Accelerating Growth: Grow Faster Without Working Yourself to Death – Hiten Shah – MicroConf 2015

0:00[Applause] you guys ready to eat aren't you drink something cool you can hear me I'm assuming I gotta check something I got 80 I have 85 slides and you can get them all here you can either follow along on your laptop I'd rather you pay attention to me because I'm gonna say stuff that's not on the slide kind of related to the slides but I do want to make sure all of you download them because certain parts of it I might go through kind of fast and they're actually very prescriptive so there are things that you can go do with your customers or something like that

0:39but before I get into that I've booked that book ended it with things that are not really related to the topic but they're very related to all of you so I can't name how many people in this room have asked me about this this being I I'm one of the few people probably on the planet maybe I like to believe I'm special but that raised money and has a self-funded business or two all at the same time so you would think that I would have information about this many of you have heard about my pet peeve of not calling it a lifestyle business or bootstrapping and calling it self funding so I'm gonna

1:18talk about this first so first of all and hopefully so no one asked me again at least in this audience about this so please pay attention so when you when you self fund you spend them uh sorry I'll hold up oh yeah when you raise money you spend the money ahead of you could spend the money ahead of your revenue so people are giving you money you get to spend it and that's the simple explanation of cell sort of raising money that I have and that's all I got like I think a lot of people want to talk about how it's evil or they're these you know invest for vultures etc

1:53but it's actually not like that it's like they just want a return from their investment and you get to use their money ahead of actually having the money from your customers it's very straightforward actually and then when you self fund which is what most of you in the room if not all of you are like which is sort of I think the sort of most genuine way you could probably business cuz you're all here to make money but I'll get a little bit more into that later you're actually just making money as you make it from your customers I know some of you might have services businesses I did before I

2:24braided my software but it was still making money from customers so I could fund software either for those customers or somebody else so just wanted to clear that up so people don't ask me about it people do ask me what do I prefer these sentences these two sentences kind of explain it all for me in the sense that I don't actually prefer either I think there's a time and place for both and yeah I would say myself my my funded experience from a scale of like awesome to really shitty it was probably like a five or six so it wasn't that shitty but it wasn't that awesome

2:58it was like an average experience my my funded company I'm not running it anymore it's still running we have a CEO and whatnot and honestly I'm at peace with it I'm happy but it's because of my self-funded company why I'm happy about that so and I've got some graphs later you guys know valve they make some games and stuff anybody know about okay do you know there did you guys know it's a self-funded company okay great so they have this handbook and I was going through it the other day for a bunch of reasons and it's a valve handbook there's a link at the bottom you guys

3:31hopefully have my slides and the thing they said is Wow valve is self-funded this was like this is called a valve facts that matter we haven't ever brought in outside financing since our earliest days this has been incredibly important in providing freedom to shape the company and its business practices I think that's why I'm excited about self-funding you you actually do get to shape it in a in a little bit of a different way because you don't have this any kind of pressure of somebody wanting to get a return from the business besides you wanting to get a return quit your job make sure you never

4:02have to work for anyone else again etc so I thought this was just a really good way I really like that handbook too because they have the self-funded perspective and it's very rare to see this kind of content especially at a very large company so in the in in the style of Rob I wanted to include the what's in it for all of you sort of slide so what I'm gonna go through and it's really interesting I so I've spoken here five years spoken on lots of different sort of topics here and with all of you in person and one of the things that I I'm excited

4:31about this year is we're talking about product we're talking about product market fit I hadn't really heard the term here even last year if I'm not mistaken and we've heard it a couple times so I thought a great way the end of the day would be to talk a lot about that and then sort of how I think about that how I've done it but also how you can do it too and and so I heard a few things earlier today and yesterday about some people saying we're talking a lot about sass and this is obviously this is actually crazy egg sass slow rat's ass what is a long slow

5:03sass ramp of death that's I guess that's what it is and this is the sign ups over time and it's obviously incomplete and I have slide I have the completeness later so the big thing I wanted to say is whose sass in here already working on something sass right now okay cool so like 30 40 percent who's not working on a sass yet but is going to I knows that for sure okay few more so but that's about 50 percent so all the rest of you this is relevant to you too and if you have questions about how to apply it to your business come see me or ask a question later I

5:38don't want to exclude all of you because that it's important to be contextual at least in my opinion and make sure half the audience also gets value so please ask questions about that all this is applicable to non sass to I wanted to make I want to get that out of the way but either way it is self unto business I actually I get them I have the most fun working on a self funded business because I've learned to learn love constraints and one of the things that I think you can do in a self-funded businesses you have this massive constraint of needing money having probably limited time to work on

6:08whatever you're working on your SAS product or whatever you're doing so you really have to focus you probably shouldn't get me started on focus I'd usually show you my formula I have a little formula about it but I'm not going to show you the formula I took it out today because I don't want to get into it but focus is super important I think that's been a trend and most of the talk today has started with Patrick giving telling you what he would do what he would do today that he didn't do himself about focusing in on like a single product single thing etc single market even or customer segments so I

6:41stress is enough and in the beginning this was a study somebody did a lot of them were venture funded but is still relevant of they did like they did a study of like hundred startups and they came up with the top reason that startups fail which is no market need and it's like by like 40-something percent so when they survey these people they came up with all these things I'm gonna rattle off some of them because they're really interesting and very relevant to us too so it's no market need ran out of cash not the right team got out competed pricing cost issues poor product need lack of business model

