Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig
Speaker 2 00:00:20 Greg singer line. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Speaker 3 00:00:24 It's my absolute pleasure. And there's only, you know, you don't get to use that joke all that often. So no, it doesn't have to use it. No, we need to dig in when, when we meet other Craig's. So,
Speaker 2 00:00:34 So, so we were talking a little bit before we started recording, um, this, this kind of conversation came out of, uh, what I think is maybe like the most high leverage and, and kind of like constantly evolving thing for us at cast us, which is like, the product process is, is what I like to call it. And we, we talk about it a lot internally because it touches every part of the company, you know, like actual product. Like I usually like product is usually like design for us and UX engineering support marketing, right? Like the product processes is almost everyone in sales. Now for us, we have a sales team, uh, is really like everyone in the company. And I spend a lot of time thinking about this as like a, a non-technical person, because I can't write any of the code, but you came from the technical side now kind of living on the marketing side. So I guess let's, let's take a half step back. Can you share with folks kind of like who you are, where you come from and what you're up to these days and then we can up into the,
Speaker 3 00:01:30 The meat of it. Yeah, no, I I'm, I, I, this is one of my favorite subjects around product management and product strategy and kind of the intersection of product and everything else, because it really does become kind of the center of the universe to some degree within startups. Yeah. So really briefly, I, I am a longtime entrepreneur. I've founded a bunch of companies have been pretty early at, at, at startups, actually started my career though as a software engineer. And so for about, I guess, four or five years earlier in my career, I was building code mostly in kind of server side JavaScript, um, and some of the old archaic platforms that we don't really use that much anymore. Um, this was back in the early two thousands and I kind of realized relatively quickly, ITTO my peers are excelling. Um, they're much more technical than I am.
Speaker 3 00:02:14 They're they're getting the more challenging concepts faster than I am. I still love kind of being in the, in the ecosystem of building things. But what I learned pretty quickly was that I need to kind of move into more of a model where I'm not going to be the critical path for like shipping features. So I kinda moved into, I guess, what we call product strategy nowadays. But back then we were just, we just called it like, like strategy, I guess there wasn't a lot of nomenclature even in the product space, but it was basically just a version of product management. And through that experience, I was working at a couple different agencies I had, uh, built or contributed to building, you know, really a couple of hundred different websites applications, which then led me to the exploration around. Okay, well, how do you effectively build products that people love?
Speaker 3 00:03:06 How do you build products that you can grow? And how do you get feedback from real customers early enough, so that you understand kind of the importance of what you're building in a very specific order to meet the demands of the customer. And then that was the next big shift, at least in my careers, when I realized that the building of product was starting to get normalized a little bit, but the actual distribution is really now where a lot of the focus had to be in specifically leveraging distribution and feedback to kind of enhance that core product build meant that you can move faster than your peers and, you know, and you could have a more successful company. At least that's kinda what I thought at the time. And so then I explored, well, what does that actually mean? And what it actually meant was happening to really get into the weeds with marketing and growth marketing core marketing, everything from content strategy and messaging to SEO and technical SEO paid acquisition eventually.
Speaker 3 00:04:00 And so my whole experience has been this kind of shift from technical almost all the way over to non-technical on the, on the marketing side to the point where I actually started my, my newest company called growth university. It was a spin out from the launch accelerator where all of the companies in the accelerator kind of want to understand how do we most effectively grow our startups. And so I don't look at it from a pure product standpoint, but I try to bring in this holistic view of growth to say, okay, well, if you kind of think about these main areas of focus, it's going to help you increase the velocity of what you're learning and you'll ultimately hopefully ship better product and get it in front of more people. But that was kind of my, I guess long-winded answer of like my it's kind of weird career path that I've had that now has me founding another startup and we're kind of moving into scale mode.
