Hi Nick! Who are you and what are you currently working on?
Hi, I’m Nick. I’m 35, based in Sydney, and I’m the co-founder & COO of Tactiq.io.
Tactiq is a freemium browser extension that transcribes remote meetings, extracts key insights, and creates notes for you. I work as the COO, overseeing operations, finances, hiring, our team, and shared-contribution to strategy/priorities, product, business roadmap, and growth initiatives. As a co-founder at such an early-stage venture, I wear lots of hats.
Tactiq is a B2B productivity SaaS browser extension driven by product-led growth - we have a freemium pricing model with paid pro and team accounts. Think Loom or Grammarly, with a similar B2B + B2C distribution, but monetization predominantly through B2B customers.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Before Tactiq, I was working in AI across Europe and the US, focusing on IT productivity solutions. I completed my MBA and founded another startup, TaskPace AI, an AI management assistant for Salesforce users. It helped managers focus their teams on the appropriate activities in their CRM.
I lived in Silicon Valley, but TaskPace’s engineering team was based in New Zealand. This meant many remote meetings, where I noticed meeting productivity was correlated to information recorded during the session. At the same time, my co-founder Ksenia was at Atlassian working on team productivity solutions and saw a similar trend.
We both experienced the same problems when it came to remote working environments. We observed that meeting productivity is highly related to the amount of information captured during the meeting. Meetings are tremendously more productive if insights aren’t lost.
Initially, we thought that a transcription tool could be the solution. It would record and document meeting discussions to ensure no action items or essential insights were forgotten. But as we worked on this solution, we realized that real-time transcription was just scraping the surface of the problem.
Beyond capturing critical information, teams needed to be able to extract important details and insights from meetings. The problem space expanded with an epiphany that it wasn’t just about documentation but making post-meeting action seamless.
How did you go from idea to product?
Our validation was simple: let the market talk. We followed the tried-and-tested lean startup method. First, we built an MVP ourselves (my co-founder coded it) with no external resources. Then we launched it to the Google Chrome store and began soft promoting it through free digital channels - Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Youtube comments. Within a few months, we had 10,000 users, and that was our validation to say, “Ok, there is a market need, and we have something valuable that people want”.
My co-founder Ksenia is a superhuman - she built the entire process. She designed, prototyped, and made our MVP in just a few weeks. It was incredible. I’m lucky to have such a talented co-founder.
The biggest challenges were not trying to polish the product too much, finding the courage to put it out there, and getting public market feedback as fast as possible. It was a huge mental barrier because we wanted the product to look good. We had to overcome this internal desire to spend months on the UI and design. In the end, it came down to us deciding to be courageous and click publish.