7:14I don't know why poor marketing ignoring customers that's a good one product mistimed okay so they thought their timing was wrong okay so lost focus disharmony on team slash investors we don't have that investor problem pivot gone bad lack passion bad location no financing investor interest again we don't have that problem legal challenges didn't use network advisors burnout failure to pivot so if you think about most of those and my belief and the way I think about the world is product actually solves a lot of those problems not some of the things that people said for example product mistimed it's probably something where you should change your product poor marketing it's

7:53probably poor product poor product is poor product pricing cost issues yeah well that's some probably something with your product or your pricing and a bunch of these are actually related to product so I think no market need is obviously related to product cuz you built a product nobody cared for so the whole thesis here because this is really about accelerating your growth and making sure you can grow with without working yourself to death and also not having to spend like 120 hours a week or whatever working on your business but many of us I'm sure do you just because we like it so it's like you can't actually grow

8:25your business unless you have product market fit so you're probably wondering about now like what is product market fit so who actually knows what it is I'm not gonna call you how to ask you define it I got all that but like who knows what it is okay and and or do you think you know what it is yeah okay that's honest yeah I barely know what it is to but I'm gonna do my best to explain what I know so this actually came from Marc Andreessen he's a VC don't hate him he's great I built Netscape if you guys don't know and he works at a firm called a 16z

8:54Driessen Horwitz and he basically said it fit product magnif it means being in a good market with the product that can satisfy the market and that's the he came up with the term and that's what he defined it out so you need to be in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market again it's back to product so how do you know if you're in a good market or how do you know if you have product market fit the strongest single I've found in my businesses and just with all the people that I've talked to and things I can see out there is like basically your customers and

9:26they tend to have the answer on a lot of things and it's hard for us to like think about that all the time but like they're a great signal so one of them is strong word of mouth so this is a bunch of tweets from back in the day from crate and some recent ones from crazy again KISSmetrics about people just saying awesome things so obviously that made me feel good but wasn't necessarily beyond that it was just like public tweets we had so I heart crazy egg crazy egg is a bomb seriously guys crazy egg is an amazing tool I must have us I must

9:55have a must have simple solution to increase conversion love crazy egg I'm really loving the people reporting crazy egg all kinds of stuff oh this was a one of my favorites overhearing some developers at Starbucks evangelizing crazy egg just as I'm researching them way to go guys and I know many of you might think oh Heaton you have a blog and you have you know like your heat and char or whatever and you know you're good at marketing or whatever but like this was when we were in a closed beta type thing or early access is what I prefer and people were just using the product so it wasn't when we were doing

10:30a lot of marketing it wasn't because of us it was purely because of the product very early on and another one here was this was actually bout kiss metrics and kiss insights another product we built which is it's someone saying it's amazing but anyways I'm not showing you cuz it's awesome but that's an indicator right so sometimes you'll get these things in your email box from support sometimes people randomly tell you that when you walk up to them but this is like the strongest sign because we're two mouth from a even growth standpoint that's most people's number one channel once they hit some level of scale it's

11:01basically direct visitors coming and you don't know why they're coming to your site and that's basically weird about another one I like to think about is customer addiction so this person basically was up at 2:00 a.m. when they realized a problem and they started creating funnels and KISSmetrics and this was in 2011 so I went back and tried to figure all this out because I was just really curious about product market fit crazy egg love what you guys created I'm addicted to this service it's exactly what I needed for my new online business great awesome this is one of my favorites better than alternative so when

11:33customers are actually saying that and by the way all these tweets are completely unsolicited so we don't make you tweet we don't tell you anything they're just doing it because they want to with these new features KISSmetrics is adding I'm seriously considering if I still need Google Analytics this one is Google ounce is great but KISSmetrics may have literally changed our business so now I'm gonna actually not just talk about sort of you know all that stuff about the signal because I think the signal is actually very clear it's when customers are raving about it raving lunatics is what you want I probably do a whole talk on how to get

12:06raving lunatics but that is what this talks about so here this one's very interesting for me and I think Samuel is gonna laugh but basically this person said trying out KISSmetrics and crazy egg crazy egg was very easy to set up still working on KISSmetrics so that was a massive fail the onboarding there yeah we made mistakes but anyways and then crazy eggs been very simple and part of the reason is product part of the reason is where we focus our time in that business so this is my thesis on product market fit and what you need to do this is my hack but it's literally find their

12:42critical problems find the most important problems and just solve them like that's it and I know it sounds really basic but that's all we did at KISSmetrics at crazy egg to come to this sort of conclusion so a lot of you you know I don't think I can use as colored language as steli cuz he just totally just crushed it on that but for me and he did it in the right way it wasn't like dave McClure style that was dropping the F bombs for no reason but like I I have this habit where like I'll look at a product I'll even look at the thing anything and I'll just be like why

13:15does this suck and and in that's all I do and and it you might have heard me if I'm reviewing a product with years thing it's like you can make this like 10 times better like why does it suck and so the pattern I found and even my own work to reach product market fit was simply figuring this out so I would find an important part of an existing product and really figure out why it sucked part of it is my own intuition but then that informed hypotheses to sort of go deeper in so I'm gonna give you some example so then obviously you have to make it 10x

13:44better if you don't make it 10x better it's not it's not really going to get product market fit people are not going to tweet about it you're not gonna get the word-of-mouth you need and you're not gonna be able to figure it out so with crazy egg and this is the pattern I've noticed about a couple of our products that's why I wanted to kind of bring it up like this but we try to figure out what's wrong with google analytics site overlay it's does anyone ever use a Google arm look site overlay or attempted to okay some of you have awesome great so this is actually a new