Speaker 2 00:04:50 That's cool. That's cool. I mean, I think, uh, I know quite a few folks that have come from the technical side and now live kind of in the strategic or, or marketing side of, uh, of, of the business and, and they're really kind of dangerous because they, they know both sides of the coin really well. Uh, so it's a good idea for, for making the sale, but they know it's hard to like put the coding tools away and, and just focus on marketing, but it's yeah. I mean, I agree. I think product and the ability to create product has been normalized a bit like to an extent, you know, like it's, you know, the EDB,
Speaker 3 00:05:20 I should say
Speaker 2 00:05:21 AWS and all this makes settlements Stripe and all this makes us a lot easier to get something out the door. Yeah. Um, but then it's the real details from there that are, that are so hard. And I think that's what I'd love to kind of hear some of what you've learned recently too, to say, like, because I think for me the, and like, what we've seen is that this like feedback loop that has to keep happening between customers and our team and our product team it's, it's constant. Right. Um, and how do, how do you coach other companies or how are you like implementing like this as like the best way that you
Speaker 3 00:05:57 See it done? Yeah. And I would say like, just to add on the, on the normalization of, of some of the outputs, I mean, in the olden days, it was you, you had to code pretty much everything. There was really no infrastructure. And so compare that to now where some really amazing engineering has gone into things like a Stripe or into a node JS or whatever the technology is that has just made it so that we can move so that engineers can just move so much faster and get to some degree, get out of some of those weedy details that just took forever to implement. And that's really what I, what I mentioned, which that process, I think of kind of making that more accessible has dramatically sped up the rate of, you know, at least of startups in, in engineers, being able to focus on things that are much more kind of core value add to the ecosystem and then the, with the proliferation of no code.
Speaker 3 00:06:53 It's super interesting. So maybe we'll talk that, talk about that in a little bit, but, you know, I think those feedback loops, look, I think that what I've learned through through my career has mostly come from the failure to build feedback loops back into the product. And the typical scenario there is that as a founder, as a technical or as a product founder, you've got pretty strong conviction that something that you build is going to be a game changer for your business or for the way the market sees your business, or the way you position your, your product and for the way that your customers are gonna use the product. And unfortunately for me, I actually learned that the really, really, really hard way that it's not, it's not always about the conviction that you have and what you think is going to happen is how it's going to play out.
Speaker 3 00:07:40 Oftentimes you put something out there and it just it's a total flop or a total failure or completely underwhelming. Uh, and unfortunately a couple of times, you know, I've, I've had some, uh, some very, very strong conviction as a PM and as a founder, even to effectively overbuild and kind of delay that feedback loop process and, uh, and the company has failed. Right? And so that's happened a couple of times. Uh, there's been two points in my career where I, you know, where I've, where I've gone through that pretty epic failure side and in pretty big failure. Uh, and so that's one of the reasons why I went on this journey to first understand why startups fail and then, okay, well, how do you implement that back into the product? So in terms of feedback loops, I think that there's really kind of two, there's kind of two core pathways that I look at product management through, I guess the, the lens of, and one is that, yes, there's going to be ideas that are kind of core that you've got conviction on that are just the must haves for your customer base.
Speaker 3 00:08:40 So if you're running a SAS company and you're collecting payment, you have to be able to collect payment, you have to be able to get credit cards. You need to be able to manage accounts. You need to be able to manage users. Now that's gotten a lot easier with Stripe, but stuff needs to still be built there, all that glue and infrastructure needs to be put together. And it needs to be really elegant. It needs to be delightful for your users. So, so when you're building and you've got a product, there's those core things that you really can't operate the business without, you know, I'll use another example in the travel space. If you're going to be selling, uh, you know, selling a travel service, you have to have a booking platform. Like somebody needs to build that. It needs to be great. It needs to work well.
Speaker 3 00:09:18 It needs to be comparable to the experience somebody else would have if they go to delta.com and try to book their flight. Right? So that's kind of the core, you know, those, those types of things go from idea to product backlog, to sprint backlog, to sprint, to release you get in front of the customer, you get feedback rinse and repeat. The challenge, I think, is understanding when you have a core feature that has to happen versus all the rest of the stuff. And so I think of this in two streams, there's the idea stream that's kind of based on conviction and things that you have to do. It's a core idea stream, and then this experiment stream. And that's the one that I think is super fun in terms of, um, building those feedback loops. So that experiment stream goes something like this. I've got this amazing idea.
Speaker 3 00:10:02 I need to test this idea. I'm going to try to put this idea out in front of, uh, you know, a handful of people or a, you know, a segment of my audience. And at some point after I had this idea, I've tested it in the wild with actual real customers. Then it probably comes a core feature candidate. Uh, and that's a bit of a mind trip for, for PMs to wrap their heads around that, like some of what you're building and some of that your prototype and experimenting just is never going to make the cut. But if you use that mindset kind of going in, you go from an idea to test in front of real customers to feature roadmap a candidate. That's how you kind of blend those two streams together. And I think that's how you can accelerate growth through product.
