Podcasts about north star metric

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Best podcasts about north star metric

Latest podcast episodes about north star metric

Where It Happens
He shares his 5-Step Framework to build $1M/Month Mobile App

Where It Happens

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 23, 2025 43:22


Join me as I chat with Hunter Isaacson, a successful mobile app builder who has created apps with hundreds of millions of downloads. Hunter shares his playbook for building million-dollar mobile apps, emphasizing the importance of simple experiences, strong branding, and creating effective growth loops. He discusses how to identify opportunities by adapting existing ideas to new channels and technologies.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro01:56 - Examples of Viral Consumer Apps04:35 - Hallow Deep dive 10:14 - Locket Deep dive13:51 -  NGL's Deep Dive15:08 - Don't reinvent the wheel17:27 -  Hunter's $1M/Month App Playbook21:28 - Building a Brand People Love24:44 - Creating a simple experience25:26 - The importance of core action and North Star Metric26:33 - How to create growth loops31:28 - Additional Good Practices 33:13 - Opportunities in AI-enhanced app experiences36:38 - Future technology trends Hunter is excited aboutKey Points:• Hunter Isaacson shares his framework for building successful mobile apps, including NGL (250M downloads) and Bags• The importance of creating simple experiences with strong branding that people can understand and resonate with• How to identify core metrics and growth loops that drive user engagement and viral sharing• Leveraging new platform features (like widgets, live activities) to create innovative app experiences1) Hunter's framework for building viral, profitable apps is SURPRISINGLY simple:• Build a brand people love• Create a simple experience• Get users on quickly (even just 100)• Select ONE core action• Maximize % of users completing that actionLet's dive deeper...2) On building a BRAND PEOPLE LOVE:"Keep it short and find a slang term" - Hunter's secret sauce for naming apps.NGL = "not gonna lie" (obvious to Gen Z)BAGS = crypto slang for holdingsThe best names are OBVIOUS, resonate with your audience, and set the right vibe.3) Creating a SIMPLE EXPERIENCE is crucial!Hunter designs ALL his apps himself (started with PowerPoint, now Figma)His approach: "What's the bare bones MVP that solves the problem?"Don't overcomplicate. ONE user flow is better than branching journeys.4) The NORTH STAR METRIC changes everything.For each app, Hunter picks ONE metric that matters above all:• Wink: % of users getting a match on day 1• NGL: % sharing link + replies• BAGS: % funding account + making first tradeAim for 90%+ completion!5) GROWTH HACK: Build sharing into your core experience!"If you drop in 1000 people and 50% share, that's 500 people who've now shared your app"Hunter spent less than $10K marketing NGL to get 250M downloads! The key? Seed it just enough to activate the viral loop.6) You DON'T need to reinvent the wheel!Hunter on NGL: "Anonymous messaging apps have been around forever"The innovation? Using Instagram's new link feature as a growth channel.Look for EXISTING IDEAS that could work in NEW CHANNELS.7) On SEEDING your app:• Test content formats before launch• Work with creators in different niches• Pay small amounts ($50-100) to influencers• Look for that ONE viral video to ignite growth• Build an authentic voice on social8) TRENDS to watch according to Hunter:• Live Activities on iPhone (underutilized)• Lock screen widgets (not fully explored)• AI + consumer apps (CalAI's approach)• Crypto going mainstream• AR glasses (future)Massive opportunities in each!9) For YOUNG FOUNDERS, Hunter recommends:"Take a lot of swings. Have a lot of at-bats."Consumer mobile apps over B2B/SaaS when starting out:• More fun• Reach global audience• Better psychology understanding• Tools getting better every dayNotable Quotes:"I think that it's more about looking for frameworks than it is for looking for ideas. The framework, I feel like, is more important because now it's really easy to just framework X with audience Y." - Hunter Isaacson"You don't really need to reinvent the wheel... it's a new channel, right? If anonymous messaging has worked on the internet, it's worked on apps, it's worked on different platforms, why wouldn't it work with Instagram as the growth lever?" - Hunter IsaacsonLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND HUNTER ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/hunterjisaacsonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/hunterjisaacson/

SaaS Expert Voices presented by Maxio
Building Trust in Product Leadership with The Product Coach Tami Reiss

SaaS Expert Voices presented by Maxio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2024 42:56 Transcription Available


This week on the Expert Voices podcast, Randy Wootton, CEO of Maxio, speaks with Tami Reiss, Founder and CEO of The Product Leader Coach. Tami shares how understanding customer needs and creating a compelling vision that aligns with the company's goals, leads to successful product management. Randy and Tami talk about the value of coaching for product leaders and the necessity of collaboration across departments to drive growth and innovation. Her upcoming children's book, 'What Do Product Managers Do?', showcases her passion for demystifying the role of product managers, particularly for aspiring young professionals. QuotesSo first of all, the promise of SaaS is that your product is always going to get better, right? Right. It's why someone's paying for a subscription. So you always have to keep that in mind. So there has to be something you're doing to enhance your product for your current market. Your current users are paying you on a monthly or annual basis, because theoretically you're going to serve them more, and solve more of their problems. -Tami Reiss [24:42]“The product leader has to coach their employees and say ‘You need to set up listening posts with the onboarding team. You need to set up listening posts with the platform team, or whatever else, and emphasize to them that they are also building trust and confidence in the entire product team and the product way of working." -Tami Reiss[33:21]Expert Takeaways Establishing a clear vision and strategy is crucial for product leaders to drive successful outcomes in their organizations.The importance of aligning product management with sales and customer service to meet market demands effectively.Product leaders need to focus on building trust and confidence in their relationships with stakeholders for long-term success.The distinction between product management and project management is essential for effective product strategy execution in a company.Coaching can help product leaders navigate complex organizational dynamics and enhance their decision-making skills.Timestamps(00:00) Meet Tami Reiss: Product Expert(00:56) The Inspiration Behind Tami's Book(02:12) The Importance of Product Management Education(09:09) Establishing a Winning Strategy(09:15) The Role of a Product Leader Coach(19:07) Understanding Product-Market Fit(18:43) Defining Your Kingdom: Market Strategy(21:44) The Need for a North Star Metric(28:39)The Value of Coaching for Product Leaders(35:21) Speed Round: Metrics, Books, and InfluencersLinksMaxioUpcoming EventsMaxio Institute ReportRandy Wootton LinkedIn Tammi Reiss LinkedIn

Run The Numbers
NPV-Positive Decision Making: Thumbtack CFO Larry Roseman's Winning Framework

Run The Numbers

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2024 53:47


In this bucket list interview, CJ speaks with Larry Roseman, the CFO of Thumbtack, who shares his deep understanding of running marketplace businesses at scale. They explore Thumbtack's business model and monetization strategy, discussing the customer acquisition cost for both service providers and homeowners. Larry explains why going broad rather than niche can be fundamental for marketplace success, offering a counterintuitive view to that of many marketplace experts. He also talks about the flywheels Thumbtack has developed over time and the company's shift towards becoming a proactive operating system for homes instead of a reactive marketplace. Additionally, Larry offers valuable insights on value creation from a CFO's perspective, emphasizing the importance of making NPV-positive decisions and the strategic role of the CFO in guiding big business decisions. Hear about the crises that Larry has seen in his career and his advice to “never waste a good crisis”.If you're looking for an ERP head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist.—SPONSORS:NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than 37,000 thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist. Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

Run The Numbers
Behind the Earnings Calls: Couchbase CFO Greg Henry on Consumption Models & Analyst Relations

Run The Numbers

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2024 52:10


Having listened to a number of Couchbase's earning calls, the company's CFO Greg Henry sits down with CJ to answer some in-depth questions, starting with the rationale behind Couchbase's non-standard fiscal year and the advantages of it. He then delves into his experience of transforming a traditional enterprise subscription model into a managed service consumption business. The conversation covers Couchbase's focus on Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) as their North Star metric and the art and science of multi-year deals. They discuss how best to interact with sell-side analysts, how callbacks after earnings calls work, and how to manage relationships on the buy side. Greg also reflects on his time at General Electric during its heyday, offering insights into the culture and frameworks that shaped his approach to business today before talking about Matt Cain's framework for Couchbase and how it enables function. Tune in to hear all this and the story of how Greg lost $1 million of operating profit.If you're looking for an ERP head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist.—SPONSORS:Mercury is the fintech ambitious companies use for banking and all their financial workflows. With a powerful bank account at the center of their operations, companies can make better financial decisions and ensure that every dollar spent aligns with company priorities. That's why over 100K startups choose Mercury to confidently run all their financial operations with the precision, control, and focus they need to operate at their best. Learn more at mercury.com.Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than 37,000 thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist. Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

Run The Numbers
Extreme Ownership for CFOs with Adam Ante of Paycor

Run The Numbers

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2024 52:53


Adam Ante is the CFO of Paycor, a publicly traded payroll provider. Not only did he scale the ranks of leadership quickly, but he took Paycor public in the first two years of his first role as a CFO. Today he joins CJ to discuss his career journey and share the wisdom he's gained along the way. Inspired by the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Adam explains how aggressively stepping into your fear can help you succeed in the world of finance. He talks about overcoming imposter syndrome, training your capacity for stress, and why the small things are really the big things. He gives advice on not pigeonholing oneself but pressing into other parts of the company and earning your seat at the table. He also sheds light on how Paycor makes money, its North Star metric, its competitive moat, how its IPO share price was determined, the evolution of the Human Capital Management (HCM) market, and how payroll companies have unique insights into the economy's health. —SPONSORS:Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

Run The Numbers
Selling Trust: Airbase CFO Aneal Vallurupalli on Risk Management

Run The Numbers

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2024 54:46


Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO of Airbase, an AP automation, spend management, and procure-to-pay solution, joins CJ to discuss all things risk management. He explains the different categories of spend outside of payroll and the biggest pain points within them. Aneal does a deep dive into fraud and how to prevent it, explaining how Airbase's number one product is really trust. He covers the non-payment risks to your company, the need for stage and growth-appropriate risk, and the benefits of a risk roadmap for your company. Aneal also delves into value metrics and what makes a good one. As someone with experience in the people function, he provides a unique perspective on why every finance person should get some recruitment experience, before explaining the qualities that separate good CFOs from great ones, and the role of the CFO as a "chief alignment officer".If you're looking for an ERP head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist.—SPONSORS:Leapfin is accounting automation software that automatically prepares and posts reliable journal entries. High-growth businesses like Reddit, Canva, and Seat Geek choose Leapfin to eliminate manual tasks, accelerate month-end close, and enable accounting leaders to provide faster insights to help their companies grow. To automatically standardize your revenue data with measurable business impact, check out leapfin.com today. Mercury is the fintech ambitious companies use for banking and all their financial workflows. With a powerful bank account at the center of their operations, companies can make better financial decisions and ensure that every dollar spent aligns with company priorities. That's why over 100K startups choose Mercury to confidently run all their financial operations with the precision, control, and focus they need to operate at their best. Learn more at mercury.com.Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than 37,000 thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist. Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

Run The Numbers
Unpacking Spirit Airlines' Complex Financial Model with CFO Scott Haralson

Run The Numbers

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2024 58:59


Scott Haralson, CFO of Spirit Airlines, joins CJ in this episode to discuss the complexities of operating an airline business. He explains what it means to run an ultra-low-cost carrier model and what goes into calculating the operating costs per available seat mile, Spirit's most important metric. He talks about the difficulty of forecasting for an airline, explaining the costs you may not think about, what goes into network planning, the challenges of hedging fuel prices, navigating capital intensive decisions such as buying airplanes, and doing all of the above through unpredictable economic cycles and volatility. He also sheds light on why Spirit's ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is leisure travelers over business travelers and the important role of dynamic pricing in the airline industry. If you're looking for an ERP head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist.—SPONSORS:Leapfin is accounting automation software that automatically prepares and posts reliable journal entries. High-growth businesses like Reddit, Canva, and Seat Geek choose Leapfin to eliminate manual tasks, accelerate month-end close, and enable accounting leaders to provide faster insights to help their companies grow. To automatically standardize your revenue data with measurable business impact, check out leapfin.com today. Mercury is the fintech ambitious companies use for banking and all their financial workflows. With a powerful bank account at the center of their operations, companies can make better financial decisions and ensure that every dollar spent aligns with company priorities. That's why over 100K startups choose Mercury to confidently run all their financial operations with the precision, control, and focus they need to operate at their best. Learn more at mercury.com.Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than 37,000 thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist. Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

DTC POD: A Podcast for eCommerce and DTC Brands
#314 - Scaling Growth In Beauty with ILIA Beauty VP of Digital & Ecommerce, Cherene Aubert

DTC POD: A Podcast for eCommerce and DTC Brands

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2024 46:45


Cherene Aubert is the VP of Digital and E-commerce at ILIA Beauty, a skincare-powered makeup brand which has taken the beauty industry by storm as it's quickly scaled past 100M in revenue.In this episode, we sit down with Cherene to discuss some of the most successful strategies that the most successful brands use to grow.Episode brought to you by More StaffingJoin 15k founders and marketers & get our pod highlights delivered directly to your inbox with the DTC Pod Newsletter!On this episode of DTC pod we cover:1. Brand Differentiation in the Beauty Industry2. Embracing Organic Revenue Growth3. Strategic Marketing Shifts4. Cherene Aubert's Professional Background and Role at Ilia Beauty5. Understanding the Beauty Market Landscape6. Analyzing and Measuring Sales Performance7. Brand Awareness and Advertising Effectiveness8. Utilizing the OKR Framework in Marketing Strategies9. Optimization of Landing Pages and Offers10. Media and Content Strategy11. Trends and Team Collaboration in Social Media MarketingTimestamps00:00 Transition to Ilia for faster growth.04:52 Overseeing marketing, brand, and retail strategies.10:07 Beauty market segmentation: fickle vs. loyal consumers.12:59 Storytelling unlocks human connection in brand marketing.14:52 Early start, focus on financial planning.18:59 Building a legacy brand with team support.23:04 SEO, link building, PR, affiliate, non-paid channels.27:45 Influencer marketing expands reach and audience diversity.30:31 Teams collaborate to create and promote content.33:48 Obsession with capturing attention in social feed.36:35 Beauty, profitability, growth, customer acquisition, conversion optimization.41:45 Prioritizing landing page creation for brand impact.43:18 Maximize user retention with native landing pages.Shownotes powered by CastmagicPast guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more. Additional episodes you might like:• #175 Ariel Vaisbort - How OLIPOP Runs Influencer, Community, & Affiliate Growth• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook• ​​​​#243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands-----Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter here and our Projects the DTC Pod team is working on:DTCetc - all our favorite brands on the internetOlivea - the extra virgin olive oil & hydroxytyrosol supplementCastmagic - AI Workspace for ContentFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok ---Cherene Aubert - VP of Digital and E-commerce at Ilia BeautyBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of CastmagicRamon Berrios - Co-Founder of Castmagic

Humans of Martech
108: Ezra Fishman: Wistia's VP of Growth on healthy data skepticism and North star metric limitations

