Transforming physical product development with Brian Lindauer and VibeIQ

When you're building physical products and you're dependent on a supply chain and tooling and companies overseas, it's really hard to be agile. So there has been a huge push in the retail fashion apparel space to get more digital over time. Hello everyone and welcome to Built Not Born, the startup Go to Market podcast by Venture Guides. I'm Sage Nye and around here we believe that great companies are Built not Born, one smart decision at a time.

Each week we take you through real conversations with founders, investors and go to market experts on what it really takes to land customers and scale your startup. Now let's get to work. Hello and welcome to Built Not Born. I'm Sage Partner at Venture Guides and this episode is a really fun episode because we're actually talking about a different type of go to market.

We're talking about go to market in consumer goods and retail today. Today's guest is a builder, someone who spent his entire career fixing how products actually get made and focusing on that. He's a founder and CEO with deep roots in retail and product technology and a track record of helping global brands move faster, collaborate better and make smarter decisions. From shaping early product lifecycle platforms to now leading a venture backed company redefining product collaboration, he's been at the center of how modern product teams work and how fashion and footwear teams think about taking products to market.

As the founder and CEO of Vibe iq, he's focused on cutting complexity, breaking down silos and turning ideas into real products faster. He brings a clear point of view, real operator experience, and zero patience for outdated processes. If you've been wondering what his name actually is through this whole introduction, we are very excited to talk about leadership, scaling businesses and the future of product innovation with Brian Lindauer. Welcome Brian.

Thanks for having me. Sage. Couldn't be happier to be here and looking forward to talking. Awesome.

Well, so I'd love to start with a bit of background on yourself and what inspired you to create Vibe iq. Let's see, quick story. Went to school in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Started computer science.

Always been into computers and building things. Started my career at PTC here in Boston and after a year or so there I got connected with a customer at Timberland and got exposure to the footwear, apparel, retail market and the complexity of of how they develop and design and bring products to market and worked with PTC to build a product to kind of bring organization to that product chaos and been sort of working in that space for the past 20 years. Vibe IQ came to life in 2020 in the middle of COVID I think Covid is actually a really important formative element to this because we were all at home and the whole world had to figure out how to work together virtually.

Think about for a second products like what Timberland sells or New Balance or Ralph Lauren. The products that we buy physical. And if you're a team working on developing products and you're at home all day long, you can't touch a product, you can't hold anything in your hand. So everyone, everyone started learning how to work virtually.

I got connected to a great set of people at a company called Archer Gray during COVID And we kind of realized there was an opportunity to take advantage of virtual collaboration in new ways and solving problems that maybe had never been solved before. That was sort of the spark that triggered Vibe iq. Like, what if we could really create a step change in how companies work digitally to collaborate, identify good product ideas, and then bring them to the market faster? Our very first customer is Hoka Running Shoes.

Hoka is a wholesaler, so they sell to thousands of retailers all across the world. And it's this fall of 2020. Not a single sales rep can take a trip to anywhere with shoes to show people. So everyone was just desperate to present their product line in some new way so they could actually sell product.

So it was a perf use case for us. And we learned a ton working with hoka and really started to grow around change in the way people work with product data. And there's just all sorts of opportunities to pursue. And it's so interesting because most of the time we talk about software and the look and feel, while you can't literally reach out and touch it, you actually are experiencing it yourself.

You get to go on. You can demo your own product and try things out. When you're talking about, like, how does a HOKA running shoe look and feel? As a consumer of hoka, by the way, that's such a different concept.

And, you know, the materials that you put in it and the way you think about it can create such a difference that you don't actually get to touch. Yeah, right. An interesting parallel I always try to explore is like the idea in software of working Agile. So I've lived through this whole thing.