Speaker 2 00:10:47 Yeah. So I think that, so, so cast us is four and a half years old, uh, as a company and have thousands of bank customers. And so I think that that's, that's kind of squarely where we are, is like the core product is a hundred percent, you know, there. Um, and I think, you know, the user experience side of it is, is really good. And, and so like the things, the kinds of decisions we're making at this point are those kind of elective decisions, but, but really it's like, it's all strategy, right? Because at the beginning you have to have billing. If of users, you have to be able to do the thing that you offer value on. And so now it's, for us, it's like, you know, this integration versus that integration or this new feature and the has come kind of different, you know, metered billing thing versus just, you know, more, more awesome stuff for like the core, the core customers, how, and like, to abstract away our specific case to, to kind of a, like a mental framework maybe, but like, how do you think about as you are looking at, okay, the next sprint or the next quarter, or whatever of product, like, how do you go through the decision making process of like, okay, we've got all of our bases covered.
Speaker 2 00:11:49 Yeah. How are we going to like proactively go and like, play of like
Speaker 3 00:11:53 Product authentic. I love that question. And look, it's, it's this, I think part of this comes down to company culture and how comfortable you are with kind of experimentation and trying bold things and putting those things in front of users. But in general, the backstop that I would look at any, any of those ideas through would be one around which, which of the core metrics that are most important to the company is this thing that we're going to put out there going to impact, or what's our hypothesis that we've got that we can back into. And generally those have to come down to, you know, for, for SAS companies, is this a retention play? Is it a product led growth activation kind of, you know, middle funnel play where we're gonna, where we're going to convert more people. Is there a pricing play that's going to impact top line revenue is an acquisition play.
Speaker 3 00:12:43 And so the first mental model, I guess I would, I would look at is kind of, which of those buckets of metrics does this feature fall into broadly speaking. And, and I know it kind of sounds silly to like, try to quantify it that way. But I do think that when you're building product and you're building features, those features should tie back to some ability to measure the impact of, of whatever you're putting out there. Otherwise it's an arbitrary effort that you're spending time on. If you can't really measure it, you don't have to measure everything, right. I'm not proposing that you try to measure everything, but generally speaking, which category does this fall into? Which theme does it fall into? The second thing I think that one can do there is talk to your customers and truly understand. Okay. Well, through, through real one-on-one conversations, I mean, yes, you can automate some of the stuff through FullStory or Hotjar or looking at analytics.
Speaker 3 00:13:37 There's the kind of qualitative or the quantitative side of kind of the data analysis, but then there's a qualitative side of what are your customers saying? What are their pain points and what does this feature solve in terms of those core pain points to them? And so I would kind of like frame it that way, uh, which doesn't have to be a big process Laden, uh, effort. It's really just, you know, your product manager can say, okay, well, we've got this theme that we're working on over the next couple of weeks. Uh, we're going to, we're really trying to attack retention because we saw that last month, our retention rate dipped a little bit. And so here are the five leading ideas and we've vetted these three against a set of customers. And we ran some dead end points in the product to get some feedback.
Speaker 3 00:14:14 And we talked to 15 people and, and this is the data that we have. And we think this warrants a month long or two month long build. And then on the consumer company side, you know, again, looking back at your metrics is it is a core user growth. Is it some kind of retention metric? Is there some kind of viral loop that you're trying to build into the product? And so I would start there as a, as a mental model and then basically theme out what, what that feature development looks like, how much feedback and conviction you have on it, how much research you've done with your customer, um, and then get it into the wild and kind of just increase the trajectory or the scope of the, of people seeing these products. If you've got an, a volume what's fun about real, like what's fun about companies at scale is that you've got enough volume that you can actually do true experimentation, but that's a whole, that's a whole process. And you know, it, it takes some work to kind of build those frameworks and stuff. So I would say it also partly depends on like what stage the company's up.
Speaker 2 00:15:11 Sure, sure. Fair enough. Well, you mentioned a couple of different like timeframes in there when you're looking at like focusing on like acquisition or retention or, you know, to pricing and like expansion revenue, like what period of time do you typically say, okay, this is a focus we're going to do a thing. We're going to build a feature or we're going to roll out whatever an initiative for like some period of time. Like what's, what have you found kind of your sweet spot to be, uh, to where you can spend enough time for something to actually be useful and then get the data on what you did to see if it has an impact
Speaker 3 00:15:43 Personally, probably not enough time, you know, because I, you know, the, the mode that I found myself operating in, when I've, what I've kind of been running product teams is often one that's fairly chaotic in that you've maybe got multiple product streams and you've got different major pain points that each of those are having. So something might be having a retention problem. You may be having an acquisition problem somewhere else. So in an ideal world, I think you've got enough in terms of resourcing to be able to really focus on a theme for, you know, one to three months where you kind of just attack a big, deep problem. But a lot of us who are, you know, a little bit earlier stage don't, we, we simply can't spend all our time on retention because if we don't fix the top of funnel problems that we might be having, that we don't get enough customers to retain in the first place.