Humans of Martech

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2024 50:06


What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ezra Fishman, VP of Growth at Wistia. About EzraEzra started his career as an engineer developing devices to help treat diabetes and obesity at GI DynamicsHe later had a short stint as an Operations Manager at an investment firm that was dedicated to funding health tech startupsAfter completing his MBA, Ezra joined a video tech startup called Wistia as their Director of Marketing and after 4 years he transitioned to leading Business IntelligenceToday Ezra is VP of Growth at Wistia where he's now spent over 12 years, seeing the company grow from a handful of customers to over 375,000 and becoming one of the top vPaaS tools on the planetSummary: Ezra is a strategic and technical visionary at Wistia. He combines an audience-first content strategy with a data-informed approach to drive sustainable growth. He emphasizes the importance of genuine relationships over transactions and advocates for leveraging data to inform decisions while valuing human intuition. His journey from initiating a central data warehouse to implementing tools like Census, Fivetran, and dbt showcases how a single source of truth can enhance operational efficiency. Ezra's experience, from fostering a data-informed culture to embracing a scrappy startup mentality with a focus on high-impact ideas and rigorous A/B testing, reflects a commitment to strategic evolution and the balance between data and creativity. His insights offer invaluable lessons on growing and engaging with audiences in meaningful ways, advocating for a blend of strategy, intuition, and data-informed decisions in marketing.From Wistia's First Customer to Early Team MemberImagine this: Ezra, initially just a fan from the sidelines, watching Wistia, a fledgling startup by his buddies Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz, trying to carve its niche in the world of video. This journey from an intrigued observer to Wistia's first customer, and eventually, a pivotal team member, is nothing short of a cinematic twist.Back in the day, while Ezra was navigating the complexities of medical devices, Chris and Brendan were brainstorming Wistia's next big thing. The plot thickens when Ezra, amidst casual banter in their Boston living room, pitches a game-changing idea sparked by his own professional hurdles. Picture this: medical procedures generating heaps of video data, with the only sharing option being the archaic method of mailing DVDs worldwide. Enter Ezra's lightbulb moment—why not transform Wistia into a haven for secure, efficient video collaboration?Fast forward to Wistia marking its foray into uncharted territories. This wasn't just about ditching DVDs for digital; it was about reimagining how professionals could leverage video for learning and collaboration.The narrative takes a delightful turn when, over a lunch filled with reminiscing and future-gazing, Chris and Brendan propose a novel idea to Ezra. With a shared laugh over their collective naiveté in marketing and business management, they decide to join forces. This was the moment of serendipity, the kind that you'd find in tales of old, where the hero embarks on an unforeseen quest.Wistia's storyline evolves with a bold strategic pivot, transitioning from a focus on internal video sharing to mastering the art of video marketing. This wasn't merely a shift in services; it was a leap towards redefining Wistia's essence. The introduction of video embeds and performance tracking was akin to discovering a new continent in the realm of video marketing. This pivot was the catalyst for an explosive growth, attracting a myriad of users and establishing Wistia as a beacon in the marketing universe.Ezra's saga with Wistia illustrates a kaleidoscope of lessons: the beauty of perspective, the strength found in adaptability, and the magic of seizing hidden opportunities. It's a testament to how internal insights can dramatically alter a company's course, steering it towards realms of untapped potential and success.Key Takeaway: Ezra's journey with Wistia showcases the power of leveraging personal experiences to spot unique opportunities in the professional sphere. His story teaches us the importance of staying open to unexpected career paths and the transformative potential of internal insights. For any professional, Ezra's narrative is a reminder to embrace adaptability and look beyond conventional boundaries, because sometimes, the next big shift in your career or business strategy could emerge from your own unique challenges and observations.Ezra's Audience-First Philosophy Beyond Funnel VisionEzra's reflections on Wistia's early content strategy are a testament to the power of foresight and the courage to challenge the status quo. In an era dominated by the lead capture mantra, the idea of prioritizing audience engagement over immediate conversions was nothing short of revolutionary. Ezra's insights into this paradigm shift reveal not just a tactical change, but a philosophical evolution in marketing.At the heart of this transformation was a simple observation: content that educates, engages, and entertains fosters a community of brand advocates. Ezra noticed early on that content about video production on a budget or maximizing video effectiveness wasn't just filling up space on Wistia's blog; it was actively drawing people into a conversation with the brand. This wasn't engagement that could be easily quantified by the number of leads generated, but its impact was undeniable. Website visits and signups surged post-publication, showcasing the tangible benefits of nurturing an audience.This observation led to a critical realization: gating content might boost lead numbers temporarily, but it dampens genuine engagement. The stark contrast between open access and restricted content provided clear evidence that the key to sustained growth was fostering an environment where quality trumped quantity. This approach required a commitment to producing stellar content that people didn't just stumble upon but sought out and shared.Ezra's philosophy underscores a critical marketing truth: building an audience is about cultivating relationships, not just capturing data points. This mindset shift from a focus on quantity to a dedication to quality was, at the time, a bold stance that set Wistia apart. It wasn't about bombarding people with sales pitches but about drawing them into a meaningful dialogue with the brand.This audience-first approach is not just about creating fans; it's about building a community that grows organically, powered by the quality of interaction and content. The lesson here is clear: when marketers prioritize genuine engagement over short-term metrics, they lay the foundation for lasting growth and brand loyalty.Key Takeaway: Ezra's strategic pivot to an audience-first approach at Wistia highlights the lasting value of building genuine relationships over transactional interactions. In today's content-saturated world, the brands that stand out are those that treat their audience not as leads to be captured but as a community to be cultivated. This philosophy doesn't just elevate a brand's marketing game; it transforms customers into advocates, ensuring sustainable growth and a competitive edge.Data-Informed Instead of Data-DrivenEzra's path through the diverse landscapes of marketing, business intelligence (BI), and growth at Wistia is a narrative about the confluence of data and human insight. His tenure, marked by wearing multiple hats across different roles, underscores a singular truth: the realms of marketing, BI, and growth, despite their distinctions, share a common core centered around attracting and engaging people, converting them, and leveraging data for informed decision-making.Ezra, self-...

Product-Led Podcast
How To Identify The North Star Metric For Your Product-Led Business

Product-Led Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2024 21:58


In today's episode, Wes Bush and Laura Kluz share all about identifying the North Star Metric for your product-led businesses. They start by explaining the importance of identifying the right North Star Metric, emphasizing its role as a unifying metric that aligns the entire team's efforts towards common goals.  They chat about how an NSM is different in a product-led business and provide examples of good and bad ones. They also share an exercise you can complete with your team to ensure everyone knows how they can contribute to the growth of this metric.  Highlights [01:04] Introduction to North Star Metrics and their significance. [3:15] The difference between NSMs in product-led and sales-led metrics. [07:04] Examples of effective and ineffective NSMs. [8:49] The three essential components of a successful NSM. [16:01] Strategies for teams to contribute towards the NSM.  [20:03] Recap and action steps for implementing North Star Metrics in businesses. About the ProductLed System™️ Stop guessing how to execute a product-led strategy. Instead, follow a proven system that dials in your focus to 2x your self-serve revenue in 12 months by focusing on the nine components that make up a product-led business. You can learn more here. 

Startup Syndrome
37. Shooting for a North Star Metric

Startup Syndrome

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2024 38:37


Julia and Andreas have both been on an offsite with the team, going through the OKRs for the year, which reminded them of the most important metric to track as a startup; the North Star Metric. They end up speaking about what a North Star Metric really is, how to figure out what it should be for your startuo and end off with a quiz on which metric a few famous startups use. Alumni company of the week: Qasa Hosted by Julia Delin & Andreas Johansson Edited by Victor Ganguly Responsible publisher: Lars Strannegård

The Recruitment Mentors Podcast
How to Achieve a 100% Fill Rate, The Power Of Saying No and Why Customer Experience Should Be Your North Star Metric with Calum Lyle

The Recruitment Mentors Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2024 66:20


This week I'm joined by Calum Lyle the founder of Add Some Zest.After 8 years of working for somebody else, becoming an MD at just 24 and successfully scaling the business to 20+ people he launched his own business in October 2022.In their first year of business they did just over £500K, they achieved a +89 NPS score, a 100% fill rate and grew the team to 5 - in this conversation you're going to find out how he did it.-------------------------Follow Calum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calum-lyle-01985454/-------------------------Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_jncNtpodcY-------------------------Sponsors - Claim your exclusive savings with the links below:Sourcewhale - https://sourcewhale.com/book-demo?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=recruitment_mentors_podcast&utm_content=book_a_demoFirefish - https://www.firefishsoftware.com/rmp-------------------------Extra Stuff:Learn more about our all-in-one training platform Hector here: https://bit.ly/47hsaxeSign up for our FREE Limitless Learning Newsletter here: https://limitless-learning.thisishector.com/subscribe-------------------------Get in touch:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hishemazzouz/-------------------------

En.Digital Podcast
Hacking Growth con Sean Ellis

En.Digital Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2024 52:17


En este episodio entrevistamos a Sean Ellis, autor del libro "Hacking Growth", de la mano de Juanma Varo, Head of Growth de Product Hackers.Con Sean Ellis, hablamos de lo que ha hecho desde que escribió su libro, el tour del Growth que está haciendo en 2024, cómo hacer marketing y hacer Growth no es lo mismo y cómo podemos ir más allá de los canales tradicionales.También analizamos si definir una North Star Metric es suficiente para tener Growth, cómo debería actuar un equipo enfocado en el crecimiento y cómo aplica Sean Ellis el Growth en su vida personal.NOSOTROS

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 27, 2023 110:54


Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark and sits on the boards of Chainalysis, Hipcamp, Rekki, Cambly, and Medely. She is a founding member of All Raise, the nonprofit organization working to accelerate the success of women in the venture-capital and VC-backed startup ecosystem. Before Benchmark, Sarah was a partner at Greylock Partners. She joined Pinterest in 2012 as their first PM and launched their first search and recommendations features. She also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hypergrowth. In this episode, we discuss:Sarah's Hierarchy of Engagement framework for growing a consumer startup• The three levels of the Hierarchy of Engagement: core action, retention, and self-perpetuation• The importance of measuring cohorts and maintaining focus on the core action• Examples of core user actions from Pinterest and YouTubeSarah's Hierarchy of Marketplaces framework for building a marketplace startup• The three vectors of growth for dominating a marketplace• Advice on “tipping the marketplace” and ultimately dominating the market• The value of focusing on a constrained market• How to avoid disruption—This entire episode is brought to you by Gelt—Redefine your approach to taxes.—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-hierarchy-of-engagement-sarah-tavel-benchmark-greylock-pinterest/—Where to find Sarah Tavel:• X: https://twitter.com/sarahtavel• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahtavel/• Substack: https://www.sarahtavel.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Sarah's background(03:33) Framework 1: The Hierarchy of Engagement(06:03) Level 1: Core action(10:33) Level 2: Retention(14:00) Level 3: Self-perpetuation(19:32) The importance of focus(23:54) The challenge of anonymity(26:04) Advice for founders who want to increase retention(29:34) What founders often get wrong(31:43) Examples of core actions(37:37) Finding your North Star Metric(38:12) Who should use the Hierarchy of Engagement framework(38:54) The Hierarchy of Marketplaces framework(46:09) Level 1: Focus on a constrained opportunity(50:19) Sarah's “happy GMV” and “minimum viable happiness” concepts(54:47) Thumbtack: a counterexample to this approach(56:36) Signs you're ready to move to level 2(58:06) Level 2: Tipping the marketplace(01:04:15) Tipping loops(01:10:53) Not all markets are susceptible to tipping(01:15:55) The challenge of homogeneity in B2B marketplaces(01:20:29) Signs you're tipping successfully(01:21:43) Level 3: Dominating the market(01:28:29) The opportunity in underestimated markets(01:30:11) The challenges of chasing GMV and losing focus(01:36:36) Recognizing currents and momentum in the market(01:39:20) You can never rest on your laurels(01:41:03) How to apply these frameworks outside of marketplaces(01:42:57) Three ways to find marketplace opportunity(01:45:10 ) Lightning round—Referenced:• Hierarchy of Engagement, Expanded: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/the-hierarchy-of-engagement-expanded-648329d60804• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/• Evernote: https://evernote.com/• Notion: https://www.notion.so/• Houseparty app: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houseparty_(app)• Clubhouse: https://www.clubhouse.com/• How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-price-your-product-naomi-ionita-menlo-ventures/• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/• Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-on-building-a-viral-consumer• Saturn: https://www.joinsaturn.com/• What happened to Secret?: https://www.failory.com/cemetery/secret• How to determine your activation metric: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-determine-your-activation• Shishir Mehrotra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shishirmehrotra/• The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-rituals-of-great-teams-shishir-mehrotra-coda-youtube-microsoft/• Engagement Hierarchy: Core Actions: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/engagement-hierarchy-core-actions-dd4f72042100• Choosing Your North Star Metric: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/choosing-your-north-star-metric• Hierarchy of Marketplaces: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/the-hierarchy-of-marketplaces-introduction-and-level-1-983995aa218e• Mike Williams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoroomie/• Everything Marketplaces: https://www.everythingmarketplaces.com/• Fabrice Grinda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabricegrinda/• OLX: https://www.olx.com/• DoorDash Loves the 'Burbs as Much as You Do: https://www.wsj.com/articles/doordash-loves-the-burbs-as-much-as-you-do-11605618001• Thumbtack: https://www.thumbtack.com/• NPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score• Sean Ellis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanellis/• Rekki: https://rekki.com/• Ronen Givon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronen-givon-535b2514• Hipcamp: https://www.hipcamp.com/• Demand driving supply: The little-understood growth loop behind a surprising number of iconic billion-dollar companies: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/demand-driving-supply-marketplaces• Inside the Revolution at Etsy: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/business/etsy-josh-silverman.html• Faire: https://www.faire.com/• Bill Gurley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/• Mechanical Turk: https://www.mturk.com/• Parker Conrad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkerconrad/• Rippling: https://www.rippling.com/• “White Space” for Building a Marketplace: How to Find Your Competition's Vulnerabilities—and Capitalize: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/white-space-for-building-a-marketplace-how-to-find-your-competitions-vulnerabilities-and-79674aa4d399• Pachinko: https://www.amazon.com/Pachinko-National-Book-Award-Finalist/dp/1455563935• The Five Temptations of a CEO: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Temptations-CEO-Anniversary-Leadership/dp/0470267585• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fable/dp/0787960756• Tesla: https://www.tesla.com/• Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

The Long Game w/ Elijah Murray
Alex Meredith: Product-Led Growth Strategies

The Long Game w/ Elijah Murray

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 19, 2023 53:07


Alex Meredith is the co-founder of Honest, a product growth studio. In this conversation, we explore the concept of product-led growth as a business strategy. We delve into aligning a company around its product, identifying a North Star metric, and using the ICE scoring system. Tune in for insights on measuring and analyzing product performance. EPISODE LINKS: Alex Meredith on LinkedIn Honest Website: https://honestprod.com/ Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson Forbes Article on North Star Metric Growth Hacking on Wikipedia ICE Framework Customer Data Platform (CDP) Reforge Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis TIMESTAMPS: (00:02:19) Product-led growth (00:03:59) Exceptional products in product-led growth (00:08:36) The future of growth (00:11:25) The Evolution of Product-Led Growth (00:16:09) Framework, North Star Metric (00:22:27) North star metric: criteria and adaptability (00:25:40) Product Management vs Product Growth (00:26:41) Product Strategy as a Growth Strategy (00:29:28) ICE framework (00:33:34) Essential Growth Tools (00:37:10) Preferred tech stack (00:38:44) Top product (00:41:23) Transitioning from Full-time to Multiple Clients (00:43:38) Selling Product-Led Growth (00:46:38) Aligning Marketing and Product Growth (00:49:21) Learning Product-Led Growth (00:52:37) Closing CONNECT: Website: https://hoo.be/elijahmurray YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@elijahmurray Twitter: https://twitter.com/elijahmurray Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elijahmurray LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elijahmurray/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-long-game-w-elijah-murray/ Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/elijahmurray --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/elijahmurray/message

Product-Led Podcast
Effective Decision-Making Strategy in PLG with Amplitude's Marketing Leaders

Product-Led Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2023 43:42


In today's product-led convo, host Maja Voje talks with two exceptional experts from Amplitude: Tiffan Dano Kwan, the company's Chief Marketing Officer, and Ashley Brucker Stepien, the VP of Global Marketing. Together, they dive into why implementing an analytical system is essential for effective decision-making in leading a PLG strategy. The discussion explores valuable lessons from their experiences with some of the fastest-growing product-led companies, emphasizing the importance of establishing a legal system, measuring and monitoring pipeline growth and revenue in marketing, and aligning business objectives with a North Star metric. Key Takeaways: [05:25]: Setting up analytics [09:30]: Monitor key metrics and ROI [17:40]: Flexibility in planning  [25:30] Identifying key moments for users [27:30] North Star Metric for marketers [32:30] Input-output metrics and correlation to value [38:04] Setting up analytics system About: Tiffan Dano Kwan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude, known for her expertise in shaping the future of work through digital experiences. With a notable background as CMO at companies like Collibra and Dropbox, Tiffan leads Amplitude's global marketing strategy, focusing on creating exceptional customer-centric experiences. Ashley Bruker, VP of Global Marketing at Amplitude, is a growth expert with a track record leading teams across revenue field channels and product marketing. With experience at high-growth startups like Webflow, Ashley is a pivotal contributor to Amplitude's global marketing strategy, focusing on aligning marketing as a profit center and providing insights on legal systems for product-led growth strategies. Links: Tifenn Dano Kwan | LinkedIn Ashley Bruker | LinkedIn 

