The Story of Hana Mohan, CEO of MagicBell

Welcome to Magical. My name is Jeremiah McVay, and I'll be your host for this and upcoming episodes of the podcast. In this episode, I'll be speaking with Hana Mohan, founder and CEO of MagicBell.

It almost felt like I couldn't carry the persona online, because online is a persona, right? I don't think the online is a hundred percent reflection of how we feel at all moments. And I think the reason to go offline – I actually purged all my accounts at that point, Twitter, Instagram, I just have WhatsApp or whatever left… It just felt like I couldn't really carry that person. I couldn't relate to it. And I think MagicBell is again similar.

Jeremiah McVay:

We'll discuss Hana's experience, not only of founding MagicBell, but also before that, both professionally and personally. Our goal with this podcast, from this point on, is going to be to tell the deeper story of MagicBell in various ways. But by that we don't just mean the story of how the company was formed or what it does. We also want to tell the personal stories of the people behind MagicBell and the people who use MagicBell.

Additionally, we want to delve into the story of digital distraction and explore how cutting through the so-called noise of digital life can help us to feel better in our actual life. We hope you'll come along with us as we embark on this new direction for the Magical podcast. Now here's my chat with Hana Mohan…

Jeremiah McVay:

It's good to talk with you, Hana.

Hana Mohan:

It's great to chat with you, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah McVay:

We'll of course be talking about MagicBell more broadly, but I would like to start by talking specifically about you and your story before MagicBell. So can you tell us what first drew you toward becoming a developer, even before Muziboo, which we will discuss in a little bit.

Hana Mohan:

I'd say I've always kind of been interested in building things. I grew up before computers were really a thing in India, at least a thing that was commonly available. So I did a lot of electronics, would build little circuit boards and it actually grew eventually to powering our own house with the UPS I built myself or things like that. So it actually grew pretty serious, that hobby. And then I got into engineering and I chose to study electronics, but then I think just the draw of software, was I think eventually irresistible. It was unfortunately better money and reluctantly, I kind of moved over to software, I'd say I'm glad I did, actually.

Jeremiah McVay:

Besides the money aspect, which you just mentioned, was there any problem or need that you were trying to solve as you became a developer? Was there something you were working on to try to solve a problem? Was that something that drew you towards it?

Hana Mohan:

Absolutely. So money was one reason, but I still wanted to stay. So I didn't move to web software. For example, I actually moved to embedded systems, which is still closer to the hardware, but just it's one level up from hardware. I actually liked the job I had, but then I think they had some structural changes in the company and my project was shelved and they weren't really quite sure what to do with me.

I think they assigned me something that I wasn't very excited about. So just from the side, I started building Muziboo and that was just this instant hook to put something out there into the web. I think the power of the web after being an embedded systems engineer was just fascinating. Instead of, nobody used your software or it was hidden away somewhere, in the web you just put it out there. People responded to it really quickly. You could make changes really fast. It was also very exciting to be able to recreate things that you were already using yourself, putting an audio player on the internet, doing sign-in and log in. It was almost like opening something up and learning its internals.

Jeremiah McVay:

So what is one of the earliest memories of something specific that you worked on, that made you feel you'd chosen the right field as a developer?

Hana Mohan:

There was actually a moment where I did feel very good, but I still don't know if I was sure that this was my career choice, because I think I'd spent six to seven years becoming this electronics engineer. And so there was a lot of sunk cost into it. But I remember this moment we pushed Muziboo live and we were wondering when somebody we didn't know would upload a song of theirs and that actually happened in three days of putting it live. And that feeling was just really fascinating to see that people cared about this, people that we hadn't even met – we hadn't told, somebody else told them. And they were starting to use this product we had put out.

It was so rudimentary and they were still so excited about it. But then I think it took me another three or four months to really get to the point where I said, "You know what? This is actually a legitimate career choice." I think it's more about what you build, how you build it. Not necessarily about “electronics is holier than web software” and so on. And so I think that kind of learning keeps happening eventually, even later as well. Programming is holier than business work, or building things is holier than selling things. And so I think I'm still on that journey, I guess.