Speaker 3 00:16:28 And, and that becomes a compounding problem and vice versa, right? Like if we don't spend any time on the retention leading indicators, um, it's a challenge. So, so I would say you need to be able to give enough time to a theme to validate or invalidate whatever your hypothesis was. And, and, you know, that could happen in a matter of days, you may put something out there that fixes some hemorrhaging that your product is having with some kind of onboarding strategy. It's not uncommon, actually we're through growth. You, we see a lot of, um, a lot of consumer and SAS companies who have done kind of version one of onboarding, but when we look at it and we do an audit, it almost instantly we'll spot major, major, major gaps that probably only take them a few days or maybe a couple of weeks to fix messaging and sequencing and tagging all of that stuff.
Speaker 3 00:17:22 Generally, isn't a huge, huge lift, but it's, but it's often, it's often just overlooked because nobody really owns it organizationally. And so that might be a really quick set of iterations. Or you may have a retention challenge that might take you six months to figure out how to fix, because you have to look at enough cohort data. You have to take the signups by by month or by some other segmentation where you're looking at a cohort and you measure the impact downstream, but you're not really going to get results for six months or nine months or a year. Uh, so there's a whole strategy for that, that I'm happy to dig into, but it's, you know, that's kind of where my mind goes with this stuff.
Speaker 2 00:18:01 Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. We we've been fortunate to never have like a churn problem. I am very glad because I know from talking to other friends that it's just painful. Like you do a bunch of stuff and you don't know what really worked because you did six things in the last six months and one of them worked and one of them, you don't know what to unwind. The thing I think that we, and I'm probably kind of going back to this idea of maybe from a different angle is, um, this, this kind of concept of like multiple perspectives or like cooks in the kitchen is the term that one of our team members says, like, uh, you know, rightfully I think that the product is influenced by me as the founder, um, the engineering team, because they say, Hey, we, you know, we need to upgrade from level six to level seven or whatever it is.
Speaker 2 00:18:47 Like, that's a, that's a thing. And that takes a period of time. Uh, other members of our teams say, Hey, we have to go build this thing. And they they're really in the weeds of, of the industry and really know kind of where the puck is going. And then eventually like customers, right, are saying, Hey, what the hell? Like either this sucks or you need to do this thing. And like, I find myself, so that's like four different things. I find myself sometimes saying like, you know, you can't all have what you want. You know, it's like, it's like, kind of like my kids, you know, it's like, no, you can't play iPad for three hours. Like, how do you, how do you try to balance that? How do you try to say like this group as, you know, more priority over this right now. Right? And like, it's not always like that, but, but at some period of time, or at some point in time, I guess, like, you know, there has to be a higher priority. Like how do you think about that?
Speaker 3 00:19:39 That's really tough and, and that never fully goes away. Right? So that's a problem at early stage companies where usually it's the founder kind of dictating the roadmap. It happens at mid stage companies that happens at scale stage companies. I would say that the, the most dangerous scenario is the founder with like just an insane amount of conviction. Who's not really willing to look at the data. Who's kind of dictating what happens. And I've been in a couple of those situations and it's as a product manager and as an engineer, it's an incredibly tough spot to be because you may have data and you may feel that it's not going to work. That that idea is not going to be the thing that you need to be working on right now higher than everything else. That's kind of all those other fires that are burning by.
Speaker 3 00:20:23 You may just be forced to do it. And so if you're in that situation, that's a tough one. Uh, you need, you need to kind of have one of those. You may need to bring in a third party to help mediate the, those struggles. And so don't be shy if that's, if that's you, in terms of like the, the rest. I mean, yeah. Th the part of the challenge, and I think part of the fun of being a product person and probably an engineer at a smaller company where you've got a lot more autonomy is that you are going to be bombarded with ideas. The ideas are going to come from customers. They're going to come from data. They're going to come from founders. They're gonna come from conversations. You're having, they're going to come from team members. They're going to come from what your competitors are doing.