Paraşüt'le Üretim Bandı
Itamar Gilad | Product Front | Evidence Guided

Paraşüt'le Üretim Bandı

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2023 51:24


Bu sezon sponsorumuz Sanction Scanner ile tanışın, “Breaking Bad” de gördüğümüz kara para aklama sahnelerini hatırlarsınız. Senede 2 trilyon dolarlık kara para aklanıyor.İşte burada Sanction Scanner'ın yazılımı devreye giriyor. Yapay zeka ve makine öğrenmesi ile desteklenen ürünleri, banka ve benzeri finansal kuruluşlara gerçek zamanlı AML, yani Anti-Money Laundering, taramaları yaparak finansal kuruluşla iş yapmak isteyen kişi ve işlemlerin sıkıntı olup olmadığını analiz ediyor. Sanction Scanner hakkında daha fazla bilgiyi buradan ulaşabilirsin: https://sanctionscanner.com/---Brick Institute eğitimleri, deneyimli eğitmenleri ve seçkin katılımcılarıyla birlikte Ürün Yönetimi Temelleri, Ürün Analitiği ve Ürün Liderliği programları çok yakında başlıyor. Bu eğitimler, gerçek hayat uygulamaları ve vaka çalışmaları üzerine odaklanarak, ürün yönetimi alanında uzmanlaşmak, ürün geliştirme süreçlerini kuvvetlendirmek isteyenler için oluşturuldu.Kontenjan sınırlıdır, bu nedenle hemen www.brick.institute adresinden başvuru yaparak yerinizi garantileyin ve eğitime katılmak için kaydolun!----Üretim Bandı'nın Slack grubu olduğunu biliyor muydunuz? 3000'den fazla ürün yöneticisi, girişimci, yazılımcı, tasarımcının bir arada bulunduğu aktif ürün topluluğuna siz de katılın:>>> uretimbandi.com/slackİki haftada bir yayınladığımız, ürün geliştirmeyle alakalı bültenimizi de aşağıdaki linkten takip edebilirsiniz:>>> uretimbandi.com/bulten----------GUESTItamar Gilad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamargilad/LINKSEvidence Guided: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJCDP1H7TOPICS(00:00) Beginning(01:45) Creation process of the book(07:18) Only certain thing is uncertainty(09:34) AHA moment(16:33) “Let's find out.” approach(19:45) Aligning with product builders(26:33) Right Goals(29:50) North Star Metric & Top Business Metric(36:55) Getting the Evidence(40:30) Launching sh*t to the market(42:42) Adoption of this process

The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Decoding Effective PPC Ads

The Unofficial Shopify Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2023 46:33


Jessie Healy Spent $20 Million on Digital ads, Here's What's Working In 2023Sit down with Jessie Healy, a digital advertising veteran with a focus on e-commerce. Jessie, whose agency oversees $20 million in digital advertising, discusses the subtle art of crafting an ad that resonates. She also offers a nuanced perspective on the role of algorithms, the pitfalls of over-optimization, and why a one-size-fits-all approach to advertising doesn't work. But she also brings something more: an understanding that behind every click, every metric, there's a human making a choice. It's a conversation that goes beyond tactics to explore what really makes consumers click, literally and metaphorically.Show LinksWebtopiaJessie on LinkedInJessie on TwitterSponsorsFree 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - To get an unadvertised gift, email help@zipify.com and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".Elevar - Never miss another conversion with Elevar's server-side tracking. Enhance Klaviyo flow performance 2-3x. Plans from $0 a month + 15-day free trials on all plans.Theme Updater Plus: Vault - Effortlessly back up and quickly restore your Shopify StoreLoop Returns: Ecommerce Returns Management for Shopify - Brands using Loop retain over 50% of their revenue by promoting exchanges over refunds.Not on Shopify? Start your free trialNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin Kurt's newsletterHelp the showAsk a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook GroupLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Kurt up to?See our recent work at EthercycleSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelApply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

Global Product Management Talk
450: The process that makes Thrive Market thrive

Global Product Management Talk

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2023 36:00


Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... Product Mastery Now with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode:  Jonas Klink is joining us. He is the Vice President of Product Management & UX Design at Thrive Market, the health-first membership for conscious living. He is responsible for the company's entire product portfolio, shepherding a lean virtual team of 10 Project Managers & UX Designers. He has established a system allowing the team to focus on understanding customer needs more deeply, creating Outcomes through hypothesis-based testing, and measuring progress through Velocity, Win Rate and impact towards their North Star Metric. In a minute, he will tell us how to do the same thing.

Unchurned
How to Keep Customers from Churning When Renewal Budgets Are Tight ft. Gillian Heltai, CCO (Lattice)

Unchurned

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2023 36:10


When every other business is cutting costs, it has become more important than ever to retain your customers.With a focus on retaining customers, Gillian Heltai, CCO of Lattice shares insights on her 2x2 framework to help you assess customer health and put in place strategies to retain customers during the downturn.  Key Highlights- Tech downturn impacting budgets and renewal cycles- An economic framework for customer retention strategies- Assessing value: ask, adoption metrics, health score- Determining business health: ask customers, and analyze data- North Star Metric: health score elements, product adoption- Focus on best customers, reinforce value, gather resources- Health score drives customer engagement and retention- Helping customers during the crisis to retain advocates.We spend more of our time on the value than we do on the health of the customer." - Gillian HeltaiCheck out the framework: https://www.emcap.com/thoughts/playbook-for-retaining-customers-in-an-economic-downturn/

True Growth con Fernando Trueba
Deep Dive: Formación y Manejo de Equipos - Carlos Ranero (Jüsto)

True Growth con Fernando Trueba

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2023 60:32


Carlos Ranero es Chief Growth Officer de Jüsto. Cayo tiene un background muy interesante, inició su carrera en empresas de consumo, alcanzando posiciones de liderazgo en Anheuser-Busch donde fue VP de Marketing y Global VP de Consumer Connections y en Danone, donde fue Director de Marketing para Bonafont y Flavored Beverages. Después de pasar 15 años en la industria de productos de consumo, Cayo hizo el salto a eCommerce al unirse al equipo ejecutivo de Jüsto como Chief Growth Officer. Con Cayo platico sobre su adaptación al mundo de startups y en particular en eCommerce y entramos a fondo en la forma en la que maneja a su equipo, tomando en cuenta que en tan solo dos años y medio, ha pasado de manejar un equipo de 3 personas en México a ser responsable de más de 50 colaboradores distribuidos en tres países distintos. Por favor ayúdame y sigue a True Growth en Instagram aquí. Te invito a que veas las notas de este episodio aquí. Sigue a nuestro Invitado: Carlos Ranero en LinkedIn Conecta con True Growth: True Growth Master Program Sitio Web YouTube Sigue a nuestro host: Fernando Trueba en Instagram Fernando Trueba en LinkedIn Recursos mencionados en el episodio: True Growth Master Program Built to last - Jim Collins Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman The Reforge Solution - Reforge Program Guía de contenidos: 03:44 - ¡Bienvenido, Cayo! 04:23 - El salto de carrera que Cayo hizo de CPG a Tecnología y E-commerce 10:24 - Las dificultades a las que se enfrentó Cayo en su cambio de carrera 16:34 - Cómo Cayo se educó rápidamente sobre su nuevo rumbo profesional 18:21 - El MBA del futuro: trabajar en una Startup 20:25 - Empresa pública vs. Empresa privada: diferencias en las dinámicas de trabajo 22:45 - La importancia de alinear la toma de decisiones con el objetivo de aprender 27:42 - North Star Metric vs. Métricas Departamentales: ¿Cuál es el mejor método para definir objetivos? 31:13 - Los retos que surgen durante la implementación de OKRs 34:32 - Cómo Cayo ha desarrollado su estilo de liderazgo 39:40 - La importancia de establecer metas grandes en todos los aspectos de la vida 42:23 - Aprendizajes al haber gestionado equipos de forma acelerada en Jüsto 47:29 - Cómo manejar equipos remotos de manera eficiente 52:50 - Cómo Cayo maneja la dinámica de las reuniones individuales en su equipo 59:13 - ¡No te pierdas nuestro próximo episodio sobre Formación y Gestión de Equipos!

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Thrive Market's Winning Growth Formula: Velocity x Win Rate x Impact = Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 30, 2023 58:12


In this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr chat with Jonas Klink, Thrive Market’s Vice President of Product Management & Design. Thrive Market is a subscription-based online grocery delivery service that aims to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone.   And that is a perfect fit for Jonas, who has over 15 years of experience in eCommerce working at companies like eBay, Walmart, and WeightWatchers. As he thought about the next chapter in his career, Jonas wanted to find a mission-driven company where he could make a difference, and Thrive is proving to be the right place for him to have that impact. So in this conversation, we dig deep into Jonas’ growth approach and his passion for building organizational learning velocity. Scientific rigor is at the heart of his process, but speed is key. He explains that to keep growth flowing, tests must focus on answering hypotheses, but they cannot get bogged down by everything else needed for broad distribution.  If you have ever struggled to manage design in a high-tempo testing environment you will particularly enjoy this conversation. Jonas and his team have built a culture where UX and product are deeply connected so that design can flow into experimentation without encumbering it. And that is just the beginning. From his use of the RICE prioritization framework to building alignment around a North Star Metric, Jonas is building the culture of experimentation most of us strive for as we look to accelerate growth. So join us as we dive in with Jonas Klink and find out what’s driving breakout growth success at Thrive Market.    We discussed:* Sustainability, healthy living, and 18 million orders: (05:11) * Bringing experience from Walmart, eBay, and Jet.com to Thrive Market  : (10:08) * Organizing for rapid experimentation and great design: (14:54) * Building a growth language where learnings replace failures: (30:58) * The importance of lightweight process for teams: (39:11)And much, much, more . . .  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seanellis.substack.com

Studio Beeckestijn
Growth Hacking: de implementatie van het groeimodel

Studio Beeckestijn

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2023 43:35


In deze podcast vertelt Tanja Sanders je over growth hacking. Ze gaat in op de onderwerpen customer centricity, data driven growth, de North Star Metric, groeihefbomen én de organisatiecultuur. Aan de hand van praktische voorbeelden leer je hoe je het groeimodel kunt toepassen.

Management Blueprint
87: Find Your North Star Metric with Peter Lehrman

Management Blueprint

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 18, 2023 39:48


https://youtu.be/nfjlO5z4SiM Peter Lehrman is the CEO of Axial, a private deal network serving professionals who own, advise, and invest in North American lower middle-market companies. We talk about the North Star Metric, the due diligence checklist for buying a business, and the benefits of having perseverance in business.    --- Find Your North Star Metric with Peter Lehrman Our guest is Peter Lehrman, the CEO of Axial, a trusted online platform business owner and their M&A advisors use to safely and intelligently. explore and execute capital raises, acquisitions, and exits with strategic buyers or professional financial sponsors. Hey, Peter, great to have you on the show. Same here, Steve. Thank you for this. Looking forward to it. I've been looking forward to this as well. Not the least because AXS was one of the first SAS service that I used in this country. Ten years ago, we subscribed to your platform, I think it was a fairly new platform and we used something called, used to be called merger market in Europe. And we found Axial to be the closest alternative, we really liked merger market and then we found Axial and it was, it was a critical piece of our business, it was investment banking business and without your platform, I think we would have been very, very short of information about the market investors. So it was very, very helpful to us at the time. I'm happy to hear that. I mean, that's a great plug. So thank you so much. I know that the platform has changed a lot since and we'll cover that later in the show. So just as a warmup, so tell me and our listeners a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. How did you become this technology entrepreneur of this SaaS business, this platform that you built? So, you know, a couple of different places to start the answer to that question. Very quickly, I mean, I am the fifth of five children. My father was an entrepreneur. And so there was a lot of entrepreneurial conversation at the dining table as a kid. So that was maybe where it got started. And I was always working jobs in the summer and stuff like that. But then I'd say to just make the answer somewhat brief, my first job out of college was working with my brother Thomas and his partner, Mark. They co-founded an information business in New York as an information services company. And the company makes it easy for professional investors to speak to experts as part of analyzing companies and studying companies and making good investment decisions. And, you know, it typically gets referred to as like a technology enabled information services company. And to make that, you know, sort of long story short, that was an incredibly successful and rapidly growing business. I happened to just be lucky. My brother was starting it. I was their first intern and I was at the company kind of shortly after day one just as an intern. And then I went there right out of undergraduate school and I worked there for about six years. And over that time, the company grew from almost no people and no customers to a couple hundred million in sales and close to a thousand employees. And I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And I tried to just sort of hang on to the rocket ship and do my best work. But that was kind of where things got started for me. That was when I had a great experience. That was my first experience like being part of a fast growing company. I was just like, this is an incredible career path. This is an incredible way to spend your career is trying to either launch or be part of fast growing companies. I left and went to graduate school. I went to Stanford for graduate school. Obviously Stanford's like, you know, in the center of Silicon Valley. And so it's just tech, tech, tech, tech all day, every day. And I went in 2006 when I was there, finished in 2008. So, you know, that was like SaaS and Salesforce.com and like web 2.0 was kind of taking over and the first generation of really succ...

Billion Moonshots
93: Simplifying Web3 Onboarding | Arman & Parker, Founders of Peaze

Billion Moonshots

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2023 54:00


Arman and Parker are the founders of Peaze - allowing you to use any dapp with just an email and credit card. A lot of cool things are being built in web3 - but most of the new users who come in are unable to use them. Users have to download a wallet, manage the private keys, on-ramp the correct crypto, swap it into the correct asset, bridge, transfer over from Coinbase, etc. Web3 user onboarding is a real problem. What if you could just sign in with your email. SPONSORS Dukaan: https://mydukaan.io/ Recast: https://recast.studio/ and use code BMS05 for 5% discount GUEST LINKS Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArmanVaziri || https://twitter.com/Peaze Medium: https://medium.com/@Peaze LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/arman-vaziri/ || https://www.linkedin.com/company/76595591 CONNECT Prashant Bagga: https://linktr.ee/prashantpbagga Billion Moonshots: https://linktr.ee/billionmoonshots OUTLINE (00:00) - Leaving big tech job for build in web3 (03:30) - Origin story of Peaze (5:59) - How Peaze lowers the barrier to entry for dapps (08:30) - What happens behind the scenes when a user signs-in with Google on Peaze? (10:00) - How Peaze secures the private keys of a user? (11:23) - Narrowing down on the user onboarding problem (13:49) - Is Peaze Stripe for web3? (17:25) - User education around web3 concepts (21:10) - North Star Metric of Peaze (24:19) - The one-click experience (30:53) - Helping users become self-custodian (32:35) - DeFi is the use case for crypto '(35:12) - Market Adoption (37:44) - The Peaze Logo (38:40) - Raising $2m during a crypto downturn (51:02) - Other Web3 Trends TOP EPISODES 87: Shane Mac, President of XMTP Labs 77: Shashank Kumar, Founder of Razorpay [Hindi] 75: Kyla Scanlon 74: Adam Jackson, Co-founder of Braintrust 68: Natalie Brunell, Host of Coin Stories Podcast 62: Suumit Shah, CEO of Dukaan [Hindi] Past guests of Billion Moonshots include Shane Mac, Shashank Kumar, Suumit Shah, Natalie Brunell, Kyla Scanlon, Adam Jackson, Tyler Denk, Anshul Rustaggi, Danielle Strachman, Chirag Taneja, Suhas Motwani, Aditya Mohanty, Jan-Philipp Peters, Mo Islam, Peer Richelsen, Justin Nguyen, Paul Griffiths, Gautam Gupta, Sang Le, Rahul Rana, Grace Ling, Joseph Choi and many more.