14:10their new version of it I had to install some Chrome extension and put it up I did it on the quick sprout homepage and and there's a number of problems we had with it and back in the day it was even a little bit more worse than it is right now because they wouldn't even tell you that these problems existed in their interface but simply put we looked at the product we looked at the site overlay and we knew that people really cared about seeing where people clicked that's also what we learned from our customers basically that's what they said about the site overlay and I'll get

14:39into that a little bit deeper on how we learned that but basically what would happen is this is literally clicks all those orange boxes that you can probably barely see like at the top and all that are showing me the clicks but the main area is that middle area and I don't see any clicks in it and this is like from like three days ago their site overlay so they still haven't fixed it right so like it's basically useless to you and at the time when we build crazy things like anyone remember Ajax some of your developers right yeah Ajax was the this was like 2005 2006 and we

15:07realized that we could do a bunch of tracking there's actually a funny story about that when we were tracking every click at one point and this was during an early access beta period we basically redirected every click from every site that was running us to our home page we got a lot of sign up settings so that was yeah that was bad but anyways that was one like the stuff was a little bit harder than it is today and so what we learned is we needed to track every click they also had this other stupid problem which basically if you have two links on the page they still have this problem and

15:39both of them go to your about page one has ten clicks another has five they show both as fifteen now they have a disclaimer when you hover over it oh it says 15 in both because that's the total claims but how is that useful to you when you're trying to assess this page and make it better and not to mention they don't track the clicks on the button they don't track the clicks on the forum field they don't track the clicks on the on the little like compare up to three of your competition or whatever so super annoying I just put this TechCrunch thing in there to just

16:07explain that like when we release this product even the press was saying the tagline we want that wanted them to say because it was just right and it made perfect sense to them so to see what your visitors are doing with crazy act we figured that out that's like our bread and butter and by the way this is a heat map of the same page or another version of it but similar page you could see where the hot spots are it's very obvious I mean this is why people love the product and you can see where all the cold spots are and you know all that

16:33kind of stuff so we're actually very accurate so we figured out that the problems that site overlay had were very specific and we literally designed a product to solve them and back then it was actually technically somewhat challenging to do that and this is the reason this business works the only reason there's there's there's a couple other differentiators like site like your website changes all the time obviously like you'd make changes and stuff and so we didn't want an always-on analytics tool we built it so you could start a test we call them tests back then but let's say start a snapshot and it turns off after a certain period of

17:04time and we're done so there's some things about the business that you know make it so that we have some retention and churn issues because of that that was a key proposition that even people that copied us didn't figure out the whole idea is you have to turn this on and off because by the time if you have it always running whatever you're looking at might be completely irrelevant in terms of the data that you're looking at so it's more meant to be an improvement tool to help you improve things by analyzing them like in pockets of time and number of clicks and stuff like that this because of the

17:32proposition actually this is a the WordPress the old-school wordpress.com homepage from back in the day or it might be org I don't remember I think was calm actually and they were one of our first customers within the first 30 to 60 days they were in the early access and stuff like that but because it was such a strong of product market fit because of the analysis we did we were able to get a ton of customers at the time all over the place and we kept going I still haven't seen anyone copy this feature of ours but it's a track every click with our confetti so this is a report we call

18:03it confetti made up a kind of funny name I'd probably name it something different now although I think it kind of makes sense and those dots on the screen colored I'm sure some of you have used it and we got some love for that people people mention it in the tweets somebody else mentioned it so it's got it we really just doubled down on what we knew see where people click don't make a compliment complicate it make it easy to use and we even did that with a confetti feature so this is not just about like oh you can do this one to figure out what sucks and then make a product

18:31against that we have to keep kind of going deeper and deeper in and we did do that so KISSmetrics so we kind of did something similar so I want to talk about that and this is I know it's a funded company but I'm gonna tell you that it's like we had a very small team at the time was three or four people very similar to many our teams and we did a lot of really get out stuff so the first version in KISSmetrics was built in a month and this is the version that's running right now we had a bunch of iterations before that but this was

18:54all new code so it was built in a month from scratch so drew lines of code to release we use ec2 s3 Ruby and a sequel light and that was a very conscious decision it was horribly slow and ugly code it had bugs and it took seven servers for just 30 customers that's where the funding kind of helped a little bit but that's kind of how it worked for us and it was very good oh and I think a lot of people probably wouldn't do any of this but there was a very specific reason we did it by then we had learned that we need to do it

19:24fast and we need to get it right and we need to get it in customers hands fast so in the same form of basically as crazy egg we asked a single question basically what's wrong with Google Analytics funnels one of the things here was like we had an opinion about both of these things and I know this looks like a pattern it was kind of accidental in some ways but our opinion was that there's important pieces of analytics and we should literally they should just be the product that's a great way to start now if you ever read like innovators dilemma or of any of those

19:54kind of books around like innovation and stuff like that you'll learn that this could there's this concept of basically bundling and unbundling basically markets start out with like say point solutions and then they keep adding features and they become a bundle of a bunch of features and then you can unbundle them so we were basically just unbundling analytics picking off the important stuff and doing it better and part of the reason is Google Analytics made the market everyone uses Google Analytics it's a free tool by then it was very popular already so we just wanted to we just figured we could go do that and build a business out of that so