Speaker 3 00:21:01 They're kinda come from what a VC might be telling you to do. I mean, they're, they're coming from everywhere. I think each company needs to figure out what framework they're gonna use to quantify the inputs and outputs of whatever model they're working on. And so, I mean, we, you know, at a couple of companies, we use the Intercom rice framework just as a very, very simple starting point to try to quantify, okay, well, here are all the candidate ideas that we have. What do we think the, the relative reach or the impact of those ideas as a percentage of total customers that are going to benefit from it is going to be, what's the level of effort that we're gonna need to put into it. Uh, and then what do we think the output is going to be in terms of some increase or decrease in some core metric that we have.
Speaker 3 00:21:44 So again, it comes back to having that strong kind of that financial, that foundational growth model and those metrics that you can go back to, but then it just becomes a stack rank exercise where you can basically bubble up the, you know, the highest impact with the lowest effort and knock those off first I'm way oversimplifying. I mean, a lot of organizations that I've been really embedded in, you kind of start with a methodology like that, but then somebody kind of needs to, you have to develop what that playbook is. And so, um, you know, there was one, one company that where I was, where I was leading product, where we kind of took that Intercom framework and then built our own version of it, kind of this proprietary way of thinking about product prioritization. And that became the, the lens that we had to look through.
Speaker 3 00:22:26 And everybody got on board with that. And if, if we wanted to, if the CEO wanted to jump the line with some idea, there really had to be a strong reason for it to get moved to the top because we had all these other things stack ranked. And so the, the things that I would look at are our revenue impacts core metric impacts, team morale impact could be one of them, right? Like you can't just keep pressing without a little bit of breathing room, especially for top engineers. Like they, they don't want to work great product managers and, and frankly, great marketers don't want to work in a constantly on stressful like top-down environment. So you got to build that framework and it's a little bit messy. Um, but the best outcomes that I've had running the, these are when you start with, uh, something foundational, like again, I'll use that Intercom race framework or build your own and then iterate on it and just get full buy-in so that you understand, you know, in some of the models I've used will actually, part of that score, uh, will be who else in the company needs to be involved in the rollout of this product?
Speaker 3 00:23:30 How much UX, UI time, how much customer research time, how much marketing time is there going to be a paid spend budget that has said it. And so you have to figure out how to wrap your arms around all of that. So it's way bigger than the idea, and then stack rank those ideas through that objective viewpoint. Usually it's just done in a spreadsheet. I mean, that's how I've usually done it.
Speaker 2 00:23:49 Right, right. Yeah. This is really, I had not heard of this, but I think this is the kind of thing that I was maybe like subconsciously even hunting for when I, when I put the tweet out first and then you and I got connected as I have a lot of conviction about what I think is right. But I also know that maybe I only get like a quarter of a vote, you know, or a quarter of the vote. Um, and I want customers build directly influence our product and the team members to influence what we're doing. We've taken some investment, our investors don't don't get much say, or haven't had much say to this point and what our product is, is doing. Um, hopefully we're like, we're on the right path, but, but like, I really want something like this. So that, yeah. I mean, like when the slack message comes in and like, Hey, we should build a thing. I can go and say, cool, you know, go put it into the spreadsheet and we'll rank it. And we'll evaluate it at the end of this, you know, two week sprint or six week cycle or whatever we're doing. Um, yes, we have done things like this in other areas of the company to have a system and a process around a thing. So that it's not just this fricking slack message that just gets everyone's like hair on end. Um, it
Speaker 3 00:24:58 Lights everybody up.
Speaker 2 00:24:59 Yeah. Because like, and especially when it comes from me, I know. And like, I try very hard not to be like the random CEO who says, Hey, we should do this thing. And then everybody, to some extent, like drops what they're doing and says, oh shit, you know, Craig struggle.
Speaker 3 00:25:14 Even with all this, like all these different experiences that I is a very, very hard and you see something that you, you just, you just feel it, like we have to go do that thing. But the downstream impact of that really does have some, some pretty big trade-offs, but sometimes you're gonna be right too. So sometimes you have to push on that, but I think it's so, so I think where you can actually have a lot of fun as a company is if you formalize standardize that process and you have a healthy discussion, it's like the horse trading, I guess, around like around the prioritization, just because it's a linear or a stack rank flow doesn't mean that other things can't, it doesn't mean that you can have a lower impact item that doesn't get moved up. If the team is like dying to work on this thing, and it's still going to have some kind of impact, and it's gonna have a positive customer impact, even though it might be lower than some other, maybe much more in the weeds, maybe less fun task for the next three weeks or four weeks like that those are decisions you can make in those sessions.