You know, if you go back 20 years ago, people would write all these specs and get all the requirements right and the project plan and all the team, and then they'd code, code, code, and then you test, test, test, and you'd show the product to someone and then it would be wrong. And everyone just knows now that's not how you should develop software. You should build your demo, present, iterate, repeat, repeat, repeat. When you're building physical products and you're dependent on a supply chain and tooling and companies overseas, it's really hard to be agile.

So there has been a huge push in the, in particular retail, fashion, apparel space to get more digital over time. Lots of other industries like automotive and heavy equipment, things like that, had been doing 3D CAD for decades and that was sort of how they worked digitally without needing a physical product. But so much of the industry is still used to having a product sampled, brought to them, hanging it up on a wall, putting it on, testing it out, touching it. So working digitally is more difficult and as a result you end up being less agile.

So the pain that the software world used to feel from not working in an agile way is the pain that a whole lot of companies still feel today working with a physical supply chain. So maybe let's back up for a second. Can you share a bit more, sort of give us more details on that pain. What does it go to market or sort of building a product line look like without WebIQ?

All companies out there today go through a process that won't sound foreign, right? They go from a concept like they do research through market research, figure out trends, they build product concepts, they review those, they match them to like a financial plan and then they downselect products to sample through their supply chain and then they go through a development and industrialization process until they're ready to, you know, done the testing necessary and so forth to then place orders to put in inventory.

That whole process from like concept to market can take anywhere from like six months to 24 months, depending on the type of product you're working on. But even for like a very trend driven industry like apparel, where you're buying what you're seeing, like you see something flashes on Instagram or something, like you want that thing? Totally. Taylor Swift wore it and I want it right?

So very large companies that sell billions of dollars of product still struggle getting faster than say 12 months, like they have from an idea to be able to put something into their store. 12 months is forever. There's just a plethora of data and roles and systems and documents. It's chaos.

It is very difficult to make sense of it all. And that translates into all sorts of problems, right? Like you waste time, people have a hard time moving fast. You end up sampling products that you never put into market.

So you waste your development capacity, your Supply chain capacity. The worst real effect is when it comes time to place orders, to put product into inventory. You're doing it with not nearly as much understanding of what you're purchasing and why as you should. And that's a ramification of lots of things.

But a big contributor is just how much information they're trying to synthesize and align on and understand before they make those kinds of decisions. So hearing about the chaos or seeing some of it is one thing. Deciding I'm going to go solve this and to go create a company is an entirely different step. Was there a specific moment or something that you saw or that someone said to you where you were like, okay, this is the time to finally start.

Bye byeq. Yeah, so the timing was part of it. I mentioned Covid. Yeah, right.

So the kicker there was in particular, if you think of some roles, right, let's just take an extreme situation or like a designer in a fashion house, they are going to want to hold fabric. Designers in general are technology adverse, right? They want to draw, they want to think, they're creatives. So suddenly everyone, including all those designers, are at home.

So you can't have this forced adoption of technology. They don't have a choice. So that was like a. It was kind of priming for a new type of software product to come to market.

I also witnessed the younger generation, like, I have three kids, they're all in school at home. And that did all their work. Every single thing about their schoolwork was done through Google classrooms, cloud, digital, no paper. And it was just pretty clear that that's tomorrow's workforce.

The task and the idea of Vibe IQ was relatively ambitious. And it kind of goes back to something I heard over and over again for the past 20 years working with these companies. The merchants want Excel, everyone works in PowerPoint. And then when you gave them enterprise software, they're like, you know, I don't like that.

And then the company mandated adoption because tools like digital asset management systems and PLM systems benefit the company in major, major ways. When we work, when we collaborate, when we communicate, when we're ideating, we're doing it in Google Docs and Microsoft Office. And what took off around Covid time were digital whiteboards, super collaborative, free formed, unstructured data. And the idea that hit was like, all these users have been asking for PowerPoint and Excel for 20 years and they never got what they wanted.

Really, what if we could just give them what they wanted? What if we gave them the user experience and the interaction model and the Ability to collaborate. So it felt like the document. But what they were actually doing was creating enterprise data at the same time.