Subscription League
PhotoRoom - How to grow a subscription app business and its user base globally by Olivier Lemarié

Subscription League

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2023 25:52 Transcription Available


With over 50 million installs and a growing number of paying subscribers, PhotoRoom is scaling quickly across multiple markets across the globe. In our conversation, Olivier shares his insights on growth strategies in gaming and utilities, the challenges of scaling across markets, and the importance of experimentation and community-building.We discuss how subscription-based utility apps like PhotoRoom defer from gaming apps that rely on one-time in-app purchases and user acquisition.We also explore the challenges of scaling a business across multiple markets and how PhotoRoom is applying agile testing and learnings from one market to another.Olivier also shares how PhotoRoom leverages TikTok content creators for user acquisition and emphasizes the importance of giving team members strong ownership and trust, making experimentation easy, and understanding the culture and needs of different markets.Tuen in to learn more about PhotoRoom's journey to grow its global footprint.Episode Topics at a GlanceWhat is PhotoRoomMarket targeting and business strategies when growing an app internationallyTV apps vs. Photo editing and utility appsPhotoRoom's challenges aheadLeveraging TikTok content for user acquisitionGrowth tips for utility appsBalancing ownership in a team More about OlivierCurrently VP Growth at PhotoRoom, the leading AI photo-editing app for resellers, small businesses, and marketplaces, Olivier has been leading revenue and user base growth since 2020. Recently, PhotoRoom has reached 50 million installs, has millions of active users and several hundred thousand paying subscribers.  Prior to joining PhotoRoom, Olivier was heading Molotov marketing operations, a TV streaming app used by millions of french households and recently acquired by Fubo and he led the monetization strategy of Wooga, the Berlin-based mobile gaming studio.Olivier's LinksPhotoRoom websiteOlivier's TwitterOlivier's LinkedinTimestamps0:00 Welcome to the Subscription League 0:20 Olivier Lemarié introduction 0:50 The PhotoRoom editing app 2:59 Olivier's background and journey 3:44 Growth for utility vs gaming apps 4:49 Olivier's experience at Molotov vs Photo Room 8:04 Core challenges at PhotoRoom 9:30 PhotoRoom's test culture 11:32 PhotoRoom's value and retention with users 13:15 How PhotoRoom leverages TikTok content 18:07 Olivier's advice for growth 22:23 Balancing ownership in a team 23:20 What is PhotoRoom's North Star Metric? 24:20 Where to learn more about Olivier and PhotoRoom 25:15 Wrap Up 25:26 Thank you for listening!

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2023 51:27


Hila Qu is one of the leading growth execs of the last decade. Hila helped scale Acorns from 1 million to 5 million users as their VP of growth. Hila then joined GitLab, where she launched their PLG motion (on top of an established sales motion), and built their first-ever growth team. Today Hila is an advisor to amazing companies like Replit and funds like Mucker Capital, Openview and First Round Capital. In Today's Episode with Hila Qu We Discuss: 1.) From Biology and Explosions to Growth: How Hila made her way into the world of growth with growthhackers.com? What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways from her time with Acorns and Gitlab? How do B2B growth orgs compare to B2C growth orgs? What is different? What is the same? 2.) WTF is Growth? When? How & Why: How does Hila define growth today? What is it not? When is the right time for early-stage founders to hire their first growth hire? Why does Hila always look for data analysts in this first growth hire? From a data standpoint, what should founders have ready and accessible for their first growth hire to have access to and learn from? Is Google Analytics enough? 3.) Hiring Your First Growth Hire: How should early-stage founders structure the hiring process for the first growth hire? What do the best growth job descriptions include? What do they not include? Once applications are in, how does Hila advise founders screen for the best candidates? How should founders structure the interview process post-screening? What are the must-ask questions? Who is involved in the interview process? What are some red flags? 4.) The Master of Onboarding: What should new growth hires want to achieve in the first week? What should they want to complete in the first month? In the first quarter, what do the best candidates have completed? What can founders do to set their growth hires up for success in the best way at this time? 5.) Growth Models, North Stars, Activation and Onboarding and Key KPIs: What really is a growth model? How do founders and growth teams create one? How does Hila advise founders on how to pick the right North Star Metric to focus on? Why are activation and conversion Hila's two favorite growth metrics? What are growth loops? What are growth funnels? How do they work together?

Best in SaaS
Unpacking Demand Efficiency: The North Star Metric to Reduce CAC

Best in SaaS

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2022 8:59


Podcast SummaryIn this conversation with Eli Rubel, CEO at Matter Made, he talks about the rebranding of the Best in Saas Podcast to Demand Efficiency. Today, you'll hear about the podcast's new direction and focus. With over 15 years of marketing experience, Eli has served as a marketing advisor for companies like Dropbox, Hopin, G2, Calm for Business, Loom, and Productboard. Many other companies rely on Matter Made to smash their yearly growth targets through best-in-class Go-To-Market programs.Eli Holds a degree in Leadership and Strategy from Harvard Business School.Episode Outline[00:55] Name change from Best in Saas to Demand Efficiency[01:05] How do we do more with less?[01:40] What does Demand Efficiency mean?[02:20] Demand Efficiency as a North Star metric[04:11] What does Demand Efficiency measure?[05:43] Opportunities around Cost to Aquire (CAC)[06:29] Season expectations[07:04] Demand Efficiency Index[07:55] Demand Efficiency Slack CommunityConnect with Matter MadeMatter MadeLinkedIn (Eli)

Metrics that Measure Up - B2B SaaS Analytics
Saas Metrics for Investors and Execution Decision Making - with Nick Franklin, Founder and CEO ChartMogul

Metrics that Measure Up - B2B SaaS Analytics

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2022 35:41


Nick Franklin is the Founder and CEO of ChartMogul, a leading SaaS Metrics Reporting, and Subscription Analytics Platform. Nick worked for five years at ZenDesk, where he led both Europe and then Asia-Pacific before founding ChartMogul eight years ago.With 2,500 B2B SaaS companies as customers, Nick's insights around how companies use metrics to inform decision-making are unmatched. Nick's perspective is that during the earliest days of a B2B SaaS company's evolution, the importance of being able to track metrics begins. An example early on is how pricing and packaging impact customer acquisition and growth. Another example Nick highlighted is if a founder is considering raising external funds, having a grasp on the key financial performance metrics is critical to gaining investor confidence.Nick highlighted the importance of providing access to company performance metrics to all employees is critical to creating a metrics-centric culture. When I asked Nick "why companies do not provide performance metrics transparency to their employees?", Nick shared that many of their customers simply say they prefer to keep company financial information "on a need-to-know basis". Nick could not explain why that is beyond history and an old-fashioned mentality.Nick responded that they wanted to ensure that even the earliest-stage companies could develop a metrics culture, and use ChartMogul as that infrastructure. That is why ChartMogul provides a free version of its platform to companies with less than $10,000 MRR. Over fifty percent of their customers are paying customers up to $100M ARR. Some companies decide to use a metrics and subscription analytics platform in preparation for an impending financing event, which begged the question of what are the top metrics investors want to see a founder truly understand. Nick highlighted early customer retention, revenue and product engagement growth, and eventually dollar-based customer retention and expansion.Double clicking on the "engagement" measurement, what are the common metrics to measure? How many users, how many times do they log into/use the platform on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, and then almost always there is a product-specific "North Star Metric" such as messages, API calls, documents sent, etc...During our discussion on "engagement", I asked Nick what the aha moment, often referred to as the "activation point" is for ChartMogul. He shared that integrating into a subscription management platform is the first activation point, but more importantly the "high-value activation point" is when the user gains insight or perspective on a metric that was not previously available, understood, or even considered as a critical business metric.If you are evaluating how best to capture, calculate, publish and use metrics to inform your B2B SaaS journey and decisions, this conversation with Nick is a great listen.

Engineering Kiosk
#47 Wer Visionen hat, soll zum Arzt!?

Engineering Kiosk

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2022 43:53


Eine Vision und Mission für die Firma und das Team: Notwendig oder Firlefanz?Die Geschäftsführung spricht oft von der Vision und Mission der eigenen Firma. Doch was ist das eigentlich? Wo ist der Unterschied? Und was habe ich, als kleiner Mitarbeiter, eigentlich zu tun? Wie wichtig ein gemeinsames Ziel und ein übergeordneter Sinn für die Belegschaft sein können, wird oft unterschätzt. Ab und zu sogar als esoterisch bezeichnet, denn es ist doch klar, wofür wir alle arbeiten. Ist es?In dieser Episode klären wir was eine Vision und eine Mission ist, wo die Unterschiede liegen, welchen Effekt dies auf die Firma und das eigene Team haben kann, warum es nicht einfach ist eine Vision und Mission zu definieren, ob es auch ohne klappen kann und wie man diese Sache generell angeht.Bonus: Warum man keine Löcher kaufen kann, was Computerbild Themen sind und wieso Andy nicht für Heckler und Koch arbeiten würde.Feedback (gerne auch als Voice Message)Email: stehtisch@engineeringkiosk.devTwitter: https://twitter.com/EngKioskWhatsApp +49 15678 136776Gerne behandeln wir auch euer Audio Feedback in einer der nächsten Episoden, einfach Audiodatei per Email oder WhatsApp Voice Message an +49 15678 136776LinksDall-E 2: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/Index Out of Bounds Episode 40 - Tech-Trends, die uns begeistern: https://anchor.fm/indexoutofbounds/episodes/040--Tech-Trends--die-uns-begeistern--AR-und-ML-e1r24fnPrompt Engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineeringSite Reliability Engineering: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Reliability_EngineeringWas ist eine North Star Metric?: https://blog.hubspot.de/marketing/north-star-metricEngineering Kiosk Episode #44 Der Weg zum hochperformanten Team: https://engineeringkiosk.dev/podcast/episode/44-der-weg-zum-hochperformanten-team/Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_Key_ResultsSprungmarken(00:00:00) Intro(00:00:55) Prompt Engineering(00:04:12) Können wir durch Prompt Engineering bald Incidents lösen und Operations betreiben?(00:06:37) Die Vision und Mission Site Reliability Engineering durch Prompt Engineering steuerbar zu machen(00:07:44) Die Vision und Mission von Firmen und Teams und was es für einen Effekt auf das Team haben kann(00:10:50) Kann jedes Team zur Firmen-Vision und Mission contributen?(00:13:58) Was ist eine Vision? Was ist eine Mission? Wo ist der Unterschied?(00:16:12) Visions- und Missions-Beispiele von populären Firmen(00:19:52) Wie kommt man zu einer Vision und Mission?(00:21:15) Muss man für seinen Job brennen, um die Vision und Mission zu definieren und daran zu glauben?(00:27:05) Hat Andys aktuelles Team eine eigene Vision und Mission?(00:29:08) Große Herausforderung: Eine Vision und Mission zu formulieren, wo jede Abteilung teilhaben kann(00:32:57) Für ein Performing Team sollte der Sinn, Metrik und Ziel definiert sein(00:34:42) Themen für euer 1on1 und Manager: Was sind unsere Vision, Mission und Ziele?(00:35:32) Kann eine Firma oder ein Team auch ohne Vision und Mission erfolgreich sein?(00:38:58) Wie startet Ihr am besten, um sich dem Thema Vision und Mission zu nähern?(00:40:42) Vision und Mission: Esoterisches oder essentielles Thema?(00:42:17) Was ist die Vision und Mission vom Engineering Kiosk?(00:42:51) Outro: Feedback, Fragen und WeiterempfehlungHostsWolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)Andy Grunwald (https://twitter.com/andygrunwald)Feedback (gerne auch als Voice Message)Email: stehtisch@engineeringkiosk.devTwitter: https://twitter.com/EngKioskWhatsApp +49 15678 136776

Doppelgänger Tech Talk

Warum haben VCs Ghostwriter? Adblocker blocken https://ads.lollipod.de. Miro kauft Around. Wie sollten Anteile unter 3 Gründern verteilt werden? Was wäre eine gute Company-KPI? Macht es Sinn als Business Angel immer zu verkaufen, sobald ein Start-up Unicorn Status erlangt? Facebook wird beschuldigt, Konkurrenten von OnlyFans zu benachteiligen. TikTok profitiert von Livestreams von bettelnden Familien. Müssten Inflation & Gaspreise die Tourismusbranche im nächsten Jahr nicht noch stärker treffen als den E-Commerce aktuell? LVMH Earnings. Wie ist eure Meinung zum werbefinanzierten Abo von Netflix? Philipp Glöckler (https://twitter.com/gloeckler) und Philipp Klöckner (https://twitter.com/pip_net) sprechen heute über: (00:00:10) Ghostwriter (00:07:15) Lollipod (00:10:30) Miro + Around (00:13:25) Anteile (00:18:30) KPI; Driver Tree; North Star Metric (00:38:00) Business Angel (00:44:45) Facebook (00:52:00) TikTok (00:55:00) Tourismus (01:04:00) LVMH (01:18:30) Netflix Shownotes: Ghostwriter https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ghostwriter-silicon-valley-vc-venture-founder-san-francisco-2022-10 Scott Stedman: Nick Clegg and Nichola Mendelsohn are accused in a civil lawsuit of taking bribes from OnlyFans https://twitter.com/scottmstedman/status/1580276334948806656 Nick Clegg, Other Meta Executives 'Inadvertently' Identified in OnlyFans Bribery Suit https://gizmodo.com/clegg-meta-executives-identified-in-onlyfans-bribery-su-1849649270?rev=1665602961883 Facebook accused of blacklisting OnlyFans' rivals https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60497274 OnlyFans Owner's Dubious Financial History https://forensicnews.net/adminleo-onlyfans-owners-dubious-financial-history/ TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging https://www.bbc.com/news/world-63213567 Musk appeasement of Putin and China stokes fears of new Twitter policies https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/12/musk-twitter-foreign-policy-worries/ Elon Musk denies he spoke to Putin about Ukraine war https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63225781 **Doppelgänger Tech Talk Podcast** Doppelgänger & Friends auf Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/doppelgaengerio Sheet https://doppelgaenger.io/sheet/ Earnings & Event Kalender https://www.doppelgaenger.io/kalender/ Disclaimer https://www.doppelgaenger.io/disclaimer/ Passionfroot Storefront www.passionfroot.xyz/doppelgaenger Post Production by Jan Wagener https://twitter.com/JanAusDemOff

Product Guru's
#154 Carol Nicolini - Você tem usado errado a North Star Metric.