20:26this is how funnels looked in Google Analytics they were top to bottom and they had some stuff going on they're kind of complicated they had a whole bunch of other issues like has anyone ever tried to build a funnel in Google Analytics yeah has anyone successfully done it on the first try all right awesome so that was the problem right so there's this bunch of issues like you have to back then you had to track the date you have to go go to their page build the kind of funnel then I think you had to track the data at that time they didn't even have an event so it's

20:56only on pages and then you had to wait 24 hours to see if that data was correct then you had to like audit the tracking and all that kind of stuff to make sure it was correct and then you might still have gotten it wrong and if you're in a little bit of a larger company or you're not a developer you're basically having to communicate with them they get frustrated you get frustrated maybe a week later you have something that you think you can use but you might still not trust it because of all that effort you went through so that's a big problem they wouldn't let

21:21you just track the data and do what KISSmetrics does which is build everything on the fly it solves a big innovation even in analytics that like we discovered and somebody improve their conversion and a step in their funnel from 20% to 95% which I still debate whether that's accurate but like sounds cool right 20% to almost 100% cool and they said they did it because of our funnels so this is what an early version of the product looked like it was just one report one screen there's all kinds of issues with it from a usability standpoint this was the ghetto fast type version in fact we had this little

21:53constraint that's kind of weird because of how Bill how fast we built it we can only show you the last 10,000 people through your funnel and we couldn't do anything else and that was a very deliberate constraint cuz we weren't trying to validate whether we could do years of data or you know let you slice and dice or anything we just wanted to basically solve the core problem and the core problems we just saw here with Google Analytics around tracking the data and all that kind of stuff so the simple first problem we solved was we wanted to make the data more accurate cuz Google our wentz data is not person

22:21based so we created a person based API this is the same API that still exists prior to as far as our knowledge prior to us doing this it didn't exist people weren't able to pass data into an analytic system based on a person they only were able to do that in their own back-end databases or with lots of work with Omniture somebody tweeted about it so apparently you know all of you know how hard api's are but someone apparently liked ours we had this really other cool thing that we invented has anyone seen this in KISSmetrics is very old yeah okay Patrick alright ah been awesome so this thing was like you know

22:56dig anyone remember dig remember like dig spy dig stack any of that cool stuff the visualization so we got super inspired by that and said what if you had that for your website and we didn't build it just for that reason but we built it because our engineer at the time this was oo9 2009 and in 2009 he was very good in flash and he was just really fast in it so we built this in flash which had its own problems and is basically every time you put event calls you could make you see this live stream and at that time I think there's already chart beat and stuff but no one was

23:26making we built this with the purpose of debugging because of that problem with creating funnels and having to debug the data so we totally build this thing and it was really cool some people put up on the big screen and is all colored and stuff like that but that was another part of like learning where the frustration was and having a solid solution for it and then this is another cool one so you know many of you can say like and I've done this mistake too where it's like okay you did that you built a product then what like how do you improve it etc so this is one of my

23:54favorite examples we changed the live report someone was not happy with it I gave the team feedback they came back and said and you know I'm the whole Sarah had her customer service and all that stuff they were super stoked because like I didn't even tell him we fixed it and he had figured out we fixed it and it was it took about seven days which is kind of crazy but like whatever I guess he was happy and he basically said I've never seen a company as responsive to his customers as KISSmetrics that put a smile on my face but um and at the bottom it's just someone saying how

24:23awesome the KISSmetrics live was for exactly what we wanted which was remains the best debugging tool from any third-party service so this is nailing it this was the ghetto version that we that we made that was really shitty you couldn't see enough events and stuff like that then with the final version ended up being you know ten times better and I know I don't usually share it like stats so I'm gonna share some stats so I took this from a board deck hopefully the investors aren't pissed but it's from December 22nd 2009 and it was about a month later so we had a whole bunch of beta requests whole

24:55buncha invitations sent a bunch of accounts created and lots of data and in and bid sketches on here because he was using our product at the time Thank You Ruben I don't know if you're in the room and this was back in o 9 so he's been a customer a long time so he's old-school like that on for all of us we had a bunch of other companies using it but the reason I wanted to share this is like this wouldn't happen if we didn't nail it and and people didn't like love it and care about using it we had pretty good retention at the time and we had

25:23more volume than we knew what to do with in fact the the lead engineer it was only one engineer one core engineer for the back end at the time he had to go spend three months because of all the volume we had to just make everything work right after that ghetto period of sort of the the ghetto build that we did this is another thing that like it's sort of it's taken me some time to appreciate it but like I think I think it's really interesting to share so when you get it right basically eventually it becomes the norm a more aggressive way to say that is everyone copies

25:54you so this is all funnels where this is another funnel product this is another funnel product this is our product and then this is everything after it oh and Google copied it too this is this is like recently for some crap they did but but we came up with that pattern and it just over and over and over so when you get it right it gets copied so just wanted to make that point that you know you're getting it right if people are copying you it's kind of the Apple effect right everyone wants a fingerprint scanner on their phone now because Apple did it and Samsung has to

26:29spent as had to spend a lot of money to do it because Apple actually locked them out of the whole production of being able to do that because of the little technology there and stuff was very interesting but anyways I've seen this repeatedly I mean today you could probably do the same with heat maps and say that there's like 50 products with the heat maps um so anyways it becomes a norm it's it's sort of frustrating but whatever you just got to keep going and think about what's next so how to analyze product market fit so we did a lot of this you can do a