Speaker 3 00:26:12 And I think then it gets into, well, who's involved in that decision making process, you know, do you go, do you give you a product, your head of product, just full autonomy. And it's just their decision to own completely. Obviously they need to get buy-in, but it's like you push that problem onto the head of product or whoever's running the product team, or, uh, or do you have more of like a shared distributed team-based model? And that's where I think it gets really fun when you, you need a PM, you need like a, you need a very entrepreneurial product manager. Who's willing to kind of listen to all of the different stakeholders internally and externally, and kind of objectively weigh the pros and cons of whatever big discussion you're having. But I would involve product and engineering lead, probably somebody from marketing as well as product.
Speaker 3 00:27:04 And if you've got a customer service team or a customer happiness team, who's literally talking to customers all day long. That's an amazing voice to bring in that a lot of companies kind of neglect a lot of product companies don't bring in that voice of actually from the customer, because it's not a quote unquote product facing role. Like those customer service roles generally are not product or engineering focused, but the, but the value of bringing their voice to the table is incredible. And so I think like having those folks at the table is where you get the healthiest debate and you'll be a voice at that table too. Right. Just like I am when we do this stuff, but you're not the only voice.
Speaker 2 00:27:44 Right. Very much by design. Like I know I could be the only voice and that's just not healthy because then that's right. Then, then I, well, two things, one, you, you mentioned like morale. And I think that like the team needs buy-in on this thing that we're gonna be working on for the next month or six months or whatever. Um, but also like I'm just one person and I only have one perspective and set a data. You mentioned like support. Yeah. Kim from our team, who's our customer experience manager has a lot of feedback into, and to product and where product is going. And I think it's super healthy because I have a lot of confidence that she represents our customers kind of as, as a whole. Um, and so it's, it's a great thing to, to be able to say, cool, Kim's input kind of represents what the customers need directly from what she's seeing, you know?
Speaker 2 00:28:25 Um, I love that. And then we can have, you know, different perspectives come into it as well. One, one thing I'm thinking as we, as we kind of talk through this, so we're a team of 15 people right now. And so I consider us kind of like a smallish, medium size company, um, to where like a process like this kind of makes sense, but just barely. Right. Um, a lot of people listening to this podcast are like one or two people, three people maybe. Yeah. Is this still like, obviously one person, like, you're just kind of making, making these decisions yourself, but like, do you, do you still apply a framework like this and put it into a Google sheet and everything, if you're kind of one or two people, people, or is this only really effective when, when you have like kind of multiple stakeholders? Well,
Speaker 3 00:29:11 So we're a team of six now. Um, and we're growing, we're growing pretty quickly both on the revenue and on the team size, I mean, six months ago, there were two of us working on this. And so I will say that even from the earliest iteration, whenever we're thinking about that feature set or that set of offerings, uh, we're not a core, we're not a core tech products or more of a product type service, but, but even there, like what we're looking through is what is that return on my, or what does that return on my money going to be? And I mean, founders that are one or two people, like the biggest constraint that we hear about is generally not money it's actually time. So if you think about prioritization more as an exercise of prioritizing where you spend your time, most wisely than I would a hundred percent recommend some lightweight version of this.
Speaker 3 00:30:04 So for example, what I do and my team has a phrase that they use, and I'm trying to remember what it is, but I have this massive spreadsheet that I basically run the business off of right now. And it's a derivative of the same massive spreadsheet that I've used at pretty much every other company. And, and the reason why it's in a spreadsheet is because there's little nuances that you can't get out of just using Google analytics or Mixpanel or segment or something else. There's, there's other things that need to go into the model. And so I've got a bunch of tabs, right? So it just opened in the open the hood a little bit here. It's a little chaotic, it's not perfect, but I will put any kind of core directional shift that we're thinking about or area where we're going to spend a significant amount of time or capital into the model to try to measure what the output over the next one month, three months, six months, 12 months is going to be.
Speaker 3 00:30:58 So for example, we've been testing pricing a lot and we've been testing a free free trial versus a $1 trial for a week versus there's no trial. You just come in and now we've got a bunch of data on all three of those scenarios, but the data in when we were looking at, okay, well, do we run these big shifts and spend a bunch of time updating the website and shift how we talk about it in the market. We modeled it. So at least I can say, okay, well, we're going to go spend this week kind of pivoting into this idea. And, but if it goes, well, then the return in six months in 12 months is going to be X, Y, and Z versus the effort that we need to put in right now. So yeah, I think at one, in, in what it does is it lets me kind of objectively measure what, what happens if we do that versus we don't do anything.