Product Guru's

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 5, 2022 63:57


A North Star é certamente a metodologia de estratégia de produto mais abrangente e, ao mesmo tempo, a mais incompreendida atualmente. A maioria das equipes de produto está lidando com as consequências de não defini-la, ou defini-la incorretamente, levando suas equipes por um caminho indesejado. Por exemplo, vemos grande parte das empresas lidando com objetivos trimestrais, tentando reinventar a roda ao final de cada trimestre para tentar alinhar seus objetivos e encontrar “resultados-chave” que se alinhem com o que a organização busca. O que traz como consequência uma cultura organizacional que alinha seus resultados e esforços a projetos trimestrais, e não a missões de longo prazo e alto impacto. Para citar John Cutler, esses padrões são o resultado de tratar trimestres como “longos sprints de entrega organizacional vs. uma cadência de introspecção” Perfil da Carol: https://bit.ly/3C4vq0i ------- Quer trabalhar no Banco Itaú? Então só vem! https://bit.ly/3SmzNLA _____

The Business Project
Marketplace Growth

The Business Project

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2022 42:00 Transcription Available


In this episode, join Rahul Jacob as he talks to Akshay Punjabi, Head of Performance Marketing (Marketplaces) at Mensa Brands, about scaling traffic and revenue on marketplaces. The Episode covers the following points: Why is Amazon a cost-effective medium for acquiring customers over other channels Getting started with listings and how to use the honeymoon period to your advantage. How to do Competitor Research effectively on Amazon How to Organically scale reviews from customers and tools to use. Using Brand Analytics for increasing Average Order Value Types of Ads to use starting off and identifying the right keywords Finding the North Star Metric and predicting order volumes.   Useful Links: Use Helium10 for for all your marketplace needs like keyword research, listing optimisation and scaling reviews. To get started with Helium10, here's the link to get 50% off for the first month - https://bit.ly/3eDCM2V

The Stack
Product-Led Growth with Justin Bauer, Chief Product Officer at Amplitude

The Stack

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 41:46


Amplitude is a product intelligence a.k.a product analytics platform. Founded in 2012, the company has grown to be one of the leading platforms of its kind. That's largely in part because of their product lead growth strategy. A strategy that works uniquely well given what its platform is. Justin Bauer has been with Amplitude since 2017 as the Chief Product Officer. Justin's got a strong focus on data, and he's also focused on keeping that data moving him forward. That's why he has his team zone in on their North Star Metric. That metric is the key measure of success for the product team in a company. For Justin, that metric is their weekly learning user. In this interview, we'll learn more about what that means and how they're tracking it. Justin also shares more about their product lead growth strategy, why it works for them, and how he's built a stack that helps his team meet their goals.Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You'll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

From Think to Do
What we can learn during the annual goals "silly season"

From Think to Do

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2022 20:50


This time of year is called the "silly season" in motorsports because we're in the literal middle of our racing season AND we're all already operating in the 2023 season: planning partnerships, talent moves, and logistics for the year we won't start for another six months.  Every summer I see something really similar with my corporate clients who set goals annually: sometimes between mid-July and September, even IF the organization did a mid-year reset after Q2, we find ourselves looking at our annual goals, scratching our heads, and wondering, "What were we thinking?" For organizations that set goals annually in November or December of the previous year: when we set those goals, we did so based on the information we had at the time. Now, we have seven (or so) more months of information that may line up with or be dramatically different than the assumptions we set those goals based on. We know a lot more right now about what our goals for this year could or should have been. But, generally, now is not the time to "revisit" or "reset" our annual goals. In a lot of situations, it's better to stay the course, notice what we're learning about our goals while we work with them right now, and get ready for our next annual planning cycle (which is just around the corner) to improve, with what we learn during this "growing pains" phase. This episode talks about a couple of specific opportunities that you can leverage for learning right now, while we're "living with" annual goals that may feel awkward: The creative exercise of evolving (not changing) Objective language; and What we can learn right now that makes us smarter about our most important organizational measures of success, which we may reflect next year as a North Star Metric and/or Topline Measures. This awkward mid-year growing pain phase can be a source of frustration, and it can be a really valuable source of information and learning that helps us do better with our next round of annual goal-setting. Visit http://thinkydoers.com to share your thoughts about this episode, and to learn more about creating and leading Connected Strategic™ organizations.

The Pilote Podcast - In the Driver's Seat
Bad News & Digital Nomads

The Pilote Podcast - In the Driver's Seat

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2022 46:07


The one where Cory and David talk about the state of the news media and what lies ahead. Can the new 'creator economy' and Web3 help journalism and the search for a single version of the truth? Plus the pros and cons of life as a digital nomad. Show Notes & Bookmarks00:40 - Water being sucked out of the wells is the subject of the movie Chinatown (1974) & and a series of Goliath (2019) 02:36 - The (Bad) State of the News09:44 - What is the North Star Metric for a Newspaper that doesn't want to be sensationalist?11:25 - More than half of Americans get their news from Social Media 14:05 - Yes Minister Newspaper insight15:46 - Could Web3 style technologies restore trust to the news? We will come back to that.16:23 - Cruden Farm is the Murdock family estate16:33 - Paparazzi dates back to the 1950s, but origins are in the Felini film, La Dolce Vita 17:45 - Online subscriptions seem to be working and changing the business model.20:19 - How could the Blockchain change news?21:10 - Shared identity and trust mechanisms could be developed…21:44 - Section 230 of the communications decency act allows social media platforms to be classed as platforms rather then publishers, so they avoid accountability standards that newspapers have. 23:59 - Don't forget to check out Full Episodes and bonus content on our YouTube Channel 24:10 - How do we add a consensus mechanism to fact-checking the news?26:18 - There is a precedent for this… Wikipedia27:08 -News IN the metaverse - MTV Awards: Best metaverse performance by a 'virtual being' 29:08 - The biggest problem with news is the lack of local accountability because of 'News deserts'32:57 - The Pros and Cons of being a Digital Nomad39:27 - Nomadlist.com is a great resource for digital nomads. Melbourne is ranked 43. Top city is Warsaw, Poland. Atlanta ranked 40.Support the show

Two Facet
How to define the North Star Metric of your product with Amplitude Framework

Two Facet

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2022 28:29


As a product team we need a Northstar Metric to guide us towards success: a metric that represents the vision of our product, aligns everybody on the team towards our goals and help us make product decisions. So, how do we define it and, moreover, how can we determine the steps we can take in our day to day work to impact it? The North Star Framework by Amplitude helps us define all this in a structured and collaborative way. In this episode we discuss what is this framework, when should we use it and the benefits, as well as how to use it. We go through the core elements do the framework that can be defined in a collaborative workshop: - The North Star - The Input Metrics - The “work” We also explain and discuss with examples, the Northstar framework checklist, the list of what makes a good metric: - It expresses value - It represents vision and strategy - It's a leading indicator - It's actionable - It's understandable - It's measurable - It's not a vanity metric To know more a about the framework and how to run the workshop, you can have a look to the original Northstar Framework Playbook by Amplitude _____________ If you like what we do you can buy us coffee

Strategic Move
Что такое хорошая продуктовая аналитика, зачем реально нужна North Star метрика, и как создать аналитическую модель продукта с Еленой Серегино

Strategic Move

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2022 60:17


Сегодня в гостях Елена Серегина - практикующий консультант по продуктовой аналитике и фаундер Prometricspy. Мы обсудим темы:что такое хорошая продуктовая аналитикакак оценить вклад продуктовой аналитики в успех компании и продукта как выбрать подход для создания аналитических моделей продуктакак создать приближенную к реальности пирамиду метриккакие есть достоинства и недостатки North Star Metric, действительно ли она нужначто такое модель роста продукта и нужна ли онакак создать сильную продуктовую гипотезукак создать аналитику в старпапеПодписывайтесь на канал Strategic Move, чтобы не пропустить выпуски: https://t.me/strategic_move

Management Blueprint
87: Find Your North Star Metric with Peter Lehrman

Management Blueprint

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2022 39:48


Peter Lehrman is the CEO of Axial, a private deal network serving professionals who own, advise, and invest in North American lower middle-market companies. We talk about the North Star Metric, the due diligence checklist for buying a business, and the benefits of having perseverance in business.    Time Stamps [01:32] Peter's entrepreneurial journey [05:47] Peter's experience with management blueprints [07:16] The North Star Metric [11:07] Axial's North Star Metric [14:05] How Axial subtly leads customers into signing an NDA [16:59] Why businesses need to custom-adjust their management frameworks [18:46] The importance of having perseverance in business [22:17] The complex process of buying or selling a business [26:44] The key identifiers of small businesses in the US [31:27] Technology adoption and incorporation at Axial [34:13] How Peter and his team create reach for business buyers and sellers [36:37] Buying a business: Due diligence checklist [39:29] Parting Thoughts   Links and Resources: Axial.net Peter's Twitter Handle Peter's LinkedIn The North Star Playbook Buyable: Your Guide to Building a Self-Managing, Fast-Growing, and High-Profit Business Complete the Buyability Assessment for Your Business https://StevePreda.com

The Startup Operator
EP 162 : Pioneering India's 2nd White Revolution - Kirti Jangra (Co-founder & COO, Animall) | Managed Marketplace | Build for Bharat

The Startup Operator

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2022 27:04


Kirti Jangra is the Co-founder & COO of Animall Technologies, an online platform that facilitates the buying and selling of cattle and empowering farmers to usher in a new era of white revolution. In this episode she spoke about solving a full stack of problems, what it takes to enable the next white revolution, the nuances of scaling a managed marketplace and more in her conversation with Roshan Cariappa. Topics: 00:00 Introduction 01:00 Founding story of Animall 03:21 Solving a full stack of problems 06:10 Lessons from building for the Bharat user 09:38 Enabling the next White Revolution 11:00 Nuances of scaling a managed marketplace 13:55 Nuances of managing a cattle marketplace 15:13 Nuances of onboarding users 16:40 Educating the customer 18:21 North Star Metric for Animall 19:46 The next couple of years for Animall 21:41 Animall: the next Amul? 22:40 High level challenges Kirti is solving 24:55 Importance of having a co-founder 25:46 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs ------------------------------------- Click here to get regular WhatsApp updates: https://wa.me/message/ZUZQQGKCZTADL1 ------------------------------------- Connect with Kirti : Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirtijangra/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/KirtiAnimall ------------------------------------- Connect with Us: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator ​Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup​​ ------------------------------------- If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/startup-operator/message

Project Talks
#22 — Владимир Баяндин о продуктовом подходе в создании образовательного контента

Project Talks

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2022 53:45


Вова Баяндин уже 4 года работает над разными продуктами Скаенга. Сейчас он отвечает за весь образовательный опыт студентов Skypro: преподавателей, платформу, контент. Я пригласила Вову отрефлексировать 2021 год и поделиться секретами работы команды Skypro

Investor Connect Podcast
Startup Funding Espresso -- Challenges With North Star Metrics

Investor Connect Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2022 1:34


Challenges With North Star Metrics Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. The North Star Metric seeks to capture the essence of a business in just one metric. It makes decision-making easier. Anything that doesn't foster that metric is deprioritized. It does change over time as the company's priorities change especially with growth. It's not always a simple metric and can be complex depending on the business. You can however choose a simple one so it's easier to communicate. Here are some examples: Spotify -- Time spent listening to music. Quora -- Number of answers to questions. Uber -- Rides per week. Amazon -- Purchases per prime subscriber. The North Star Metric can focus on time spent, transactions, productivity, or other. Consider what drives your company's growth and focus the North Star Metric on it. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let's go startup something today. ___________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out   For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group   Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

Investor Connect Podcast
Startup Funding Espresso – Finding Your North Star Metric

Investor Connect Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2022 1:31


Finding Your North Star Metric Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. The North Star Metric is the one metric that drives the growth of the core business. Founders use it to focus the company around a common goal. Some startups focus on signups, others focus on retention, and still, others focus on engagement. If you don't have much startup experience, then you should work on customer acquisition, engagement, and retention efforts first. Once you know what drives the best outcome for the startup then you can focus on determining your North Star Metric.  Your North Star Metric should be simple and specific. Look at successful outcomes by cohort or initiative. What benefit did each one bring? What is common about them? What is your ideal user case? From this information, look for the factor that drove the outcome. Focus your North Star on that driver. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let's go startup something today. ___________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out   For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group   Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

The Swyx Mixtape
[Weekend Drop] Developer Relations (with Sai Senthilkumar of Redpoint)