Jeremiah McVay:

I like your framing of it as one is holier than the other. I like that. That was your first venture back in 2007, but what ultimately pushed you to take the leap and launch Muziboo as both an app and a company?

Hana Mohan:

I had launched it even before I quit my job to work full-time on it. After a few months of working on it, I figured, okay. If I can do so much by working on it part-time, imagine how much more I can do if I could just be full-time. Turns out actually not that much more, because then you also tend to procrastinate a lot, have a lot more anxiety, but I didn't know it back then. So that was probably the reason why I took the leap.

Jeremiah McVay:

You mentioned earlier that pretty quick off the bat, after launching that, you enjoyed the connection you felt to people who were using the app. So what about that feeling and that experience of connection pushed you to continue with Muziboo, and then of course, after Muziboo you worked on a customer support ticketing system called SupportBee. So did something from that experience move you towards wanting to move towards this newer experience later on?

Hana Mohan:

I'd say it's the same feeling even today. That feeling never left me. Putting something out there and then seeing people actually use it, that is the connection. I think we all want to feel useful in some way. And it's beyond making money or there is a way you see the world and then some other people see it that way too. So it's the same as I think writing or producing music, it's that resonance that you seek out. So I think even today, every time a customer buys, let's say MagicBell, or when they were buying SupportBee, I think it's almost like you have this resonance with somebody who says, "I see how you're solving this problem. And I agree with that way of solving a problem and I'll bet my money on it." So I think that's the connection. The connection is somebody saying, "I get your vision. I get what you're building. And I like it as well." It's the same reason why we'll enjoy some movies and then we go and talk about it on the internet.

Jeremiah McVay:

And then SupportBee, like I said, is a customer support ticketing system. So that is more explicitly an app or a service aimed at connecting with people, which was the thing you enjoyed about Muziboo. So was there some conscious decision that you wanted to do something that took that further, that experience of connecting?

Hana Mohan:

It's only after many years of having been an entrepreneur, having just been around in the world. I think I realized that I do seek out communities. So I think a lot of times my draw in doing something is to find a community or to create a community. So with Muziboo, it was a community of musicians. I think there was that connection for a bit. But I think what I realized after a few years was that I am not really a musician myself. And because I was an entrepreneur, I barely had time to learn music either. So I was starting to lose my connection with that community. I wasn't able to really appreciate what they wanted, why they wanted it. And so unless you have a very strong connection with that community, you are not in it for the struggle. And it was quite a struggle, because we were not making a lot of money.

We were working on it quite a bit, even though we only had karaokes or whatever, we were still getting legal notices saying – because everything is programmed now, if the name of the song matches, they'll send you a legal notice. Then you have a legal team, but we didn't have a legal team, for example. So I think at one point it just became very obvious that I didn't really have a compelling reason to stay there. But I had acquired all these skills that I was very grateful for, skills of building something, promoting it, charging money on the internet. And it just made a lot more sense to apply it to a problem that also financially made more sense. I'm very pragmatic in that way. So it's not that I'm driven by money, but I'm definitely driven by pragmatism. It made sense financially, because also, you want to make money so that you can run a great service, so you can hire other people and build more stuff.

So it's not just money that you put into the bank actually, but also I think I could relate more to small business owners. And so in that sense, the connection to SupportBee was stronger. And I must admit, that I think it never actually left me, even when I moved on from SupportBee. I still like, relate a lot to small business owners and there's a small business owner that will always live in me, I think mentally. And then the community kind of changed, not necessarily to customer support people, but more towards business owners. And maybe that was perhaps some of the gap in SupportBee too. I think, all my life I've been trying to move closer and closer to the actual user being the community. And now with engineers and product builders, I think it's the closest I've actually ever been.