26:57lot of this if you have a product I'm gonna go through it there's these five different ways so product market fit survey Net Promoter Score retention cordon alysus engagement and churn so I wanted to focus on the first one because I have a very strong competitive advantage on the first one to talk about while the other four I could probably link you to Bob close any time and give you lots of details some of the people in this room have written about the other four but this one I haven't really seen written about so I want to talk about that and it's bringing back something very old this is StuH the

27:24product market fit survey is a survey created by Shaun Ellis and I know how many of you have heard of it okay cool so so not enough all right great so I'm gonna talk about new stuff great and this is actually why I had you guys download the deck because this is an important topic and it's been very powerful for me I learned it from Sean Ellis he's he was a marketer at logged me in and and he was a adviser to Dropbox and a bunch of stuff he's badass and he taught me everything I know about this kind of surveying and he basically said I asked existing users if a profit

27:54product how they would feel if they could no longer use a product it's a really powerful question it looks like this in the survey i/o tool its surveyed i/o we helped build it with him it was many years ago but if you're gonna do this go use Survey Monkey I've even got like a template if you guys are so lazy where you don't want to copy these questions over and I don't mean that in a bad way I'm lazy too I I would I would constantly use that template so it's cool but uh let me know if you really wanted and you have a Survey Monkey account you might need a

28:22pro one sadly I'm thinking about making a type form version or or something like that but the reason you want to do that is you want to be able to analyze the results I'm gonna talk through this survey question by question so this is a survey that was the main question which basically asked how would you feel if you could no longer use google analytics I'll tell you why I use that in there in a second and then it's very disappointed somewhat disappointed not disappointed please help us understand why you selected this answer so one of the things responses you'll get if your product has product

28:51market fit with some people is they get really scared that your products in a go away and and I'm gotten people that get afraid of that of asking the question but the whole point of the question is for people to get scared so so don't worry about that just just go with it so the idea here is that if if people are very disappointed and enough of them are very disappointed you have product market fit and I'm gonna go through a little bit of that but this is the key question that helps you segment the rest of the questions great survey methodology for analyzing surveys is all

29:19about segmenting the surveys and the responses in the right ways so this is this is actually let me let me go back let me go back let me find this slide hang on anyways okay so I'll talk about it here so before I move on and I might have a slide for this again but it's not on the right order or whatever but basically we at KISSmetrics before we release the product before we came up with all those things we actually ran this survey for Google Analytics customers because we didn't have a product but we had a competitor so to speak and we had a specific thing we wanted to figure out

29:54so we ran this survey with them and what we learned is that they have product market fit and so even if you tell me you don't have a lot of customers I can't I don't want to survey them or like whatever you can go survey competitors I'd even go spend money to go get their responses because I would be dying to know about all the competitors in the category how people feel about them whether they have product market fit how people describe the products etc we've even ran the survey for Twitter and stuff like that before so here's a scenario in this scenario nobody really gives a about your

30:25product because 48% of the people said not disappointed they wouldn't be disappointed if your product kind of didn't go away or went away so in this case there might be some signal if you go analyze the very disappointed responses and somewhat disappointed responses for the rest of the questions but it's very likely you're gonna have to go back to the drawing board and try a different sort of methodology again if any of you want to run the survey or any of this stuff I'm happy to get emailed and help you analyze it or teach you how to but I'm planning on doing in this in this presentation so another one here is

30:59when you have a lot of people that say somewhat disappointed and maybe the very disappoint even which are really aiming for is 40% or more of people saying they'd be very disappointed if a product no longer existed and that's Shawn else is sort of rubric for saying okay you have some level of product market fit and all that so in this case again you're trying to figure out the difference between the two responses and sometimes you can do product or customer segment tweaks so I'll give an example so let's say that the people who are somewhat disappointed didn't experience a specific feature in your product while you realize with the

31:30written responses that the people who are very disappointed did experience it and if you realize that then what you can say is okay I can go try to improve optimize tweak my product even my value proposition so that the people who are somewhat disappointed actually end up I get more very disappointed people because they actually got exposed to the product you can even get really crazy and try to email the people that said they're somewhat disappointed and sort of you know assure them along in the process but the whole idea this is analyzing it and analyzing it qualitatively again yeah so this is where the slide oh sorry it's the next

32:02one anyways um when the majority of people can't live without it you're basically in a place to grow and if anybody does surveying and gets to this point just shoot me an email you have a lot of work ahead of you but you have such strong signal that like you need to move fast and sort of jump on it because market to get crowded pretty fast so if you have product market fit it's just time to hit the gas and start growing the business and make sure as many people as possible as fast as possible can get value from your product and then it's just about optimizing the out

32:31of everything anyway you can again this is what this is the data from the Google Analytics survey that we did so basically here we learned that Google Analytics has a lot of product market fit I think is like 70 or 80 percent of people said they'd be very disappointed if it didn't exist and we got about a thousand responses on it we tweeted it out we did a bunch of advertising we did it whatever we could because we knew this data would be valuable to us because we're building a product that's somewhat competitive if not exactly competitive to them and you guys can do all of this so another question in the

33:04survey is about alternatives so it's really you know you saw those tweets about alternatives that I said people were saying about our products and how we're better than alternative so here it's like what what would you like lis use as an alternative google analytics were no longer available so a lot of times like I think even in like Rob's case where he really didn't want to call it email more getting or marketing automation and stuff like that he would have learned that pretty fast if he did this and he would have it would have been more irrefutable than his own opinion or even having to go talk to a whole bunch of