Speaker 3 00:31:48 And maybe we go spend a bunch more time on paid acquisition, or I get on a bunch of podcasts and spend my whole week doing that, or, you know, or I spend the week writing content or I build a new program or somebody else builds a new program. And these are all investments of time. And so you do kind of need to quantify where you're spending time, because founders are amazing at being busy. We're amazing at being busy, right. Product managers within companies. I mean, I would argue that the product manager role wasn't even really a true role at most startups until probably 2012, right. It just, it was handled by either a group. Maybe it, it just, wasn't a formal. And so you've got all these new roles that have become these specializations. I myself came through that ecosystem, right, as a product manager by both by training and, uh, and, and from a practitioner standpoint, but we want to be busy. Humans feel good, being busy. We like to have a lot on our plate. We don't like to have a lot of idle time and therefore quantifying what you're actually spending time on, I think is absolutely critical.
Speaker 2 00:33:04 Hmm. I agree. And I would kind of clarify, or maybe a little bit that like, well, I'll just say, I think about this and the lens of we've started using OKR in the company. Um, this quarter we did rocks before from the EOS and it's kind of, you know, potato Patato. And I think that when you start pairing the concept of rocks or okay, <inaudible> with product decisions like this, what it does, I think, and like, we're already seeing it. We're two weeks in, but like, we've been talking about it for a few weeks before we really rolled it out at the, at the beginning of October, is it makes all of these decisions really easy. And it makes our ability to focus my time and everyone else's time on a productive thing, much more likely. And I think that's where I'll be critical of us.
Speaker 2 00:33:53 We've fallen down in the past is we've done a bunch of stuff like shuts on a blog post and YouTube videos and podcast episodes and product features and stuff like that. But a lot of it really is just been probably coming from me saying we should do this thing. And so we would do this thing, but there's not been a ton of like, you're talking to like modeling this out. Okay. The goalpost for this quarter is private podcasting for us. Right. Okay. Everything should be moving towards private podcasting. So product marketing, sales, support engineering, everything should be moving towards this. So any decisions we're making and product is, is obviously a huge one, but it is just one. And so just kind of, all of this kind of comes together nicely in my, in my mind, uh, when you put it in the lens of a cohesive company goal, whatever you call it, that
Speaker 3 00:34:40 I totally agree. And I think, I mean, we just implemented like our first, you know, kind of our micro version of OKR hours two weeks ago as well. And we're still kind of in the process of building them out. But what it's forcing us to do is think through categorically within those core metric areas of focus. Okay, well, what are the things that, that we want to start attacking? Because again, when it's one or two people, you just, you just make decisions and you do stuff because you don't is just your time. And yes, like I just went on this rant about PR highly, you know, protect, protect your time and prioritize your time. But when most of us start these things, we don't have enough of a signal yet to really, truly understand even how to prioritize. So we are just doing a bunch of different things, but, but once you add that third person or that fourth person, or that fifth person, or 6%, especially if these early stage hires are not, if they haven't built businesses, if they're not entrepreneurs, like they can't operate successfully in that completely arbitrary, chaotic environment.
Speaker 3 00:35:43 And you're not doing them a service by, by being kind of disorganized there too. So yeah, it at about, yeah. At about five people, we started to think about, we started to realize that we have some challenges internally because we're very, all of us early on here are very entrepreneurial. So we can work in a fairly chaotic environment where things are shifting every day. But we also realize now to kind of accelerate growth, we do need these big themes. And so, yeah, we've picked four or five key themes to work on, which also back into our main metrics and goals that we have, which are the things that keep the business solvent, you know, like those OTRs have to tie back to something real, uh, in, in once you set that up, it's like, okay, well now everybody is kind of working within these themes. Now there might be a lot of autonomy within those themes. You still need to do the trade-offs and the prioritization, but that's an amazing step that you guys have gotten that done. Uh, and it's a big feat to pull off.
Speaker 2 00:36:41 Yeah. I mean, it's definitely like a lot of things, it's a work in progress, but, but even just putting it into a Google sheet and talking about it every week in our Monday meeting has been, has been great. Like it gives a lot of Liberty to people to say, no, I'm not going to do that. No, I don't think that's a good idea. Yes. I think that's a great idea. Let's, let's do that. That's perfectly aligned with what we're doing. So we don't have, uh, really, uh, a lot of layers of OKR. We don't have a lot of layers it's we have one kind of company level OKR, and a lot of the company really contributes to that. But, but everybody certainly knows what it is. I think we might get more detailed with it down to like the division and the individual level later on. Um, but didn't want to be overwhelming at first.