Jeremiah McVay:

And in 2016 you went on a sabbatical during which time you, "unplugged from the digital world for a few years." And during this time you, of course, transitioned. Were you still officially leading SupportBee?

Hana Mohan:

Yeah, I was officially the CEO, but unfortunately I was very absent and so my co-founder, Nithya – I mean all credit to her and the rest of the team – they were the ones really steering the ship and keeping it going and improving it and keeping customers happy. But yeah, I was quite unplugged. It was a very disorienting experience to start transitioning, especially because I didn't really know that I am trans until a few months back, clearly in that vocabulary. So I felt very disoriented and I couldn't really move forward with any ... even authority, I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing. Yeah. So those were kind of my lost and confused years, I would say four years like that.

Jeremiah McVay:

Then it was after transitioning when you first launched MagicBell. If you don't mind my asking, it sounds like you are already saying this. Was there anything about your transition experience that led you to want to start this new company?

Hana Mohan:

In some ways, yes, but also in some ways, no.

Actually what happened, if you want a slightly longer answer is I started transitioning and then I started asking myself if my ambition or this desire to build a company, was that real or was there just more I was trying to compensate for, or covering up for, my other anxiety, which came from my gender transition. And honestly, for a couple of years, I thought that I actually probably was not that ambitious. And I was living a very different life for those few years, in fact. I moved to Barcelona after kind of halfway through my transition. So I'd already passed through, in some ways the hardest part. And I would like, go for in the morning for a one hour coffee and just a very European life, I think I was living. In those years, it felt like ambition really wasn't my thing.

I was happy to just be a woman actually, because there's also a lot of learning in that. When you have your puberty, if you are a cis-gendered person, you have almost eight years to figure out how to navigate the world before people expect you to navigate with a certain poise as a man or as a woman. When you're a trans woman, you just get dropped into this midlife as a woman and you actually can't really navigate it that well. So you do pull back a bit. I think I pull back less than a lot of trans people I know, but you still pull back, because you're not very confident. I was so busy with those things, working on my voice, working on my mannerisms and I could try to not blend in and just make a statement or I could just blend in.

And I chose in some ways the easier path, or the more privileged path, of trying to blend in. Once I was wrapping that up, I did realize that no, I think a lot of my ambition is kind of innate. SupportBee was doing decently well for a small team. And I could have continued that. I did try to continue that. I did try to find my love back for SupportBee. I loved the problem, but I think I had stopped being in love with the way I was building it. It just felt like hitting a reset on that, trying to change the DNA of the company, because now my goals have changed, just felt unfair to the customers, the product, and the team members. And it just felt like it'd be better to choose a new path if I wanted to do things way differently.

Jeremiah McVay:

And now that we're talking about MagicBell more specifically, of course, MagicBell's stated mission is to, "Empower all product teams to build relevant notification experiences for their users." So, with a service like MagicBell, you have to think not only of your clients, but also of their clients, right? How do you balance the needs of these two groups? I'm curious, Is that something that you consider in the decisions you make, about how you build your product and think about how others are building their products that they're going to integrate yours into?

Hana Mohan:

That's a great question. I would say I'm very aware of the need for that balance or how it uniquely impacts a company like MagicBell. I think it's a unique challenge. It's also a unique opportunity to attract people who are excited about those kind of problems to work with us. We think about it a bit, but as a small team, I have to say that not as much as we would like to. But then some of our larger customers also think about it a lot and we give them the tools, so that they can bring their own flavor of notifications to the solution. MagicBell is an open-ended software in the way that how we think the developer experience should be, but it's not opinionated yet in the way that we say companies should only implement notifications in a certain way.

It's very flexible. It's like a Swiss army knife of a sort. So I would say maybe we have delegated that more towards the customers, our customers right now. However, that is one of the things that, as we grow, we want to focus on more and more. But today, some of our smartest customers, they can certainly build something that is better for them, for their use case, maybe better than our out-of-the-box experience. And we wholly encourage that. And we wholly enable that.