33:36customers and interview him when you could have just surveyed them and figured out what kind of alternative they we use so it's a really powerful question in that sense so this one is about the primary benefits so what is a primary benefit that you have received from Google Analytics so this is actually the one that we use to figure out the crazy AG tagline of show me my heat map or actually it was show me my heat map and see where people click on your website and it was because that's the primary benefit they set they just want to see where people click and so we

34:04use that and that's actually what converts the best for us we haven't found a winner or beyond that we also use some of these answers to figure out the dot copy that Joanna mentioned about show me your show me my heat map another one this is a pretty standard question it's about have you recommended Google Analytics to anyone so you might think we're trying to figure out whether people have recommended it or not we're not really trying to figure out that out here what we really care about is what they say when they say yes and they explain it and that can inform a lot of your copy

34:33or positioning all that kind of stuff because you're basically asking them to tell you how they told their friend you're not you don't really care that they did or not that's actually not the most important thing here the most important thing is understanding how they describe your product to a friend because that's generally gonna give you the kind of copy you need for your site to test and stuff like that and this one's just obvious it's like how could Google Analytics be improved to better meet your needs yeah so that was the survey I gave you guys a PDF I know I went pretty fast through it if you guys

35:04are so inclined to go try it with your customers because you have enough or more interesting to me want to try it with a competitor and learn how to like kind of do that super happy to help this has been this surveying has been the number one most valuable thing for me outside of all the quantitative stuff that I think has actually put me at an advantage when I'm analyzing customer bases by doing this kind of survey so Thank You Shaun Ellis for that so I've got about eleven slides left and I think I have time so I'm going to keep going so I wanted to talk more about product

35:37and talk about another like tactic it's called working backwards but so let me get started on that and this is all before product market fit it's all about getting to product market fit so this is another sort of tactic this one's not more of a hack it takes a bunch of work but it's really powerful so has anyone seen this thing this is where you have a skateboard and it goes to the car how many of you seen this before cool this is like Spotify someone at Spotify did it what I really like about it is that it gives MVP a perfect like framework to think about so when I

36:06build an MVP now we just actually don't even call it mep anymore we're like we're building the skateboard because the skateboard will get us from point A to point B but a wheel won't unless we want to learn how to ride one wheel or whatever like the one wheelie bicycle which nobody really wants to do and very few people can do it so the idea is you're building a skateboard then you build the little little razor type thing and then bicycle motorcycle car and as you do that there's there's more further distance that you can go basically and but the job that people are trying to do

36:33in this case is get from point A to point B and all these things can do it while the top stuff you can't really do it so that's how you want to think about your product you want to think about it very holistically if you think about back to the sort of funnel with funnels with KISSmetrics if we just solve one of those problems it wouldn't be good enough but we solved all those problems and built the skateboard but it was super ghetto and we knew it and we did it really fast that would be a I would say that's probably a really good example of MVP of getting every single

37:00part of the process right but not worrying too much about making it a car instead just saying okay it'll get people from point A to beat there's a whole bunch of stuff that we knew we had to fix but we wanted to get in customers hands fast and I know this is obvious a lot of people you know customer development interviewing talking to your customers you guys all know this it's very important to do the research this is why I'll do that product market fit survey on competitors because that's actually a strong form of research but this is neat this tactic is that I want to talk about is called

37:30working backwards how many of you have heard about this awesome great so I'm teaching you something maybe so and I've iterated it a little bit after thinking about it but basically it's a it's a it's a it's a product development methodology from Amazon it's actually how they build a lot of awesome product it's actually why you have prime and all these things because the way they think about it and basically what they do is they try to basically they in their case they write an imaginary press release with a specific structure which I have laid out here from a Kawara post of basically the product launched after it's launched

38:09before they even sort of create the product so if you're gonna do that right you're gonna need a lot of thorough research just like some of the stuff I described when we built product and also you know just basically doing interviews and stuff so you actually understand the pain and you're able to write this so in our product development now we're always doing something like this but we actually do now I started out with like we would do blog posts in our companies and write these elaborate sort of blog posts which are basically launch blog posts we know when we nailed it when like that blog posts is very similar to

38:39the one we write when we actually release the product but the whole idea of this is to get a discipline around if I have to write that blog post first and I'm building the product then like I know I I know I immediately figure out what I don't know what I know what I need to know I start thinking about the customer right away because I'm writing this for them so I think a blog put the blog post is the new press release I'd even go further now based on all those tweets I showed you from our companies you should be writing tweets that you think people will say about the product

39:08you know that's what we do now so we will write tweets we'll write maybe even up to like 50 tweets based on all these things we learn that are the critical problems that customers have in our market and it's been really really really really really valuable in saving a lot of time and even like crushing a lot of debates because we're actually working backwards they get a little more elaborate about it at Amazon what they'll actually do and this is a little bit interesting but the like though they'll basically basically what you're doing when you're working backwards is you're imagining a future state of your customer or even your company or

39:42whatever depending on what you're working backwards for and normally what people do is they might be able to set a goal or a future state but then what they'll do is they'll figure out what they need to do from now till that goal what Amazon does is they'll take that goal and this is the reason they call working backwards they'll do for that goal what's the step before that and then what's the step before that and then what's the step before that and what's the step before that and then they'll come to where they are today they won't go forward and the reason is you're not