Speaker 3 00:37:21 It's awesome that you built that, that framework out. Yeah. I had actually not used OTRs until, um, I did a stint at upside business travel, uh, which was, we were probably at about 120 people and the OKR system really scaled up nicely to a team size, uh, of that bag. And then the next company that was at, uh, it was called sandbox much, much smaller, and it held up there too. So that's, yeah, it's a great framework. I mean, it doesn't have to be OKR necessarily, but it can be something that's I think you said rocks. I actually haven't actually come across that. So I'll go look that up after, but it doesn't really matter what the exact framework is. It's just have your goals clearly stated and make sure that everybody understands what those goals are. And, uh, and I always say that it's like, you know, if you ask me what is my company goal? It's like 20% month over month growth. Okay. Well that doesn't really give people something to work with. Right. And again, that works when it's like myself and my co-founder like my earliest of early team members, but like, it just that doesn't scale. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:38:24 Yeah. And I'll, I'll just say, like to the last point of this, uh, the more specialized we get in hiring people, the less that works. Um, so I think the earliest, you know, our first kind of employee, our first developer, very entrepreneurial, you could say, good, go build this thing please. And they would go build it. You know, it's a front end developer, a back end person or assist admin or a paid acquisition person. You can't just say 20% month over month growth.
Speaker 3 00:38:49 No, you really do have to break it down. Yeah. It's a fun evolution as that happens in plays out.
Speaker 2 00:38:54 Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty interesting. Could you share a bit about what growth you is all about and kind of what y'all are up?
Speaker 3 00:39:01 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, growth university is, um, we like to say it's where founders come to help build their S their playbook for growth. And so we have, um, live cohort programs on demand programs, and we do some one-on-one kind of coaching of startups to help them understand how to grow their startups faster or more effectively or more holistically. And there's generally kind of like five themes that we think about when, when we're helping startups. Uh, one is around, uh, some of the stuff we've been talking about today, goal setting, understanding what your growth model is, understanding how your growth and financial models kind of play together and, and really forming that foundation. The second area of focus is around customer acquisition. We go super deep into acquisition. We've got, uh, multiple, um, four to six module, long form content training programs that are available on demand that we offer Facebook advertising, Google advertising.
Speaker 3 00:39:54 We've got a podcasting for startups, uh, program. I mean, all sorts of stuff there that's geared towards helping practitioners get better at their jobs in the channels they're working in. We do a lot around activation and what I call driving intent. So kind of onboarding sequencing, drip campaigns triggers. We talk a lot about retention. Uh, how do you increase retention? How do you improve it? Uh, what are the tactics to do that? How do you look at LTV and cohorts and measure product market fit and look at core and proxy metrics to understand kind of what things actually matter in terms of that prioritization that we went back to earlier and then find the experimentation on how do you increase that the velocity of those feedback loops. And so I had started growth university as a spin-out from the launch accelerator. I'd taken two companies through the launch accelerator and, and I had then both been an operator, uh, as well as an advisor, kind of a small time investor, and then, um, a mentor to a couple of hundred startups and for the last four or five years.
Speaker 3 00:40:57 And I started here the same, those same five themes in almost every conversation. Like one of those five things was extraordinarily challenging for the founder that I was talking to. And it kind of dawned on me that, like, I think that there's a way to start to quantify and, and structure a set of programs and learnings that founders can take, uh, and, and just kind of step up their game. Uh, and so we're, we're kind of dog food in that process as we grow our own company, uh, we actually just per, we just acquired a company on micro acquire and we're going to kind of grow that in public. So this is part of our theme is that we're trying to share some of that knowledge of like, what happens behind the scenes when you're building and growing a company, what, like, what are the good things and bad things that are happening?
Speaker 3 00:41:39 What are the challenges, what are the wins? Um, but I started to grow with you really, to solve, to try to set out, to solve the problem of company failure or startup failure, where, I mean, the vast majority of startups fail within their first five years. And it's often because they don't get enough feedback from the market from real customers that are, that are spending money with them and they get lost along the way, either overbuilding or over-hiring or losing the signal, or just not understanding what's actually important in that, that became kind of my life mission to, to, to figure out how to, how to solve that at scale. So here we are. Awesome stuff,
Speaker 2 00:42:14 Awesome stuff. So we'll link up growth, university.io in the show notes. Craig, thanks so much for hopping on and chatting. This is really awesome to hear. I'm sure everyone will get a ton out of it. So
Speaker 3 00:42:25 Thank you so much, Craig. I super appreciate your time today. Thank you. Awesome.
Speaker 1 00:42:29 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more
