Question Base COO Yana Tornoe: Business Lessons From The Best Slack AI Autoresponder

This article was originally posted by Roberto Popolizio on Website Planet.
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In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business.

A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical tips that will immediately help you build and grow your website.

My guest today is Yana Tornoe, COO and Co-founder of Question Base, an AI startup that helps companies scale their internal support by automating the process of answering employee questions on Slack. The company has already found traction in industries like fintech, events, and logistics.

Yana is also a judge for the Webby Awards and together with her two co-founders, CEO Kasper Pihl Tornøe and CCO Stefan Vladimirov, has previously founded a successful startup called Swipes (1,5 million downloads).

Let’s pick her brain.

To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?

I am one of the three co-founders of the technology startup, Question Base. We are building software that helps growing companies manage their internal support and enable their employees with instant answers to their questions at work. As a small team, we are all in each other’s work but my primary focus is talking to customers, understanding their needs, and helping the team translate that into a great product. You can call it Marketing, you can call it Product Management, you can call it Sales. It really is a bit of everything.

In the past 18 months of the company, we’ve graduated the business accelerator, Techstars, closed our pre-seed round, launched an early version of the product that became Product of the Day on Product Hunt, tested the product with over 200 companies (Fortune 500 companies and many unicorns) and just last week, got featured “Brilliant Bot” by Slack.

What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers?

Growing companies experience a high number of internal questions from employees. It’s hard to keep track of everything that gets asked and ensure everyone is unblocked. There is no effective workflow for handling internal support in companies and Product managers and Operators struggle with make-shift solutions like creating new channels in Slack like #ask-product or enforcing rigid solutions.

There is also a drastic shift in the way we consume information thanks to the boom of AI tools for personal use. People now expect answers not articles which makes all the wikis and current company documentation a very ineffective way to equip employees with the right know-how.

What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?

I was working as a Product Manager in a software company in my last job. I was at the intersection between the commercial teams and the product team. I sat on both the product know-how and the market insights. I spent my days translating one or the other to the rest of the organization and tried unblocking people. Naturally, a lot of questions came my way. Also naturally, I tried to document things properly and send people to the many articles and updates I was writing. However, when customer agents or sales folks had calls with clients, they needed an immediate answer to their questions, not my articles. Thus, Slack was the main place where know-how was exchanged.

My co-founder, Kasper, who was working in a big corporation spotted the same problem there. He was told to ask questions in the chat and not look for answers in the wiki because the data is likely outdated. My third co-founder, Stefan, was in a similar position. He was a contractor in a fast-growing unicorn and had limited access to the company’s documentation. He also was forced to ask questions in the chat to get the information he needed.

Once we talked about it and Kasper, our CEO got the light bulb – Aha, if the most recent and accurate piece of know-how in a company is exchanged as Questions & Answers in the chat, why don’t we build a system to capture that and re-use it. This will be the wiki of the modern company, it will work the way employees work today. It will be effortless documentation that extracts know-how as people chat.

This is how Question Base was born.

What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?

Everything in Question Base is copy-able. And companies do copy us.

The quality of our work is not determined by what it is today but by:

1. The in-depth knowledge we have about the problem we are solving
2. The care we put into a constant conversation with the customers we are solving it for
3. Our fine-tuned ability to translate this information into a delightful product experience that solves the problems.

I am most proud of our newbie mentality. We approach every day with curiosity and humility to learn from our customers and market. It makes us unbeatable. Companies don’t compete with what we have today but our ability to create exceptional things tomorrow.

“Question Base is easily the best AI autoresponder for Slack out there and the team continues to ship great improvements at high speed!”
Juraj Pal, Head of Partnerships at OpenPhone

From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful website and online business? Please explain each in detail.

Our online presence is incredibly important to the success of being a SaaS business. I think story-telling is the most important aspect of the online presence, either through the website or other medium.

Story-telling requires that you understand a problem in a very profound way. Not just mechanical aspects of the problem and its implications to somebody. But also the invisible human aspect of the pain it causes – the frustration, the anxiety, the confusion.

If you can clearly articulate the emotional state of people and show a deep understanding of their problems, you have a solid foundation of trust to then present a possible solution.

That’s how I think about website building.

What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a website and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?

It took me a while to realize the importance of CTAs on the website. As a builder, I was stuck in thinking what my goal was – the person who landed on the website to convert into a user. But I heard a number of website conversion experts talk about it and it clicked in my mind – this is my goal, not my leads’ goal.

If I need to be in their shoes for a moment, I’ll realize that they may have many different objectives while visiting the website. They may want to explore the solution, see a demo, understand the technology, compare to competitors, follow the company, read the blog, and follow the brand.

My job as a website builder is to think about all these possible desires of my visitors and build relevant content and CTAs (from soft to hard) that allow people to achieve their goals.