Jeremiah McVay:

Well, as you mentioned earlier in our discussion, some of your perspective and your realizations only came in hindsight about how your experiences with your previous work impacted and took you forward. Similarly in a way, going into this interview, I knew I was going to ask you about Muziboo and SupportBee and how those led you to MagicBell.

But in a way, I feel like with the hindsight of hearing your answers about that, I see kind of a clearer narrative path than I did before we started talking about it. You said that with Muziboo you started off building something that people connected with, then started to build a way for people to connect with their people. And now you are doubling down on that in a way, and taking what you've learned about connecting with customers and users and offering those tools to people who need it.

Hana Mohan:

Yeah. I think that's a really good way to put it. I think for me, it was more connecting with end customers and connecting with the business owners who are my customers. And this time, the larger community, I think we are connecting with just people who want to build great products and then empowering them. Yeah. But I think that's a fair way of putting it. Yeah.

Jeremiah McVay:

And then bringing it back around to you and your perspective a bit more again, between the three companies we've discussed, you have years of experience as a developer, a CEO, and a founder. What is the biggest change you've seen in this world or these worlds during your time?

Hana Mohan:

I can tell you what change I've seen in myself, which is I remember a time where just being able to build something was so exciting. I didn't even want to really bring in anyone into the team, because I was just so excited to do it all by myself and learn everything, everything from design to programming, to managing the business and marketing.

And I think what I'm doing this time is, I've finally embraced both as a programmer and as a business owner, that my ideas far exceed my capabilities. And this time I'm just very much focused on the vision and the goal, and then bringing in whoever can help me get there. So I think that's a change I've seen in myself, is just being more collaborative, reaching out for more support. We are talking with you now and you're helping me to do this podcast better. It's actually very much a manifestation of the same idea.

The changes in the world, yeah… I think the expectations from users are very different now. If you go back and look at the launch page of MailChimp or even Basecamp, or even in 2010, the kind of software polish that tools like Intercom had, versus let's say if a new Intercom competitor were to come in today and launch something less polished than Intercom, there is absolutely no way to take over.

So I think that's a big change I've seen in the world. I remember when, it's embarrassing, but I remember when I launched Muziboo, it took almost a month before somebody emailed me and said, "Hey, you don't have a privacy policy." And I was like, what is that? And now an entrepreneur can't even imagine launching something into the world, at least publicly, without full GDPR compliance. And in fact, very soon having SOC 2 compliance. And so I think just the bar for what is considered acceptable has gone up significantly.

Jeremiah McVay:

Kind of pushing that forward then, is there any major change or development in the world of tech dev or business that you expect will happen in the next few years?

Hana Mohan:

I'm not really big on predictions, to be honest. So I don't want to make big tech predictions, I think. We have placed some big bets. I think notifications and the way people see notifications and all these disparate systems sending notifications whenever they want to a user, not worrying about whether, “has this user received too many notifications?” – in my industry, I think there's going to be a significant shift. And that's what we are betting on. In the wider world, I actually do think that, and I thought this… we've been working remotely since 2015, so to me, when COVID happened unfortunately, and the remote work picked up and everybody got excited, I was surprised almost that so many people never saw it coming, because to me, this was just such an obvious thing that was happening to the world.

So I think that will keep accelerating.

I do think the nature of collaboration tools is going to change significantly, because today the kind of tools we have do feel more like a relic of the past, just brought over to the present. This is the other exciting thing about customer support or productivity software. The market is just so big that people are going to constantly come up with new things and there’ll be always takers for it– people like me who are always excited to try a new approach.

Jeremiah McVay:

Kind of switching gears just a little bit. What is something specific either from your time with Muziboo and SupportBee, or just more generally from your life and experience, that you would consider to be an influence on MagicBell, but which might actually surprise people to hear about as an influence on MagicBell.