The Swyx Mixtape

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2021 49:50


I was interviewed by Sai of Redpoint based on these blogposts: https://www.swyx.io/community-builder/ https://www.swyx.io/measuring-devrel/ The session was covered by Tom Tunguz, whose blog I love (https://tomtunguz.com/shawn-wang-offi...) and the feedback was wonderful!Full video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guK1XiLQbH8Timestamps [00:01:42] What is DevRel?  [00:04:59] Where should DevRel report?  [00:06:57] Getting Started with Early Stage DevRel  [00:12:28] How to Structure DevRel Efforts  [00:16:02] When to Hire First DevRel  [00:18:23] Community and DevRel  [00:25:41] How to Start a Community  [00:29:47] Technical Community Builders  [00:31:04] Social Media Managers  [00:33:14] North Star Metric  [00:39:20] Product DevRel  [00:40:37] Finding Great DevRels  [00:43:47] DevRel for Dev Platforms of non-DevTools companies  [00:46:38] DevRel Tooling  Transcript [00:00:00] Sai Senthilkumar: My name is Sai and I'm at Redpoint investing primarily in B2B software with a focus on developer oriented business. I'm very excited to be chatting with Shawn Wang today about the importance of developer relations for any company selling to developers. You know, we find that several developer companies we work with today are hiring for diverse leaders and oftentimes it's function gets overlooked early. Or maybe not built out soon enough. So today we'll talk a little bit more about how to structure and measure our world-class Debra organization for any startup and why it's so important for a company's overall health. So I'm wanting you to be joined today by Shawn, who is the head of developer experience at Temporal. Shawn, do you want to briefly introduce yourself?  [00:00:39] swyx: Yeah. Hi everyone. I am Shawn Swyx online as well. I guess my dev role ex experience starts at Netlify where I was the second DevRel hire. And we grew from about 30 ish people when I joined to about 250. And. I think something like 300,000 developers to 1.5 million. And then we, and then I left in 2020 to go to Amazon where he spent a year working at amplify and thinking about AWS level or branded Daryl. And we can talk about what it's like to work at. You know, a series B to C stage company. The rail versus a big company devil. And then I joined Temporal this year in in February to head up developer experience. And we're a series, a company focused on microservice orchestration, which is a bundle of words, but basically we're reinventing asynchronous programming. And if that doesn't hook your interest, I don't know what will, so I'm happy to talk more about that. [00:01:42] What is DevRel?  [00:01:42] Sai Senthilkumar: Awesome. So is that Shawn is the, is the guy to speak with, in terms of structuring and starting out in Beverly also Shawn, I guess starting with the basics here, you know, many people wrote in asking for clarity around the devil row. So, so in your, in your mind, what is Deborah and the various roles and responsible. [00:02:04] swyx: In what is dev route and the various rules and responsibilities. Okay. There a very big question. So dev REL I think is essentially for a lot of people is essentially rebranded marketing. Developers. Don't like to be marketed to every time you hire a professional marketer and you get them to talk at developers, their eyes glaze over and they're turned off by your marketing buzzwords and your emphasis benefits over features because you refuse to talk about how things work because marketers don't know how things work. Cause they're not technical. You hire developer relations before. Developers want to be spoken to by other developers. And they want to be explained on how to use things, why, and not to be handheld too much to do some hand hand-holding, but not to do too much handholding that you restrict their creativity. Because I think some of the best DevRel programs have often just said, we can't wait to see what you build, which is a very cliched term in Debra. It's actually, it's pretty true. If you talk to the early Twilio, derails, they just held hackathons and they're like weird a communications layer. What can you come up with? And they are often impressed in a lot of their new products direction comes from the, the stuff that developers want to take their product in. And so Val is very much of a bottom line. Developer first marketing efforts. And I personally segments the growing sub specialties that devel into three set, three segments, which is community content and products. The reason I add products in there, which is not a very common thing to, to emphasize with Daryl is because developer relations has. Background or backstory as developer evangelism, which is kind of the old Microsoft slash Google name for it, which is essentially you hire professional influencers to travel the world and give talks. And it's very us to the rest of the world. Like I'm pre. The good word, which is very nice because a good talk and a good useful demo or a good you know, explanation is, is actually a very important, but there's not much of a two-way street. So, it's very, it's very like us coming out to them. And I think now people understand that they, once they're devils. Their PR company in front of developers. And they talked to them so much that we can actually use that product feedback to feedback into the development of the actual product itself. That's the vision. That's the, that's what a lot of people say that Debra is a two way street developer. Evangelism is a one-way street in practice. It's more like 99% outbound anyway. And 1% inbound. The reason being that no one has time for your product feedback. Everyone has their own product roadmap. You're not proud of the PM org. You're not part of the engineering org. Who are you that I have to listen to you. So people are still figuring this out, but I think the content and community pieces REL are a bit more developed. [00:04:59] Where should DevRel report?  [00:04:59] Sai Senthilkumar: Totally. 100% agree. And when you mentioned this in the beginning, but I think it's important to flush out the difference between. Developer advocacy and Deborah and for marketing, I think oftentimes those, those two those two topics get confused with each other. So, so yeah, I, yeah, I think that is that's important for any startup that starting out. And this is a separate organization,  [00:05:21] swyx: Hopefully, well, so there's there that kind of leads us into a natural segue of where does deferral report to, but you can have that conversation. I'm not sure that it's a solved question yet. I think a lot of people are converging on the consensus that dev roles should report into product. And I think that's fine, but I'm also, I don't judge people where dev REL reports into marketing. I don't judge people went there for all reports into engineering or, you know, at Netlify we were a separate org. We were separate from products, separate from engineering, separate from marketing. And we reported up to the CEO. Okay. It matters basically as a founder or, you know, or based on company direction, how important your dead relatives, your liver function is how senior you are a different leader is and also how you measure them because at the, at the end of the day, even if your dev REL team reports into product, but the way you measure. Is entirely marketing metrics. Like how many hits did you get to a front page? Then they are our marketing team. It walks like marketing talks about marketing, their marketing, even though they technically, you put them in your org chart under the product team. So be very careful about just play playing at like making your devil or you know, part of product, but not actually, because that leads to some interesting tensions between. What it means to be a representative for your company and how that actually leads to tangible impact for your business. So yeah, I'll leave it at that.  [00:06:57] Getting Started with Early Stage DevRel  [00:06:57] Sai Senthilkumar: And it, even before you get getting into building, you know, Deborah, I guess like what, what are some tips that, you know, any early stage startup or founder that's in that develop that is selling to develop. What are some tips that they should know when getting started? Yeah, I guess what are some lessons learned from, from your time of  [00:07:13] swyx: peripheral? How early stages are we talking? Let's say series  [00:07:18] Sai Senthilkumar: a, you know, you've just raised some capital, you know, you're scaling to the series B, you're selling to developers, developers, easy. These are core bread and butter, you know, I guess what are some.  [00:07:27] swyx: I think some amount of focus and regular cadence is important. So, so at, at a point of series, a like you have some form of products like your, you have been around enough that you, that you raise your seed and you, you convince people, okay. Invest in serious. Say. That's probably where you should start hiring you know, a different team like we hired to, to I, I came on in February and then we hired two DevRels this year and I think that's where you start trying to figure out what the public story is. You want to tell, because you have some core base of early adopters, but you need them to not just you know, not just grow into like, the early majority, which I love to use this model of crossing the chasm. And I like to say that my personal specialty is helping developer tools cross the chasm, which is a very. Profitable a specialty, if you can actually do that repeatedly. But yeah, so you need to start basically like kind of start building machine of like curious what here's a collateral that we here's the typical story, like our, our one sentence pitch, our five minute pitch, our 10 minute pitch. So 20 minutes a patient on a one hour pitch and you need to kind of market. Among different sets of audiences and figuring out what kinds of audiences like how to qualify these audiences immediately so that you can go down, you know, between two to three different talk tracks that are usually relevant. Because the reason I say two to three talk tracks is because I'm not a strong believer that there is one marketing message to rule them all. Because a lot of developers who was companies are horizontal companies and it can be used in multiple different ways. And the things, the words, the. Influencers, the concepts that appeal to different audiences vary based on their own background. So you need to figure out like what, what the, what that fit is. And then I think for me, like, the most important thing to establish at this early stage is the developer journey. Like what, yes, you probably have as CSA stage, you probably have a working products. You're probably building more features that are going to take you to the next level. And your products is pretty dense already. And probably a lot of people barely even scratched the surface. That's what everyone says, right? Like it's a little bit depressing as a deputy founder to build a bunch of features. And then like people just use you for like the bare minimum. That's, that's just how it is. A lot of people don't have time for anything more than the, the core. So first of all, your core value proposition needs to be really good, but second of all, you need to guide them through the rest of your product to see how awesome it is so that it can grow and usage. So that I termed the developer journey. What should people. Land on your landing page. And then they're like, okay, like my friend said, this is cool. I'm going to come check it out. But I only have five minutes. What are you going to give them in those five minutes? Are you going to dump your entire feature set? Are you going to give them a hello world that is trivial? That is that they could do in a weekend? Like what is the, what's the wow moment that you're really trying to deliver? And what's the open question that you're trying to leave in their minds. They're not happy with the five minutes and they want more. So I think that's something I think about a lot. And I, I draw a lot of inspiration from game design where it's a progressive review of features. And you don't give them that much apart from like, do this and then do that. And then, and then go here and then go there. And you have a very strong sense of like what level one level, two level three, it looks like. And so that's the journey throughout through to products for me, it's about what a core, what the core concept is. You know, doing a hello world or like, you know, deploying the, playing a basic app and then building, and then branching out into maybe like performance or security or deployments monitoring that kind of stuff. But that's for us, you know, and your, your message could be a bit different. Finally, I'll, I'll talk a little bit about specialties within the team. So , we are very focused on front end developers. So the way that. We'll thought our team was that we had different framework specialists. So I was the react specialist because I'm a well-known speaker in reacts. And we have view, we had angular, we had you know, sort of static site generators specialists for us at Temporal. We have SDKs in different languages. So we have a Java slash PHB guy, and then we have a gold person and I'm going to be the TypeScript person. And we'll, we'll have Python, ruby.net, whatever. You might want to split it up by, by that because there's a certain audience that each of these developer relations people speak to that maybe they're already known in the conference circuit. Like it's super easy for me to get into any JavaScript conference. And I think that's, that's a, that's a home ground or unfair advantage that you should play when building out a different team. It's a bit hard to hire like super well known people. So sometimes you need to have an eye for trajectory rather than. You know why rather than you know, where they are today because they Def Netlify definitely took a bet on me very early on when I was getting started my speaking career and it paid off for them. But sometimes it doesn't work out and sometimes you have developers where we kind of are not that productive, but I think that's where a really good dev manager can come in. And up-level your individual contributors. [00:12:28] How to Structure DevRel Efforts  [00:12:28] swyx: So. Yeah,  [00:12:30] Sai Senthilkumar: no, that's a great point. And I think you know, we'll get, we'll get into this later when we, when we discussed how to actually measure the ethicacy of if you done an organization, but you, you have a great way of thinking about it. You know, I think in the seminar we said something to the extent of there are four pillars of developer relations. And I think that is that's a company like Hashi Corp, where they have. You know, there, there are much later stage that they're not a series a or series B startup. And I think they bring it into education, community events and audience, but you know, that's just not realistic for a series a or series B startup. That's just starting out. And I think you just have a great framework for this by just asking what kind of Deborah are you? I think you get, as you mentioned, you have those three emerging subspecialties and Beverly the community focused upon think focusing product focus. Just asking that very basic question in the beginning. I think we'll go along with.  [00:13:18] swyx: I think so, too. So, I mean, since we're on zoom, can I screen share the visual? Just so we so that, so the audience members can actually see what we're talking about. So, what size talking about is this four pillars thing from the previous session with Adam Hashi Corp. And I mean, you know, there are a series what F or E company. And I w yeah, I would love to have an education team, you know, especially former teachers. A really good every time I see a former, you know, someone who actually has done teaching in like a public school setting or something crossover into developer education, they're amazing at it. A formal events team. Amazing, fantastic. You know, but I, you know, I think these require fairly large, large budgets and have a very long PR cycle. Whereas I think maybe a lot of earlier stage companies are more focused on community advocacy and audience, right. So my, the way I break it down is a little bit simpler. I and for the record, like I, I had seen this before, but like I just kinda made up, meet this up based on the people that I know. So like I have. Certain archetypes in my end, when I look at these things and that's kind of how I view it, right? Like at the end of the day, all everyone wants this monthly active developers. That's not screw around. Like that is the source of truth for where Deborah is going to feeds into the, the rest of the value equation for a startup. There are certain specialties for people. Like some people are not that great at content. You know, they, they, they don't produce like, especially inspiring blog posts or talks or anything, but look, they're charismatic as hell. You know, they, they, they just know everyone who's anyone. So their community devils, you know, whereas some people are just like thought leaders. They're just, you know, they just get chunk out like amazing and visually appealing and just like fantastic stuff. But then maybe, you know, and, and so maybe it should be applied. And then others, like they can, they're, they're sort of more quiet, but they are very inside. The understand the core user insight that like people, you know, when they aggregated a lot of feedback from people, they can really sort of channel that into a very strong sense of product feedback. So I liked this and I liked that for me, the most impactful time as a dev REL on. Was on product launches. So really focusing on making a launch successful by being the first beta user internally within the company RV products and just being brutally honest, like if you cannot pay someone to be brutally honest at you, then you don't have an intellectually honest culture. And then, but then also like making the demos and making the the collateral and the, the storytelling that will make your launch successful and a really good launch. You can't really emphasize it enough to, to really help you. So I'll, I'll leave it there. I don't want to like spam people with, with too much, but I can, I can talk a bit about intern about each of these specialties and we'll get  [00:16:02] Sai Senthilkumar: him.   [00:16:02] When to Hire First DevRel  [00:16:02] Sai Senthilkumar: We'll get more into that when we, when we get into measuring measuring the ethicacy. You know, you mentioned you know, after series a maybe even after your seed, but it seems that there isn't a black and white answer in terms of, at what stage in a company's growth earnings, should it consider building a debt relative? But it, it, it seems that you know, it may where it may be different from company to company, but generally it's when you, you're starting, you have a product out in market and you're starting to get developers to start paying for it. [00:16:30] swyx: Was there a question in there? I mean, I agree,  [00:16:33] Sai Senthilkumar: I guess for Temporal, when did, when did they hire you? And then when did you know, when did they start thinking about it? Was it after this year?  [00:16:42] swyx: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right after series a, they they started reaching out to me and I, I said, no, at first. And then I said, yes. So that's the short history. Cause like I just joined Amazon and I was like, I was very, very ready to rest, invest for four years essentially. But like, you know, I think when you, when a rocket ship comes along and something that. Fundamentally feel at your core has been missing all this? Well, I think we should take the totally. [00:17:10] Sai Senthilkumar: And you were getting into this earlier before, but the question of who should that role report up there? It, I mean, ultimately it touches multiple facets of the business, product marketing, customer success. So I guess there isn't a black and white answer there as well.  [00:17:24] swyx: There's no black and white, but I think most people agree on products. They just don't. You know, it's one thing to like, all right, move some people around on your org chart and just say, okay, you're under products now. And then job done. Right. But then your metrics haven't changed. You. Okay. Ours are all marketing. So what does it mean to belong in products, but then you measure them like, That you just, you're just treating them like a marketing team. And they're a very expensive affiliate marketing team for a lot of people. That's how it is like at you know, at, you know, Phil in previous company, we counted our Google UTM tag attribution, right? Like, oh, I drove 10,000 visits to our blog this month. And you can pay for that way, cheaper, elsewhere. You can pay for inorganic surge. You can pay for like, you know, there has to be something else that your devils are giving you because otherwise they're just very, very expensive affiliations.  [00:18:23] Community and DevRel  [00:18:23] Sai Senthilkumar: Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Awesome. You know, I, I want to make sure we hit on community, the importance of community here, a strong developer relations or John UI communities on the side. You also have a community at Temporal, I guess. Why, why invest in community, you know, in the first place you have a great post here, but I, you know, the audience would love  [00:18:41] swyx: to hear. So I guess someone will share it. The post. So I'll give, I'll give my community credentials for people who don't know. So I got started in the New York tech scene where I was very much, in-person just getting to know everybody at every single meetup. And then I moved online where I was the moderator for the R slash react to a subreddit. And we grew that subreddit from 20,000, 30,000 people to 220,000 people before I left. And then I started small society from scratch. And now that was about. A year and a half ago, and now we're at about 11,000 people. And then I wrote a book where I run a paid community for the book. That's about 2000 people. And then for Temporal, I run the community events, forums and stuff like that. And when I say I run, I mean, with a lot of help from actual other people who actually know way more than me. So, I've just like kind of the coordinator it's, it's pretty funny. Cause like at Temporal. One of the least technical people there. It's just very unusual position for me anyway. So that's my community backgrounds. And obviously I, I have a lot of friends in the community manager space Rosie, Sherry, or the orbit, love people comScore and yeah, Mac written from from, from all these, all these community funders. Like it's a very hot topic right now. Okay. Why community? Basically it's the. It's the, it's your users that are identifying with your company and a lot of community forums, a lot of company, community forums, like glorified support channels, right? Like, it's just, Hey you know, you don't like answering questions on stack overflow. All right. I'll come to your custom discourse deployments and ask questions to you, but it's basically stack overflow. And what you really want is your users talking to each other, what you really want is your users hiring each other where you really want is your users building on top of you because they believe that you're, you're here to stay and they expect that their association with you will outlast their current employment. The problem with this is good luck fitting any of this in an OKR that is measured quarterly because community is a relationship based. Long-term goal rather than a short term transaction. But I mean, I think people are understanding that at least for developer tools, that's the strength of the community is very important for crossing the chasm. And I think a lot of people realize that when they cross the castle. Early adopters don't need community. They just need the tool to work. They just need to, like, they don't even need like that great of a docs. They don't need like a functioning, a vibrant job market for that technology. They just need to understand that the tool works and they can use it to solve problems that they have. But once you get into the mass market, the majority, then people start deciding on like, Hey, I picked a. The TensorFlow community, because that community is really great at helping beginners. And it's got, it's got plugins and resources for everything that I could possibly want, that those are not core to the technology, but there are a lot of the reasons why people pick technologies, which is there, there's a strong community. And I think to invest in that is a very, very long-term game, but it's a moat as well because everything else about your technology can be cloned or out competed, but a community is very, very hard to.  Yeah,  [00:21:50] Sai Senthilkumar: and I think you, you have a great point there. That community is, is a feature that cannot be copied and it itself is a moat for you and helps you gain these network economies. I think you elegantly structure that in your, in your post.  [00:22:03] swyx: There is a, there's a VC out there. I'm, I'm really, I'm really sad that I'm blanking on her name because she wrote a really great book. I refer to her in my own blog posts on technical community builders. So, so please go check her out, but I'll give you the thesis of the blog post, which is previously. Traditionally community. It was like the community manager at now. The five was kind of like Lewis on the totem pole. You know what I mean? Like, they would be going through the forums and seeing like, okay, like this person asked the question three days ago, it hasn't been answered. Please can anyone in the company help answer this question? That is such a pathetic, like, I mean, you know, they were great, but like that, that just shows that the company. Value community, right? It went when, when that is, that kind of behavior is, is around. But then also the community experience or someone's interaction with a company is very fragmented. Like on the forums, I'll be interacting with the support team. In, in, in conferences, I'll be interacting with the dev team in webinars. I'd be interacting with the marketing team in sales conversations. I'll be interacting with. It's very disparate thing and there's no sort of central. I guess CRM to manage like the interactions, but also I think more, more, more, more to the point who in the C-suite or who in the VP suite is responsible for community and who's managing that journey through, you know, through your company. I think as I think. The community goes from periphery to core. Then a lot of things start deriving their insights from community. Like instead of having community be the afterthought of like, Hey, we launched this product from that's now go support it in the community forums, like actually go engage community users in the forums and help to drive product insights. Or, you know, or beta test with like a super user community where there's just some, which is a topic I really like as well. Like the, the idea that every, every company, like I'm, I'm a part of a few super-user programs like GitHub stars Stripe community experts. I am blanking on some of the others, but we're looking into establishing our own as well, because it was very, very helpful for basically not just like recognizing some experts within the community, but also giving them preferential access. As a ways to say thank you. And, and I think, I think it's just a very, it's a win-win proposition all around for your most engaged users. Yeah.  [00:24:26] Sai Senthilkumar: And Shawn, you're wearing multiple hats control your community, fellow Corps experience this, this community eventually become a separate role within, within Deborah. Let's say you get to that stage on that.  [00:24:38] swyx: I haven't seen it personally myself. But yeah, I've, I've seen some companies basically have a head of community or VP of community or chief chief community officer is also a title that I've seen thrown around. But it takes time, you know, it takes it takes the right person to lead that. And so I don't have a. Either way of like when the right time is, cause I haven't been through that myself. But I would love to see it. I would love someone at the highest level to say I represent the user and, and not, and this is very, by the way, this is very true for open source dev tools. I represent the. Who never pays us a single cent, but contributes so much in tangible value in terms of code in terms of content and sort of like just buzz around the tool. And sometimes that, that person is just not represented in meetings, you know, that, that free user. So, yeah. I love, I love for that to happen right now. A lot of that falls on their roles laps and that's a, that's a job that we need to just formally recognize that we do. And I think that's. Yeah. Awesome.  [00:25:41] How to Start a Community  [00:25:41] Sai Senthilkumar: So the, the $1 million question here, I guess, what are your recommendations for kick-starting a community, especially you guys have done a great job, you know, and you just pay in a year or so. Like what  [00:25:54] swyx: are some recommended. So, first of all, I don't think we've, I think we can do better. Let's just leave it at that. I, you know, I'm sorry that it's just never happy. And I want to acknowledge so many in the Q and a James light. Yes. I think that's Lisa. She I haven't personally connected with her, but I have, I think, I think her posts for like drawing, like sort of community led growth, I think is a, is a very core insight that I think a lot of founders should have a good think about if not actually implement. So. So recommendations, you said, right? Two things, like, I think obviously there's, there's this, there's this standard stuff, like have a slack, have a discord by the way, slack versus discord. If you're open source and maybe sort of more Indy go discord, if you're more enterprise Eagle slack, that's just how it is. I don't love slack either, but that's just how it is. And then So the two recommendations are this like one. Events are underrated for community. So you saw how into Hashi court, four pillar thing events where different team and community. But I think at a smaller stage, those are the same thing. People need gathering points, and this is about the temperature of. Your community as well. You need to manage your temperature. It's not always hot, but there's hot and cold and you need to make sure that the hot wet hot moments are really good. And when I'm not kidding around when I talk about temperature, so, for the sort of communication, immediate theorists in the room, you should refer to Marshall McLuhan who talks about hot media and cold media. And I think it's very, very true that there, there are a lot of community and. Forums which are cold. And then there is some community community engagement methods that are hot and you probably want a variation of these things. So slack, so slack is one of those interesting ways in which a cold can sort of upgrade to a warm, but a hot you know, event would be a, would be a meetup, right? Like a conference. And that's something that I think really helps. Netlify kicked it up, kick it off. Like we launched the conference where we weren't sure if we could sell up, sell up the seats. But we did. And then, you know, we went from one conference a year, it's a three conferences a year and that just really helps kick it off because once people have shown up and they start talking to each other and they have no choice, but they're kind of, they, they're kind of committed to like being in a room with you. One to two days and like sitting through a bunch of vendor presentations it's such a really powerful thing. And, and, oh, by the way, getting your users onstage to talk about how proud they are of using your product. Amazing. Right? So events are super under four, and you want to, if you want to get good at community and get good at events, because then people have a reason to, to come show up and join you. But also there there's a bunch of people who are just. Participate. So you need to be decent at a cold outreach as well. What is cold or what is you know, basically building an issue, distribution channel it's basically the stuff that you, you imagine like a mailing list like a Twitter presence, like a YouTube presence. I think those are the main channels that I focus on. And obviously blog posts that, that drive. The second part, which I really like to talk about community, which is underrated, I think is content content is the minimum viable community in the sense that all right, you know, you have your products and it's kind of like it exists and people can use it, but really good blog posts would drive people from hacker news straight onto your community. And they want to talk about your blog posts and give them a place to talk about it. Right. So, that's kind of how I drive my own. Writing community. That's how I think if you look at like basically the playbooks of the independent creators out there, they're writers for. Or there a YouTuber service, and then you have a community attached to them and the community aggregates around their writing or a content, but then they spread out from there. But at least it's a reason to show up that is not about asking for support. And once, once they see a place to promote themselves or actually, you know, get into related conversations that are about what you stand for, rather than just about using you then you have. Vibrant like a self-sustaining community where people just show up because they know that's where they're going to get good feedback or responses. [00:29:47] Technical Community Builders  [00:29:47] Sai Senthilkumar: Yeah, that's awesome. And I guess the point here, in terms of finding someone to drive your community, you have a great post you're on, on that technical community builder would love to just double click there and what you mean by that  [00:30:04] swyx: finding content, right. I mean, you know, at a bare minimum, just curation is really nice. So if you think about like the big newsletters in the tech industry, like software lead weekly you know, pointer there, there's a bunch of these like basically aggregation blog posts, but curated by someone fairly knowledgeable. And that can be enough. Like you don't have to write the content, you can just aggregate it and that's, that's still a form of content creation. So maybe someone to start there is, is good enough because writing original content that that's a hit after hit is, is a fairly tall ask. Like I write a blog post a week and I only get one hit a year. That's how bad it is. Right? Like that's how bad I am. But, but also like, that's just how brutal the content industry is. And at the end, at the end of the day, like what all you're trying to do is provide a space for people to come to, to connect with other professionals who are solving the same. That's right. Like, Yeah, we  [00:31:00] Sai Senthilkumar: had a question come in here. I'm going to weave it in because it's relevant to the community section. It goes. [00:31:04] Social Media Managers  [00:31:04] Sai Senthilkumar: What, what if you have a great team of devs and Deborah ELLs, but they don't necessarily want to run social for the company. So the company developer handle is run by an actual social team that doesn't necessarily have the developer chops. And so any, any tips for the not dev teams per se, the social teams running dev communities, or should you just, you know, maybe look otherwise elsewhere and get a technical community builder? [00:31:31] swyx: Oh, okay. Social. I think it's okay. So, by the way, for those who don't know, like the post for my, my block wasn't think community building was actually making a case for why your community managers should be technical rather than non-technical obviously that's a. More expensive, higher, but I think it does pay off because people, it really helps when developers understand that the person they're sitting across from actually gets what they're trying to do and can connect them with the resources or the people that they need to get stuff done, or, you know, just have mutual shared interest in. But social media, if you have a social professional, a professional social person I haven't worked with those. I'll be honest. So I don't know what it's like. I mean, I know I'm, I'm friends with Rob or gala boob as he, as he's known on Reddit and Twitter. And he's a professional social media guy, and he's funny as hell. And people follow him for that. If that's the brand that you're building more power to you, but sometimes that's not the brand of your building. And. And you need to make a conscious choice of like, is this, is this like, yeah, you're getting a lot of internet points for your social media person's output, but is there anything relevant to what you're trying to build as a business? And if it's not, you gotta cut it. If it is then great. So I, I don't want to say like, so, I'm, I'm an investor in a company called Swyx. And they're amazing at me marketing but that's just the founders who love developer memes. It's not a separate social team. So I, I, haven't worked with a separate social team to, to understand how to work best with them to, to really give you a good feedback there. [00:32:55] Sai Senthilkumar: Super base is great. I love that. I love it reads as well. I guess. Okay. So let's say you have a couple of folks in your Deborah or, you know, you're starting to build a community you're, you're driving that forward. The question that we, that that was most asked, you know, before the seminar is just measuring your devil efforts and then your, you already flopped that slide,  [00:33:14] North Star Metric  [00:33:14] Sai Senthilkumar: Shawn, and you, you shared your north star metric, but now people continue to talk about how hard it is to measure Deborah also, you know, would love to hammer. The point of just why, you know, monthly active developers is, should be your north star metric. We would love and will.  [00:33:28] swyx: It's it's, it's the one that keeps you honest, right? Because your usage at the end of the day, and there's, you know, you couldn't men measure monthly active deployments or monthly active cluster. And by the way, if you're hosting platforms this is a very relevant question. If someone deploys on you and just hosts on you and, but never touches, never logs in. But you know, they're, they're still getting value from your site. They're still paying you is that a monthly active developer? Right. But the definition of monthly active developer is up for grabs as well. What most people who I talk to who are in the hosting business agree on is that if they're not developing their sites then they're not active. So, so be more brutally honest with yourself. Like, are you delivering enough features or are you getting the kind of developers who are growing usage and if they are, they should be constantly in your dashboard kind of tweaking stuff. Like it's kind of like in how, in how consumer apps, like, you know, the people want. To build a recurring habit of coming back to you at least once a week, if not daily. And for developers that small, probably like at least monthly, if not weekly. So there should be some kind of recurring behavior, but monthly active developers, basically, you want to land within more and more different logos, and then you want to expand within those different logos and monthly active offers is like the one metric that kind of covers that, right? So you're not, you don't just want to do evangelism, but then you also want that. W make sure that people don't turn off and you also want to make sure that people are growing within within the, within the companies that they landed. So, I think that kind of covers all of it, you know? It's especially hard, especially for open source because developers are very touchy about telemetry. Yeah. As long as the contract is clear and you're, you were steadfastly just only measuring activity and not identity. I think people are fine with that. Okay. So, the one thing, one thing I will say as well, is that like, that, that is obviously the, the point where you know, sales can take over and, and start looking for leads and, and, and all that. So that most directly translates to money. The reason I do not. Stare at like, I don't know what my med is on a month to month or even a quarterly to quality basis. I just, I just need to know if it's like up. So it's just like up, it's fine. Like I will have good bites. I'll have bad months. Some of it will be driven by product launches. Just by the seasonality or whatever. It's very hard to control. It's a lagging indicator. And so you need to compliment it with a leading indicator. In fact, a bunch of leading indicators, and that's the way I set it up. Right. You have one lagging indicator, that's the source of truth. And then a bunch of leading indicators that should correlate in the long run with the lagging indicator. So the leading indicators depend on your. You're a devil efforts ranging from community activity to your contents, you know, views and your, your distribution channel growth, like emails, subscribers, subscriptions, and YouTube, and all that. So your product metrics on bunch days and and NPS scores. Well, and I, and I guess  [00:36:22] Sai Senthilkumar: the point of what are some metrics that you shouldn't necessarily care about as much the vanity metrics, the bad metrics per se.  [00:36:30] swyx: Yeah, I have a, I think I might get in trouble for saying some of this cause officially I'll get up. Stars is one of our cars for as many for Temporal, but I don't like it. It's it's so it looks so sad to beg for a star. Like people should want to start you anyway. And then when people start you, they don't, they're not using you at all. They're just starting you cause they're throwing you a bone. So it's just so meaningless that. Basically the only time get off stars convert into real value is when someone is just completely naive about how this works. And they're just like, wow, it's 20,000 stars. It looks amazing. And, and also there's also like the trending page, right? Like if you get on there, some people do discover projects through the trending page and get up. What else have I said, oh, I have. At conferences to scan badges we're going to cube con and like you have to pay for like the device thingy to like scan a badge for customers. I don't think those ever work. First of all, it's like cheapens the interaction between you and them. They're just like, okay, I'm just a business card or to you. And then second of all falling up is super hard and very leaky. And those aren't good leads, you know, maybe the leads a week, maybe I'm weak, you know, And if we can, we can do all Glinka Glengarry Glen Ross there, but. I, I don't, I don't think, I don't think the transactional interaction of like, let me scan into a database on my first interaction with you works very well. So I'll just, I'll just put it as my 2 cents. I, I did at one time and I have a permanently negative impression of it. What else did I say? Oh, GitHub Google analytics, UTM tag. Yeah. So that one, that one I have been measured by as well. And I mean, yeah, I, I, the, the problem with that one is that it, it biases you towards writing a superficial Papa fund, like super top of funnel that may not have content that may not actually have anything to do with the business itself. Like as long as it's funny, as long as it's controversial, as long as it's It buys you spices, you twist the wrong thing, like in the worst ways of like how it, how the Twitter algorithm or the Facebook algorithm biases you towards clickbait. And then finally NPS I don't love MPS, even though I did mention NPS just now. I know, I understand that it's an industry standard and understand that you know, everyone understands that it's a flood metric, but it's so flawed and particularly developers. Implement NPS. Like I've been on the side where I've been asked to implement an APSI. Everyone knows how this works, and everybody knows that you don't care. You throw out the seven, you count the eight nines and tens and you, you know, so like what are you really measuring? What insights are you really getting? Like, I much rather have narrative insight rather than an arm's length. Like, am I doing, you know, approval rating essentially, of, of my, of my job, because I don't think that actually gives me much actionable insight apart from things that trending up or down, which I already have with my reactive. [00:39:20] Product DevRel  [00:39:20] swyx: Yeah, did, this  is  [00:39:22] Sai Senthilkumar: a question that came in by the way, next it's relevant from an average conversation, but let's say you're never out several reports up to product. What are, what are some good metrics there that you should, that you should care about?  [00:39:33] swyx: Okay. Yeah. So this is this is the thing I haven't personally figured out that much. So what, what I wrote is. If I that makes sense for running devel, which is coming community content, and then product is like a third wheel. Product is one of the things that we're still figuring it out. How do you think products should be measured? [00:40:00] Sai Senthilkumar: I think.   [00:40:03] swyx: So there's a lot of philosophy of what product is, which varies from company to company. And that's an unsolved question. And then there's the philosophy of metrics, how you think you should measure the thing. And then we're, we're doing so many bad shots here then, then you're like, how should reporting into product should, should be measured, right? Like this is like three tiers down of unexamined core beliefs that you, that we haven't really figured out yet. So, that's why I keep it to tangible. Related to the activities that we're doing feeding into the, the one lagging metrics, which keeps us honest because we can monetize it.  [00:40:37] Sai Senthilkumar: Awesome.  [00:40:37] Finding Great DevRels  [00:40:37] Sai Senthilkumar: You know, I, and I know we only have 10 minutes left here. I do want to touch on the last point, which is just hiring you know, Temporal, they locked out on, on finding you what were some other folks like you, you know, if you were, you were just starting to hire folks for your devil organization, where would you say. [00:40:54] swyx: Yeah, this is a tough one. So yeah. By the way, I get maybe three calls a week from founders asking about how to hire differs DevRel which is like, it's so amazing to me cause I, I kind of lucked into the job and then, you know, I randomly now have a reputation for it, but it's so amazing to me that this is something that's in demand because like, it seems like a fun job that everyone should want. What I usually say is true. Think of the ideal user that you have, that you would most like to clone and hire that person? Because what a devil is essentially going to end up doing is cloning themselves by everything that they do in their community and the, every content that they write. They're essentially going to put out signals that, Hey, this is a place that I believe in. And if you're like me, you should join me. And that's obviously, you know, had its problems with diversity, but it was a little we'll, we'll sort of leave that as a separate topic. It's hard because when I say. Typically you're the users that you would most like to clone is also your most ideal customer. So you don't want to poach your Deno from your customer? Sometimes oftentimes that ends up happening anyway, because usually the customer, you know, the person is a champion at the customer they implemented successfully and they're off to the races and then customer. The person probably believes in your company more than they believe in the company that they work at. So they leave to join you. That's how this all happened for us. And for offers there for hire. So yeah, I mean, that's very natural and very organic and if it happens great for you if you have, if you're struggling to get that, and I completely understand, one thing I like to say actually is maybe you don't like, especially if you're like pre series a. So I talked to a lot of like seed stage founders, cause I'm an angel investor. If you're pre series a like. You may want to make sure that at least your founder you know, your CEO CTO can be effective. . If you can't do it, why you, what do you expect that? So you can hire someone else who, who, who can do as good a job or better like yesterday, because they could probably do a better job if they're like an experienced speaker, expensed their phone or whatever. But if you can not be a PR, if you personally, as the founder, as, as like someone in the C suite, Can I do a good job of evangelizing for your company, then you haven't figured it out. You'd, haven't figured out like the, the core message to pass on to your detriment, to, to execute on. So make sure that you you've, you've done the job first because you're also part of the default team as a founder, like it or not. Right. You're the most credible one too. And the one with the most power to fix anything that comes up. So, maybe don't like, if you're struggling to hire your first role, maybe don't hire like someone who's already an established level who comes from a different community, because if you try that and expect them to transfer their audience to you, like NPM installed. It may not work because they don't come from that same mindset. They don't have, they haven't experienced the same problems as you. I much rather take an existing engineer who you know, has some skill that at writing posts and stuff and, and train them up because I think that their roles are more made than bored. And that's, that's kind of, I.  [00:43:47] DevRel for Dev Platforms of non-DevTools companies  [00:43:47] Sai Senthilkumar: Awesome. Well, Shawn, I know we have like another five or six minutes. I want to hit on some questions that came in through the audience. There, there was a good one here about how deck row is different when the product is not specifically for developers like Salesforce, HubSpot, or where it's enterprise stats, but you still want a developer community using the APX. How, how is demo different there? How would you think.  [00:44:12] swyx: I haven't worked on that stuff. So please, please take this with a grain of salt. I've seen Spotify DevRels at work, which is fun. Did you know Spotify has their roads? And yeah, I, I understand that. Sometimes you just have a developer that notion has a devil. Yeah, there, there, sometimes it's not the core thrust, but you're still in developer community. I think that this one is more straightforward in the sense that like, Hey, come build a business on top of us, right? Like here are the existing users, here's the monetization. Hopefully there is monetization. Usually a lot of platforms develop a preference when they launched. They don't have any money to division figured out, which is super annoying. That's what happened to the Alexa by the way. A ton of crap because they never figured out monetization. And and yeah, I mean, basically sell it as a way to. An audience that a captive audience that is behind a walled garden that they could not reach otherwise. And here are all the APIs. Here's how seriously we support it. You know, you don't want to be Twitter where you deprecate APS every so often so that no one believes in you anymore. And you know, you want to host hackathons. You want to, you want to show examples of early success. You want to show, you want to give your developers. An idea of what is most demanded by your community of of your non-technical users. And then, you know, you want to show the re the revenue potential. Honestly, I think Shopify does an amazing job at this, right? You don't, you don't think of, I mean, I think more Shopify has like a dev focused company, but actually they're not like they're selling it. They're selling. It basically rails e-commerce rails to non-technical e-commerce users and the developers come along for the ride and build out the Shopify ecosystem. Right. That's a very successful dev ecosystem because Shopify has monetization figured out. So people gravitate to where the money is, which is why, you know, all right, let's apply this to the very app that we're sitting in right now. Zoom launched a dev community with no monetization, right? There's a whole, there's a bunch of plugins. Maybe you can use them. No one, no one has any idea. What they are you know, that's, that's not going to be that successful, even though zoom has a massive, like billions of users, audience it's hard to build a company on top of it, like slack launch the fund Companies when there are certain sizes, they launched like a creator fund or like a startup funds. So the cave come build on top of us, we'll fund you. And like, you know, we'll turn you into like a legit startup. I don't think there's, there's been like maybe one successful slack based startup, but that's it, you know? So yeah, you gotta really figure out monetization built into the. Yeah, totally.  [00:46:38] DevRel Tooling  [00:46:38] Sai Senthilkumar: Another good question that came through with some of the tool recommendations here technology that devil's stack, I we've actually been following a company called orbit.love that I believe you're familiar with as well. And you know, we're, we're calling it almost a deck as a Debra L CRM that effectively acts as the operating system that rolls in from agents and any other good ones or is orbit the one like, yeah. Well, what were your tool stack be if you were to recommend that.  [00:47:03] swyx: So it's funny. Cause basically I knew Josh before he started, orbit. And so I'm reasonably friendly with them and recently actually sat them down for like an hour and just. Just like unloaded on them on like, all the ways that I don't think their product is good enough. So it's, it's so fun because like, when you have to actually use the thing versus like show a pretty dashboard, like it's, it's a world of difference. So orbits orbits at the pretty dashboard stage right now they need to basically become the definitive source of how every Silicon valley company measures their developer community. They're not there yet because they present with too many numbers. Okay. So, common room is the other one. Have you seen it? Have you seen anybody?  [00:47:41] Sai Senthilkumar: That's   [00:47:41] swyx: a good one. They seem neck and neck. I think common room has has more focus on the integrations aspects. Whereas orbit is maybe more on just general open-source community. I'm not sure. I mean, in the common room seems to have very good enterprise sales for whatever reason. It's super weird. I don't, I don't understand it, but yeah, both of these things are okay or good. Like, I don't think they're amazing because they haven't changed my life as a dev community person. Yeah, that's kind of what it's kind of where I leave it, you know, and I don't, I don't have a formal system, I think for, for sure other people are going to have a formalized CRM. We run ours in notion. It's, it's manually attracts not automatically integrated. I would love for it to be automatically integrated, but also it's not going to materially change my life because I know who my most active users are. I know, you know, I know, I know who is like, you know, super active and I know who's falling off, like, I don't need a machine to tell me that yet. When I may be you know, a much bigger company, maybe like C stage S a CVC probably I'll want to have that so that I can at least have a shared understanding of reality with my team. But right now, you know, there's three of us. It's fine. You guys are doing  [00:48:49] Sai Senthilkumar: an awesome job and, and, you know, we're, we're big fans of what you're building over there and the community you're building over there. I think we're coming up on time, Sean. Unfortunately, I I'm gonna, I'm gonna kick it off. It's obvious.  [00:49:01] Travis Bryant: Shawn we've been running these COVID office hour sessions for since we all went into lockdown and I think this was the most engaged audience. We've had of any one of these. And it was the first time we had in the Q and a, a request for how to reach out to you directly. So what's the best way to to connect with.  [00:49:19] swyx: Oh, sure. You can find me on Twitter at Swyx. I'll drop it in the chat and you can find my sites where I have like a newsletter and more blog posts, all the blog posts you could possibly want. And Swyx.  [00:49:31] Travis Bryant: Yeah, great. And what we'll be doing in the recap of this, along with the recording, number of you asked for that, and we'll be publishing that in our recap blog post, as well as we'll just make it an index of all of Shawn's blog posts so that you have an easy way to pop to those are the ones that he referenced as well as the the graphic that he put up there.