No compromise on the user experience. So you can assure adoption. The user gets what they want, but you're creating enterprise data and you're accessing enterprise data. The price of that phenomena is astronomical.

Basically means that how your teams work is disconnected with how your enterprise runs if you take a step back. So we said, what if we could fix that? And we felt like, I think we could build a version, like a presentation tool that's kind of like PowerPoint, and a board that's like Miro, and a spreadsheet that's like Excel. We could build that today, but we'll do it differently.

Right? We're not just building a disconnected system, we're going to build a connected system and focus on representing products really, really well. And then what would happen if we did that? We're like, man, that's gotta be so valuable.

One of my favorite professional moments was someone literally cried tears of joy. So I said, that should be our new KPI. Like, how many tears of joy? Three tears.

Yeah. How many tears of joy did we create this year? But we literally had someone cry on a demo because they're like, oh, I can't believe that I'm. What I'm seeing how happy they were because they've been fighting this phenomena for so long.

I don't know what the exact numbers are, but the amount of product that is purchased and put in inventory, that is never sold, that is just scrapped and burnt, is astronomically large. And, I mean, that's real money. So what we've realized over time is that the problem we're solving is that brands and companies that work on physical product lines really don't understand their product line, or they don't understand it nearly as much as they could. And if we can change that, if we can create this, like, new type of workspace, this new type of system where you always understood your product line, even when it was like, really rough, unstructured ideas, you always understood the situation and what you had and what you didn't have, then they're going to make better decisions and then they're going to more effectively deploy their capacity and their capital and, you know, get to the outcomes that they want.

And you might have just answered this in some of what you said. But one thing that's remarkable is not only have you never lost a customer, you've also had many customers see more adoption than I think they definitely expected, probably more than even you expected initially as well. Was there something that you focused on? Was it the user experience?

You can use Excel for anything. You can use PowerPoint for anything. Right. So in one sense we've built this suite of applications that can be used for anything.

I mean the common denominator is that you're working with products, but it could be design working on trends and concepts and colors. It could be merchants doing visual line planning. It could be a wholesale sales team building pitch decks for to take to hoka, taken out to Footlocker or something like that. We don't give them one form or one workflow or one framework.

But once it gets in place, once the users get engaged with it, they ask, well, could I use this to do this other process? Got it. And the answer is yes, of course you can. And they're like, oh my God, this is amazing.

And they come back and they ask for more software. I think, you know, we're much closer in nature to a pull system where you make it available, people see it and then they ask for it, and then they find new and creative ways to use it. And that's been a really powerful thing for us. And when it comes to retail retaining customers and net retention, it's had a big positive impact for us.

So let's double click on this a little bit more too because to close the accounts, even just close them and make them happy and then nevermind have them grow and all that. It takes product, marketing, sales, customer success, you know, so many different roles in the organization to be focused on that. How have you built alignment across your team to be able to have all the success? We've learned a lot.

You definitely didn't have it all figured out at the beginning. It's an enterprise software and it's an enterprise sale. And to do that well, you need to, you have to have a great playbook. You gotta know who you're selling to, you gotta know who your ICP is.

Took us a while to realize who our ICP was, but now that it's clicked, we know who we're going after and why we're going after them. It's amazing. It's a dynamic market right now in lots of different ways, but like where we figured out how to navigate enterprise accounts, we figured out also like how to transfer and modify that when we're working with a smaller company. And like we have a different sort of density of champions or decision makers.

I feel like we've got it figured out relatively well. So general market awareness of not just Vibe iq, the company, but that there's a solution to this problem has become more generally understood. That's. So things are starting to speed up now.

We're showing up and our prospect can say, oh yeah, like I heard about you through New Balance. Or like we've been thinking about this problem. Which is amazing because like, if you're thinking about the problem, that means you sort of feel like there's a solution to it. Yeah.