40:09really working backwards if you don't actually start from the end goal and work your way back to where you need to be today and you get a lot of clarity and you know a lot of people say like building products or startups or whatever like a zig zag thing this actually makes your zig zag less Zig zaggy because you actually have a clear idea if I need to provide this specific product experience to win or to solve the problem like I can't start from here I have to start from what's like the one layer below that and so on so anyways if anyone's interesting talking about that

40:36it's one of my favorite topics and just our a good reminder like you're not your customer that's why we do all this this is how we get it right when we don't think we're the customer and we actually realize we're not the customer and yeah you could start with the problem you have but what's really key is to really understand that you are not your customer even if it's a problem you have like like you need the customer like it's you need to get their input you need to get it earlier all these things I talked about are all about getting it earlier and basically getting the

41:04product market fit faster before you even like write a line of code like I can these days we can spec out and do designs and some of my companies and get to this know we have fit even before any the products launch or even built yet just by doing a lot of these processes and in some graphs so these are actually sign ups trial signups over time for crazy egg I showed you guys this when I started wow this is where we are at right now this was like I think last month and it just kept going up and there's been some step functions and yeah we went through the ramp but the

41:38thing I'm most excited about is actually this so hellobar is my other business and we started when since we bought it and we actually revamp tit we actually didn't move we still haven't fully moved the existing old customers over so we basically started from zero and so I know people want to talk about sass having the slow ramp and all this kind of stuff but like I'm gonna call on that and say we can do way better because like we're at numbers that we barely got to like a year ago and crazy egg in terms of signups and yes it's a little bit of a different

42:06business and by the way this is the first question you would probably ask well didn't you have crazy egg didn't she like all ready no we haven't touched that user base that user base has never got an email a message or anything very deliberate about hello Bart we don't even promote it so it's not like we're using that advantage and honestly the reason we are is that product doesn't have product market fit the way we want it to have yet and we had we bought the product so we still have a lot of work to do and so I think you can grow faster I don't think you need that slowest ass

42:34ramp graph anymore and if anybody wants to talk about it happy to talk about that too cool so that that ends the presentation but I got a couple quick things or one main thing so I want like this is my favorite conference and I and I never get nervous when I speak I get nervous in front of all of you so and I think a lot about what to say and you know I would probably be really bummed out if I for some reason missed it and and and what I what I what I really what I really think is interesting about this is that there's so many of you that I've

43:13watched grow some of you I've talked to you over the years some I haven't but I've been able to watch from the from the sidelines even someone like Patrick watched him grow over time in this business and now he's onto something awesome that's really his calling so to speak and so I think Zander Rob Mike sherry and anyone else that's involved in this deserves a yeah that the clap yeah let's do it

43:46yeah so I and I don't think I would even be able to grow my businesses as much as I have without this event so it's that important to me so Rob did this I think he did it a couple times but there's three actions three relationships is there anyone here that so far hasn't got this like you don't have you have three actions yeah three relationships so if you don't I will personally make sure you do so you come to me find me email me whatever let's make sure we do this because I think these are very good goals and this is the reason this conference exists and it's so awesome so

44:20with that I think we have time for questions maybe we do maybe we don't we do indeed let's go a round of applause to heat and thank you thank you so if you're putting that survey together for your competitors how do you get enough people to take it so that you can get information from it yeah so the numbers actually about 30 and you can already get good directional information and most people can get to 30 the more data you have the more accurate will be but like just survey methodology like on long form surveys like that just 30 people will give you a good signal so I

44:57wouldn't stress that but like we've seen surveys with thousands of responses pretty fast it depends on your user base it depends on if you're willing to pay for it if you're doing a competitor's one but I don't know that that learning is like priceless as you can probably tell for my graphs and stuff one here so on the product market fit stuff or the surveys for non SAS businesses what are the how would you change those questions instead of yeah you can tweak them a little bit I'm happy to help you with your specific business most of them don't need to be tweaked except like actually yeah most of them don't need to

45:35be tweaked you just tweak them a little bit I've actually did them for I've done them before for my Twitter followers so I did a product market fit survey for the people following me on Twitter right so you can do it for anything it's not just for SAS that was my whole sort of point may be things like alternative might not be as relevant right but like at the end of the day they're getting a core benefit and all that kind of stuff so just it's just a little bit about the tweaking the language not and just making sure if someone's reading it in the context of getting it for like a

46:01consulting business or you know like your Twitter account even it just makes sense to them like a book Oh books great like like if is this an e-book or something or yeah so like I'd consider sending this like maybe even like a week after they bought the book or three or four days and be like I'd love to hear from you right and know what you got out of it so yeah you would just tweak the questions to be for a book again happy to help you tweak them it's not it's a product though right everything's basically a product one way or another right so a book is not any any different

46:33you might just say my book email or whatever instead of product name yeah exactly yeah just think logical again happy to help but like I've seen it done for everything Hey so on the same topic on the surveys so the forty percent if that's getting to that it seems like it's largely a function of who you ask because if you just ask the world at large and it's not you know they're not targeted towards what you want then you're gonna get a really low signal so I guess like how how do you constrain the boundaries of who to ask when you're doing the survey yeah so if you're just

47:16asking if it's customers just just ask customers that have logged in and last like two to four weeks right I've done it out even canceled people and stuff like that tweak the survey a little bit and do it but generally like as long as there's some there as long as they're logging in and active it's fine it really depends on how many the numbers you actually have in your specific business but overall just just trying it will get you good signal I know a lot of people worry about oh it's only this type of customer filling it out and all that in my experience it tends to be even with a small number you

