Tines’s Eoin Hinchy on rejecting the playbooks

Key takeaways

Founders should stay dogmatic about their vision while being open to adapting their strategies based on customer feedback.
Flexibility in product development can lead to success, especially when initial ideas need to be challenged.
The journey of startup founders often includes missteps; learning from them is essential.
AI can significantly enhance workflow automation, provided it is implemented thoughtfully with data security in mind.
Company culture and leadership play a vital role in maintaining performance and employee satisfaction during growth phases.
Each success and milestone should ultimately serve the greater goal of improving customer experience and product utility.

Summary

Founding Tines: A Vision Realized

Eoin Hinchy, co-founder of Tines, discusses the founding of the automation platform after years of frustration in the security field at companies like DocuSign, Deloitte, and eBay. Recognizing the significant time waste on repetitive tasks, Eoin and his co-founder Thomas Kinsella set out to create a solution that would alleviate these pains for security and IT teams. Launched from a humble office in Dublin, Tines now serves over 400 customers and processes more than one billion automated actions weekly.

Lessons Learned: Grit and Flexibility

Eoin emphasizes the importance of being dogmatic about the vision while remaining flexible in execution. He shares the many adaptations Tines made based on customer feedback, specifically regarding their product offerings. Eoin admits that early assumptions about product functionality and customer needs were sometimes incorrect, but flexibility allowed Tines to evolve and better meet its customers' needs.

Navigating Early Growth and Challenges

Reflecting on Tines' early days, Eoin shares valuable lessons about hiring, customer engagement, and the challenges of building a startup without prior experience. He recounts how the initial customers were primarily from his own network and how their first major success came from outperforming established competitors in an automated task evaluation. Eoin also highlights the mistakes made from following prescriptive playbooks and the importance of understanding the company's core strengths.

The Role of AI in Automation

Eoin discusses Tines' cautious approach to incorporating AI into their product. Initially skeptical of AI’s claims, Tines dedicated time to thoughtful experimentation, ultimately deciding to focus on integrating AI in a way that secured customer data while enhancing workflow capabilities. By building a strong foundation for data protection, Tines has leveraged AI to improve workflow automation and expand its value propositions.

Company Culture and Leadership

In the role of CEO, Eoin reflects on the importance of maintaining a healthy company culture amid rapid growth. He asserts that recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader is critical, as is fostering an environment where team members feel empowered. He stresses the importance of humility, accountability, and customer-centricity as guiding principles for Tines' culture.

Future Aspirations and Vision

Looking ahead, Eoin expresses excitement about realizing Tines’ long-term vision of being an enterprise-wide automation platform. With a clear direction, he believes they are on the cusp of major milestones that will further solidify their role in the automation space. Eoin is focused on continuing to enhance product offerings and ensure customer success.

Show notes

Before Eoin Hinchy founded automation platform Tines, he spent more than a decade on security teams at DocuSign, Deloitte, and eBay, where he saw firsthand the time eaten away by important but repetitive–and not-exactly-thrilling—tasks. He and Tines co-founder Thomas Kinsella decided to do something about it, launching Tines from a cramped office in Dublin. Now, Tines saves their 400+ global customers a mind-boggling amount of time, performing more than one billion automated actions each week.

In this episode of Spotlight On, Eoin joins Accel’s Luca Bocchio to discuss how Tines got here, including: why you can argue like cats and dogs and still be founder “soulmates,” why founders don’t (necessarily) need to move to the Bay Area anymore, and what he learned from throwing out parts of the startup playbook—and trusting his instincts instead.