Hana Mohan:

The amount of focus that we put on making things simple and easy to start. That's definitely something that I've learned from Muziboo and SupportBee, because no matter how great you think you are, people don't really want to change or people don't want a lot of friction. Even for a developer tool, where we have a pretty sophisticated audience and they can certainly take two or three steps to get to the aha moment, we try to keep it to just one API call. And if you look at a lot of notification services and you compare them, you will find that we are probably one of the very few ones, if not the only one, where you can just make one API call and get a notification system up and running.

But I think getting people's buy-in or commitment is so precious. I think I no longer take it for granted. I think just our obsession to charge people for the product. We launched in November 2020, a couple of months after incorporating the company and we already had payments and we already had a couple of customers in the first week or two.

And it wasn't a lot of money. It was probably around a thousand dollars a month or something like that. Again, maybe having been a bootstrapper, I think to me, until somebody pays for something, you don't really know if they care about it. In SupportBee, I was very reluctant in charging people. And in fact, we lost some customers because of that, because some companies just wouldn't trust us, because we were not charging them. They thought this was just an experiment. I'd say those two things definitely.

Jeremiah McVay:

And then completely breaking out of that, is there a book, or a movie, or an album, or anything, a work of art or something that you really want to tell people about? Something that you don't think people know about, that you want to tell them about?

Hana Mohan:

So there is this movie that I really love that I keep going back to it. It's probably if I had to take one movie to watch forever, it'd be that, which is called Gattaca. I don't know if you know about it. Surprisingly, a lot of people don't know about it or they haven't seen it. And to me, it's just one of the best movies ever. Also, because I think the experience that they're talking about, so many people can relate to, of being sort of like an underdog. It's just such an inspiring tale.

And in some ways, that is something that has always driven me. I certainly always felt a bit like an underdog. And maybe that was actually also the reason why I didn't want to ever embrace the fact that I was trans, because I always felt held back and I always also felt bad for feeling that way.

But it always drove me and it still drives me, I think. And it also is something that we really appreciate in people who come and work with us, we're always trying to figure out like what's the chip on their shoulder? Why do they want to do this? Because we offer great salaries. We offer great equity, but we need to find people that would still have the hunger. And I think that movie is great. It's actually quite, quite amazing.

Jeremiah McVay:

Is there a question that you think I should have asked you, that I did not?

Hana Mohan:

I think you actually did hint at it. You didn't ask it as a question, but one thing that you said was, I was kind of pretty offline for a while. And even though as a trans person, you have this kind of continuity between your pre-transition life and post-transition life. It almost felt like, that I couldn't carry the persona online, because online is a persona. I don't think the online is a hundred percent reflection of how we feel at all moments.

And I think the reason to go offline, I actually paused all my accounts at that point: Twitter, Instagram, I just have WhatsApp or whatever left. It just felt like I couldn't really carry that person. I couldn't relate to it. And I think MagicBell is again similar. I could have continued with SupportBee, but it almost felt like a different person started it. And I didn't really relate to that person or the choices that person had made. And this is a difficult one to say, because in some ways I do own up to everything I've done. But at the same time, where I do have a choice, I don't really want to live by the choices I made 10 years back.

And so I think the online perch that I had or moving onto MagicBell was in some ways just giving myself these opportunities to start afresh and make new decisions and not be held back by what I said 10 years back or the choices I made. And so, yeah, not really a question, but I just wanted to expand on that.

Jeremiah McVay:

And I think that makes a lot of sense. Well, I appreciate the chat. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Hana Mohan:

I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much.

Jeremiah McVay:

That was our first chapter in telling the story of the people behind MagicBell. In our next episode, we'll hear from Alex Reed, Chief Commercial Officer for Vsimple, as we begin to tell the story of the people who use MagicBell.

Subscribe or follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to hear that and future episodes of Magical. I'm your host, Jeremiah McVay. Please join me here next time. Until then, take care.