47:47get a pretty pretty good mix of people just because of the first question will tell you your mix right if enough people are saying the different sort of options then you know you have a decent mix of people so I don't stress that too much on most of this kind of open-ended survey I think when you're doing a/b testing or you're doing more quantitative things the number and the quantity matter a lot more in this case I'm just trying to learn so even if I had ten responses I'll look at it right obviously I probably want twenty thirty more but like it already can tell you

48:14directionally where you're at and how things are going other questions so you mentioned survey your competitors do you just do that through like Google Adwords or something we've used Adwords you know on Twitter with their paid advertising you can target another accounts followers so we've done that let's see what else one time we partnered with an email list that had the audience we wanted and just paid them to go send out the survey and find out yeah that works yeah I've said this a previous events here or previous times here but like beg borrow ly steal like just figure it out right you need the responses this is

49:01very important to your business I can't stress that enough and so I'll do whatever I can if I don't have money I'll go figure it out if I have to like sit in front of a conference and get them to fill it out and give them 50 bucks like whatever right like so I think I would just find all the strategies generally though on Facebook and Twitter you can target people who like a page or are following a certain account and that's been that's actually been pretty useful for us I know some people say oh should I give money away or all that you can if you want I think

49:28it doesn't really buy us um in this kind of server if you're doing your competitors you should not give any incentive though for your customers yeah can you talk about the right side of that chart and why you had the step in the ramp out there can you talk about that part yeah so my co-founder and I this was I don't know more than 18 months ago maybe like two years ago we actually got a new CEO at KISSmetrics and the the specific part of it is we were just spending more time on the business and then and then we just found some really quick quick wins we weren't

50:03able to think about right so it was mostly the depth of thinking so a few things we did is we actually started focusing on our marketing site a little bit more and started running more tests because we didn't have anyone doing it that at the time and then we because partly because of Samuel and some of his thinking and help we started working on our onboarding a little bit more and trying to optimize parts of it we found a whole bunch of quick wins at that time so that was mostly it one of the bumps in there I think the second bump in there was actually when we started we

50:37actually we called it a reverse funnel at the time but previously you'd have to pick the pricing and then put in your email and all that but the thing we knew is we wanted more volume at the top of funnels so we could run more tests below so that was like really constraining our business so we actually just tweaked it and made it so signup happened first and then pricing page and other things we also do a lot of cool stuff that this was implemented at the time which is it if we got your email first and you didn't its credit card upfront and crazy egg so if you didn't fill out the credit

51:08card we start emailing we do our own retargeting basically but holds it we'll do email retargeting so we'll e-mail you depending on where you were in the funnel we also implemented something else where if you come back to the site you're kind of stuck on where you left off so it's like checkout cart abandonment theories but apply it to a marketing site funnel where you have credit card upfront that was very effective it works really well all right we have time for two more

51:38so if you're in a new marketplace can you use this just on a generic market so if you're selling mousetraps can you say how do you feel about your current mousetrap provider just to see where people are you want to speak you want to pick a specific product in the market so you pick you don't want to make it a generic one you want to peg mousetraps or Joe's males trip so you'd be yeah you just want to pick a specific one what's fascinating is when you start doing this with like like real-world goods and stuff like you start figuring out all this crap like we did it with a company

52:07a while ago I just did it for fun and you like a e-commerce site so imagine an e-commerce site selling something specific so let's say like I don't know what's on my mind right now let's say like these but this backpack I have right if you did it on the backpack you'd actually figure out what people are using the backpack for there's one of the questions in there I don't know if I had it in there I don't remember but like of like what type of person would be great for this product that one's great because then you could tweak all your positioning so I'd go I

52:34personally go nuts on this like it's been really valuable it's like yeah it's like a yeah it's crazy and then when you start analyzing so the whole goal is like you want to figure out what the value prop that the very disappointed people set you don't really necessarily if you have enough of me you don't care about what anyone else said because you want more of those people what you tend to find as patterns is that there's actually a big difference between those four grades and the benefit they got all right we'd like to ask the final question of microcon 2015 no pressure I might need help answering this one

53:15thanks for the great talk I'm sure I'm not the only one but when you put up that red chart with hellobar right away went to hellobar comm and I tried to find out what it was and you tried to find what tried to find out what it was yeah sure but all I got was enter you URL and then I click Next and then it asked me what I wanted to do and then I sort of went back to listening to you so I don't have any clue what that is but it sounds interesting can you tell us about it oh sure yeah it's a it was the first

53:44product we actually bought that product a couple years ago but this company digital telepathy built it built it we liked the name in the branding and it was called a low bar it still is and basically you put a javascript on a site and you get a bar at the top of the page that can direct your visitors that's what they originally built so it was like pre sumo me and pre all these things out there they were the first ones to do it so we bought it a couple years ago and since then we've added a whole bunch of stuff to it like now and

54:10this isn't even announced we just did this a few weeks ago but you can do modal's and pop-ups and sliders we've added email collection since which didn't exist in it so it's basically a bar tool but also it'll do the pop-ups and sliders and stuff like that and it's just like you know like like imagine like drip having the slider and the pop-up we do all those but we don't do the the email marketing and automation outside of it we plug into whatever exists would love to plug into you guys at some point so yeah [Applause] you