And that's. That just wasn't the case five years ago. I remember a conversation we had recently and we were talking about, you know, how do you think about going into sort of the spaces adjacent to fashion, footwear, like consumer goods and stuff, and why do you think that's a good idea? And you're like, well, we didn't even try and we already have customers that need it and are coming to us and stuff.

And so it's not like you have to go do a bunch of market research to get the data. You have the data from the customers and now it's just about making sure we can serve them really well and do all of that. Which you guys are focused on as an organization. Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many companies that create product.

And definitely depending if you're talking about an apparel company or a footwear company or CPG or you know, like cosmetics, they're all different product development workflows and they have different supply chain ramifications. They have different ways of representing the product. In some cases it's literally packaging. In other cases it's the formula.

In other cases it's, you know, the thing you're going to wear. But they're all trying to match consumer demand. There's increased localization of product and assortment. So if you're selling the same product across the entire planet, it's the same packaging, same messaging, same everything, then it's a simple world.

But if you have a diverse product line and you have to talk about it and package it and name it and present it differently in different regions, which is the norm, then there's this sort of assortment complexity across many, many different types of customers. And at its core, that's what we're doing, right? Like we're helping people understand what their product line is and how it varies across their different target markets and how they need to change in an increasingly frequent way as trends change, become more reactive, more responsive and so forth.

So we're excited by the breadth of applicability of some of the things that we're working on. That's really exciting and Kind of to that point when you started Vibe, and for most of the early years, all of the early years, you bootstrapped the business. And then recently you trusted venture guides to be your partners in the journey. And there were some theses around areas you wanted to focus on and innovate in and grow that I think you've been doing for the past couple years.

How have the last couple years felt different than the first few? Very different. When we were looking for investment partner, we knew we needed help with go to market. And in the year and a half since we've been working with venture guys, we've learned so much.

And I think if I just were to reflect on some of the biggest changes it's really been around, go to market process, best practices, and also our team expansion and the sorts of talent that we brought into the company, big focus on sales and go to market. And like venture guys, has been huge in helping us build the team out. We have a lot more to do and a lot more to learn, so we're not done. So it's a continuous process.

But now we feel like we understand our playbooks, we've got a team that can sell, and we're eager to move forward and think about what markets to get after next. And there's another big shift that's happened in the market, which is AI from your perspective. We see it reshaping how products are built and brought to market, and there's so much buzz and noise, but you're actually talking to customers and thinking about this every day. So where do you think AI creates the biggest leverage inside a company Vibe and inside your customers as well?

I think, you know, first off, it's just so exciting. Like, I'm a technology, I'm a nerd, so I can't remember being more engaged in learning than I have been the past six, nine months. Things are moving so fast and it's. It's just incredibly exciting.

And I think the opportunities are endless. A lot of it hinges around speed of, you know, moving from trend to market. Right. Like if the calendar is 12 months today and you're trying to get trend in a market, 12 months is not fast enough.

So how can AI compress that? And there's really endless opportunities for automating, predicting, guiding, bringing teams together. The other thing that I'm really excited about is not just the offering that we can provide to our customer, but how AI changes the way that we think about scaling our company. So every single function inside of our company, product engineering, customer success, sales, marketing, every Single one.

There's opportunity to completely transform how you operate. I think Venture guys talks about customer, team, self, right? Absolutely. The relationship makes such a difference and people absolutely buy software from people they trust.

So that is first and foremost from a priority standpoint for us internally and externally, when our culture and our brand has to be anchored on that. So what happens when you bring AI into the mix? Like what if we have an AI agent that is fielding support questions? Just as an example, how does it change a relationship with the customer?

It will. Right. But like you got to find the positive version of that and avoid the detrimental pieces of it. And I think that I see that as an opportunity.

