-networked. Finding people who are obsessed with something, whether that be woodworking or reading books, has been a huge signal for the Jam team. They’ve also used read.cv for finding designers and Hireflow for quickly going from a LinkedIn profile to an email. (Editor’s note: During our interview, I told Dani that X has a hiring platform, which she’s already started using!)
Expense Management: Ramp - Dani loves Ramp's design, saying "when I use it, I want to give kudos to their design team."
Words of Wisdom
If coding isn’t your strength, stop doing it as soon as you can. Dani had a huge role in the user interface of Jam and didn’t want to release it. When she had to give up the reigns, she found a design-oriented engineer on Dribbble, who still contracts for the team today, four years later.
Customer service can matter more than your product. Dani was so impressed by SVB’s customer service during their crisis, they ultimately kept using SVB (and added in Mercury), saying it inspired them to strive for that level of service at Jam.
What They Wish They Knew
Virtual Events: Luna Park - Jam users are in 173 countries, so the team wanted to take a global approach to marketing. It took quite a while for them to figure out how to host a virtual event that wasn’t boring! No one wanted to do a webinar, so when they finally found Luna Park, they realized they had found something “magical.” Most recently, they hosted a Global AI Night with ProductHunt with over 150 people in attendance.
HR Tools: Justworks, Plane and Rippling - In 2020, when they were getting started, they chose individual HR tools that solved their immediate problems. Over the years, they added on more tools to fit their needs, not knowing they’d end up with product overlap. Since HR tools are so sticky (and because they’ve had great experiences with all three products and support teams), it hasn’t been worth the effort to consolidate (yet).
The One That Got Away
Email: Front - Dani called Front "the tool that got away," praising it as "beautiful software" they wished they could have adopted earlier. Dani and Irtefa planned to start paying for Front once they started earning revenue, especially because all their support happens over email, but they’ve been so busy, it’s sadly fallen to the bottom of the priority list.
🤖 TECH STACK
Can't Live Without
AI Coding Assistant: GitHub Copilot - Dani said their engineers "love it, swear by it, and say they're never going back to a world before Copilot." Their biggest prompting tip? Up the ante and make Copilot think there’s money on the line (an engineer at Microsoft confirmed they use a prompt just like this in Copilot Workspace!).
SOC-II: Drata - Dani described finding a SOC-II provider as “an arduous, long process.” Compared to their other software decisions, this one they spent a long time weighing. Because of the gravity of the choice (and the expense!), they talked to all the providers. They chose Drata for their customer service, price (they got a “great deal”), and speed/ease of implementation.
Data Analysis: Metabase and Hex - The team uses both for different levels of data analysis complexity: Metabase is a lot more lightweight and anyone can create a dashboard. Meanwhile, Hex is more of a Jupyter notebook experience that works well for the programmers on the team.
Honorable Mentions
CDN/Security: Cloudflare - Of course, since the co-founders both worked there, using Cloudlfare was a no-brainer. Dani praised Cloudflare's dogfooding approach: "The rule of Cloudflare is nothing ships to customers until it's good enough for us." Similarly, the Jam team uses Jam all day long to build their product!
LLM - OpenAI GPT-4: They’ve had great performance using GPT-4 and haven’t seen a need to switch over to 4o. On the topic of costs, Dani thinks of high AI costs as “a great problem to have” because it’s mostly short term. AI costs will eventually go down, but in the meantime, those big OpenAI bills tell them that people are loving their product.
Thank you Dani for sitting down to share all about your Founding Tools! And if your company has bugs, you should check out Jam :)
Very nice article. It gives some good perspective to see what tools Jam uses and compare/contrast versus what we use at Riscosity and also some new ideas that would help us improve productivity, efficiency, marketing, etc!