How do we automate things without losing contact, without impeding the relationship? And from some of the stuff you said at the beginning of the call as well, it sounds like for many who aren't using Bye byq, the first question is how do we even automate this? Because if there's data in four or five different systems and it sounds like a lot of it's unstructured and who knows, maybe I just like scribbled something down on PowerPoint comments somewhere. Whatever it was, how do you actually train AI on that?

And you're losing so much information. So there's, it feels like there's that piece as well where it's like if you want to get to the shorter than 12 month cycle, can you? Without capturing all that extra data? Yeah.

That sums up one of the biggest opportunities for how our customers can use AI in particular, like, let's go back to the design. What is design? I like to say the design is a sketch, is a comment part of the design? Is it all the little pieces of information and context and references and a picture of another product and a color swatch or a picture of a piece of fabric.

Those are all the design. And the more it starts with something simple and it evolves to something complex, but the vast majority of that is unstructured content. Right. You don't start by filling out a form.

Never. Right. So that kind of illustrates a bit of the disconnect that vibe IQ is focused on. But it's the same kind of blending of unstructured and structured data is what AI is really good at.

Right. Like read all that and coalesce it into the thing. I need it to be understandable by my systems that are running my business. AI is getting really, really good at that.

And you ask about training, like yes, there's training, but like even the pre trained aspects of AI are getting really, really good at that. So we talk about specializing AI for the problem space and the domain. We could talk about how to best operationalize the AI that's already available to solve the most important problems in the most effective way. And it's really just.

It's just endless, the opportunities that are there. And I think it's the perfect type of problem to apply AI against. Right. So when we talk about brands trying to go from trend to commerce as fast as possible, I think you're going to see just this incredible compression.

Just in the next year, next year and a half, the thing was gonna happen is you're gonna see, you know, that the agent concept is gonna evolve over time. And then so you got AI agents and you got humans in the loop, and right now it's almost all humans in the loop. And then you've got agents here, and you're gonna see more and more of a shift, a blend, and who knows how far it will go. But I think what's most immediately interesting is how agents and humans can work together to iterate faster.

And like I was saying earlier, to remove more and more of the dependence on getting physical products to be in your hand in order to make assessments about the product. Like, how viable is this idea? Is it manufacturable? Can I produce at the margin that I need to hit?

What do users think about it? Maybe most importantly, what does my customer think? How many things can you predict about the product, even when it's in its fledgling, unstructured concept form? The more predictions you can make, then the earlier you can steer towards the better outcome.

That is agile, if you think about it. And AI is going to make that possible. So that makes a lot of sense. But that brings up another question of how do you think about where AI belongs in your operating model versus where you absolutely must have humans in the loop?

I think the way I feel about it right now is that there are aspects to doing business or collaborating with your design or merchant partner that are fundamental to products. And one of the things I like to say about Vibe IQ is that it's the coolest company to work at. At Vibe iq, we say our mission is to power the collaboration behind every great product. But when I show up at work every day, I get to collaborate with my team to build an amazing software product.

So we are doing the thing together at Vibe iq, that is the product that we sell to our customers and then they use our products to do the same thing. You see the recursion of that? I see it, Yep. But people make products they do.

People. People working together like, and products are consumed by people. So I'm excited by AI and I think that there's going to be agents creating value all over the place. But I think people make great products and find the right blend between those two things.

So I think the challenge for everyone in the whole industry right now is finding that right mix. What's the right blend? Where is it? Too much AI and not enough people.

And striking that balance. Right. I think is maybe what's going to be the difference between successfully deploying AI and not successfully deploying AI here in the next few years. Well, we'll be excited to see how it all goes.

All right, well, before we wrap up, we have a couple of questions for you that we frequently hear from customers we'd loved your perspective on. The first one is how do you build trust with your enterprise customers? And how involved are you personally in each of the sales processes? A transparent sales process.

You're selling the product you have, you're implementing the product you have. When you say you can do something, you do it. We follow through. We deliver value.

We create success for our champions. We look after their users. We respect and make sure that when we deliver software, it's not a transaction and focus on that relationship. Like I said before, we want them to work with Vibe IQ because who we are and they trust us as people about the software, the product that we're giving.

And as far as my personal involvement, my job is to hire an amazing team to build an amazing team. And I think, you know, again, I mentioned before, like, one of the things Venture guys has done in our partnership is help build an amazing team here. I will say I love anytime I can get a call with a customer or traveler, go see a customer. I'm doing it because every single time, no matter what, I learn something.

It could be the smallest customer or the largest customer. You learn something every time. That's fantastic. This actually brings me back to when you're thinking about leaders that you're hiring in your organization, are there character traits that you look for in specific?

And do you have any red flags that are an absolute no go? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's cliche, but like, super important. Right. Like, some of the things I most value is, you know, like leadership through humility, servant leadership, empowering your team when something goes wrong, take the blame when something goes well, pass the credit, all these things.

Right. Which, you know, I think again, humility is baked into all that all the time. But I just feel strongly to Scale a company. You need to create empowerment and enable.

Hire great people, give them big missions, help them get to the mission, don't tell them how to do it. Help them get there. So they're always learning they have just enough safety net, but they don't have a safety net. Like you need to create a fly or die kind of mentality in particular in a startup company.

But it's the difference between I think building a great company and failure. All right, before we wrap, I have a few reflective questions for you. The next one I think is going to be the hardest question of this whole thing, which is what has been at least one of your favorite memories from Vibe iq? That's a great question.

I mean, okay, just a couple highlights for me. I mentioned before, like tears of joy. I mean, I love that story. I mean if you're talking about building a company and building a product and then have someone feel that have that kind of emotional response like it, that makes it worthwhile.

The other one you just mentioned, the customer council, I remember our very first customer console was like, we're in a room and here's all these people who most of them placed a bet on a team that didn't have a big business to do something really important at their company and they put their careers on the line by betting on us and disassembling that group in the room. Again, you kind of like when you look all those people in the eye, you remember why you're doing this. And so that's going to be one of my favorite memories.

That's fantastic. What's one leadership lesson that you wish more founders understood as they're growing their businesses? The most important thing to do is to hire the right people. I mean, absolutely is the number one thing.

You can't build a company on your own. You can't build a product on your own and invest in a players and a talent and awesome things are going to happen. And maybe just to add on to that, when you hire those A players and the top talent keep growing, you grow every day and grow the people you hire. It doesn't matter if they're Harvard graduates and they get or 25 year veterans, like just they're going to keep learning.

You have to keep learning. So just make that part of your culture. If you're not learning every single day right now, we're going to get behind. I like to use this analogy.

There's a lot of hockey people in Boston. I'm not a hockey person for what's worth, but I'm a hockey person. Okay, you're hockey. So you know the hockey puck thing.

Like don't skate tour. The puck is skate tour. The puck's going. I say like quite often it feels these days you can't tell where the puck's going.

More so than ever, you're increasingly guessing and the only remedy to that is to learn. Like you have to learn every day. So I just, I'd say hire a great team and invest in your team. Don't stop learning.

Makes sense. Well, I want you to know I am dying to ask how many of the products I'm wearing. How many of the products in my house were created in Vibe iq? But assuming that I can't ask that, or at least not on a recording, what I'm going to ask instead is Brian, I'm sure many of our listeners are fascinated by you.

Where can they learn more about you and what you're doing at Vibe IQ? Obviously. Vibe IQ.com we have a growing YouTube channel.

Exciting. Check us out on LinkedIn and shoot me an email. I mean, if you'd like to hear more about Vibe iq, we're happy to engage. I'm willing to bet if you're listening to this podcast, I'm going to learn a lot from you as well and appreciate networking and seeing what happens.

Well, Brian, thank you so much. This has been wonderful and I'm really glad our listeners got to hear this perspective about going to market and a whole different type of market that many people in our listener base don't think about in their day to day. So fantastic. Thanks for having me.

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