Retention Podcast
Retention Podcast #24: VK Mail | Отписки от Ozon и IdeaBank | North Star Metric | Email VS Бейсбол

Retention Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2021 47:52


The Product Management Leaders Podcast
The North Star Metric, Finding Product Market Fit, & Taking Ownership (with Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy @ Augury, First Round Capital)

The Product Management Leaders Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2021 40:02 Transcription Available


Hi all, we are excited to share the seventh episode of The Product Management Leaders Podcast with you!Our aim with this podcast is to connect you with some of the top PM leaders and share their real-world strategies and tactics for building world-class products.In today's episode, Grant Duncan speaks with Artem Kroupenev, the VP of Strategy and former VP of Product at Augury, a Series D startup offering AI-driven machine health solutions for industrial equipment. He has led product at other companies, been a cofounder, a guest lecturer, an advisor to multiple startups, and is also a mentor at First Round Capital's Fast Track program.Leave us your thoughts about the episode and subscribe to be notified of the upcoming ones!This podcast is sponsored by Voximplant, the leading serverless communications platform and no-code drag and drop contact center solution.Voximplant enables product leaders and developers to integrate communications into their products such as embedding voice, video, SMS, in-app chat, and natural language processing and it enables customer service teams to run their whole operation from one place. Join over 30,000 businesses trusting Voximplant such as Burger King, 8x8, and Hyundai.https://voximplant.com/If you have any questions, tweet Grant at twitter.com/grantmduncan

Epic подкаст
Как заработать 1 млрд рублей за месяц. #EdTech подкаст с Аязом Шабутдиновым, Like Центр

Epic подкаст

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2021 124:29


В образовательной среде Like Центр критикуют за агрессивный маркетинг и неоправданные обещания, которые они дают студентам. Нас просили позвать в #EPICподкаст Аяза Шабутдинова — мы это сделали. И заранее собрали вопросы от аудитории, чтобы разобраться, как все на самом деле. Последнее интервью Аяз давал 1,5 года назад. С тех пор Like Центр вырос в 7 раз. Аяз рассказал нам, как добились таких результатов, о запуске бизнес реалити-шоу на 50 тысяч участников, «найме» инвесторов в команду и почему Like Центр — лучший образовательный продукт в мире (по его мнению). Полезные ссылки ниже ⤵️ _______ EPIC подкаст — это подкаст про #EdTech, запуск и развитие образовательных продуктов в России и за рубежом. Подписывайтесь, чтобы не пропустить новые выпуски! Не забудьте оформить подписку Epic Growth PREMIUM — это 150+ кейсов роста от крупнейших компаний СНГ и Силиконовой долины, лучшие практики и стратегии для развития IT-продуктов. Первые 7 дней бесплатно, попробуйте: https://bit.ly/38kEGPg И, конечно, подпишитесь на Epic Growth в Telegram — всё про рост и развитие продуктов: https://bit.ly/2Wv1kSB ______ ➡️ Аяз Шабутдинов — серийный предприниматель и основатель Like Центра, технологической образовательной компании для предпринимателей. В 26 лет продал свою компанию Coffee Like за 200 млн рублей и полностью перешел в бизнес-образование. За 2020 год выручка Like Центра составила 1,9 млрд рублей. А только за июнь 2021го — более 1 млрд рублей! В августе 2021 года Like Центр занял 1 место в рейтинге edtech-компаний по версии edtechs.ru.

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Atlassian Offers a Masterclass in Growth; Senior Growth Product Manager Shows us How

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2021 49:49


Atlassian is the powerhouse behind popular productivity software brands including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. Their solutions help more than 170,000 businesses, and in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr are joined by Atlassian’s Senior Growth Product Manager, Andrea Ho. Today, Atlassian is one of the most respected and fast-growing companies in the world, but it took some time before the company was able to dial in growth. Andrea says she and many others in Australia have been attracted to this “homegrown unicorn” because the company is always innovating in its quest to create valuable, self-serve, low CAC, affordable enterprise software. Atlassian has done an artful job of capitalizing on its successes. Building and acquiring valuable products that help customers achieve their goals has helped create a strong brand and a powerful word-of-mouth engine. Andrea’s team is then tasked with the “expansion” part of the company’s “land and expand” growth approach. They focus on getting clients to adopt Atlassian solutions across the full organization as well as on driving customers from one product within the Atlassian ecosystem to another. This approach has helped create the company’s enormous value. Atlassian currently has a market cap of over $62 billion and a team of over 5000 employees. But Andrea explains there is always more work to be done, and the team is constantly working to evolve its growth process. So join us as we learn what’s driving Atlassian’s breakout growth success. We discussed: * What’s a growth product manager vs. a product manager? (4:01) * Atlassian’s rise to global success (9:30) * Why having a revenue goal has been a good challenge for Andrea (15:33) * The “why” behind Atlassian’s new North Star Metric (17:25) * Insights into the growth team structure (24:40) * The “land and expand” growth engine (27:52) And much, much, more . . .

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Atlassian Offers a Masterclass in Growth; Senior Growth Product Manager Shows us How

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2021 49:49


Atlassian is the powerhouse behind popular productivity software brands including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. Their solutions help more than 170,000 businesses, and in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr are joined by Atlassian’s Senior Growth Product Manager, Andrea Ho. Today, Atlassian is one of the most respected and fast-growing companies in the world, but it took some time before the company was able to dial in growth. Andrea says she and many others in Australia have been attracted to this “homegrown unicorn” because the company is always innovating in its quest to create valuable, self-serve, low CAC, affordable enterprise software. Atlassian has done an artful job of capitalizing on its successes. Building and acquiring valuable products that help customers achieve their goals has helped create a strong brand and a powerful word-of-mouth engine. Andrea’s team is then tasked with the “expansion” part of the company’s “land and expand” growth approach. They focus on getting clients to adopt Atlassian solutions across the full organization as well as on driving customers from one product within the Atlassian ecosystem to another. This approach has helped create the company’s enormous value. Atlassian currently has a market cap of over $62 billion and a team of over 5000 employees. But Andrea explains there is always more work to be done, and the team is constantly working to evolve its growth process. So join us as we learn what’s driving Atlassian’s breakout growth success. We discussed: * What’s a growth product manager vs. a product manager? (4:01) * Atlassian’s rise to global success (9:30) * Why having a revenue goal has been a good challenge for Andrea (15:33) * The “why” behind Atlassian’s new North Star Metric (17:25) * Insights into the growth team structure (24:40) * The “land and expand” growth engine (27:52) And much, much, more . . .

The Breakout Growth Podcast
From Uber and Coinbase to Curve, VP Product Shares His Views on Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2021 62:02


The lines between product and growth are often gray, and in this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan share more about this trend with their guest, JD Millwood, Vice-President of Product at Curve. Curve is a Fintech company on a mission to simplify the way people spend, send, see and save money. JD describes the Curve debit card as the first over the top platform for banking, and with innovations like the ability to finance purchases you have already made, he and his team seek to create a new and better banking experience for consumers. JD previously held growth roles at Coinbase and Uber, and his role at Curve morphed from growth into product fairly recently. It has been a natural progression, and through this lens, JD sheds great insights into why growth people need to have a degree of ownership over the product to control their own destinies. At Curve, the growth team lives within his product organization, and the coupling of product and growth is a trend Ethan and Sean have been exploring with recent guests from Buffer, Canva, and other fast-growing organizations. The approach is working. Despite huge challenges during the pandemic that put a temporary hold on an aggressive hiring plan, the company still expects to nearly double its headcount from about 330 today to over 600 employees by year’s end. Strong product/market fit continues to drive growth, but JD sees partnerships as Curve’s next big opportunity. Leveraging relationships with company’s like Samsung, the company is able to extend its B2C go-to-market strategy to B2B2C and greatly expand distribution. With an understanding of how product and growth work together, we dive into Curve’s “helix” team structure where data-driven thinking guides the prioritization of experiments and ensures engineering resources are not wasted on efforts that will not move the North Star Metric. We learn about the company’s growth engine, and how building excitement for users early drives referrals and retention. And we find out how a growth mindset drives great product leadership. Take a listen. For anyone focused on growth, this is a valuable discussion. We discussed: * A better way of banking in the fragmented world of Fintech (3:45) * Why growth people need to have some control over product (6:30) * How data challenges led to the product/marketing teams formation (9:10) * Why JD saw a huge opportunity at Curve (11:25) * Curve’s dangerous exposure during the pandemic (17:05) * Partnerships and B2B2C as the next big thing (19:50) * Structuring for growth (25:50) And much, much, more . . .

The Breakout Growth Podcast
From Uber and Coinbase to Curve, VP Product Shares His Views on Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2021 62:02


The lines between product and growth are often gray, and in this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan share more about this trend with their guest, JD Millwood, Vice-President of Product at Curve. Curve is a Fintech company on a mission to simplify the way people spend, send, see and save money. JD describes the Curve debit card as the first over the top platform for banking, and with innovations like the ability to finance purchases you have already made, he and his team seek to create a new and better banking experience for consumers. JD previously held growth roles at Coinbase and Uber, and his role at Curve morphed from growth into product fairly recently. It has been a natural progression, and through this lens, JD sheds great insights into why growth people need to have a degree of ownership over the product to control their own destinies. At Curve, the growth team lives within his product organization, and the coupling of product and growth is a trend Ethan and Sean have been exploring with recent guests from Buffer, Canva, and other fast-growing organizations. The approach is working. Despite huge challenges during the pandemic that put a temporary hold on an aggressive hiring plan, the company still expects to nearly double its headcount from about 330 today to over 600 employees by year’s end. Strong product/market fit continues to drive growth, but JD sees partnerships as Curve’s next big opportunity. Leveraging relationships with company’s like Samsung, the company is able to extend its B2C go-to-market strategy to B2B2C and greatly expand distribution. With an understanding of how product and growth work together, we dive into Curve’s “helix” team structure where data-driven thinking guides the prioritization of experiments and ensures engineering resources are not wasted on efforts that will not move the North Star Metric. We learn about the company’s growth engine, and how building excitement for users early drives referrals and retention. And we find out how a growth mindset drives great product leadership. Take a listen. For anyone focused on growth, this is a valuable discussion. We discussed: * A better way of banking in the fragmented world of Fintech (3:45) * Why growth people need to have some control over product (6:30) * How data challenges led to the product/marketing teams formation (9:10) * Why JD saw a huge opportunity at Curve (11:25) * Curve’s dangerous exposure during the pandemic (17:05) * Partnerships and B2B2C as the next big thing (19:50) * Structuring for growth (25:50) And much, much, more . . .

33 Tangents
33 Tangents - Episode #157 - Revisiting the North Star Metric

33 Tangents

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2021 43:41


All the way back in episode 31, which aired in November 2018, Jason, Jon, and Jim talked about the concept fo the North Star metrics.  Going into the conversation expressed concern with growth hacking.    How has everyone’s perspective on North Star metrics changed in that time?   What is 33 Sticks’ North Star Metric?   Items we mentioned: 33 Tangents - Episode #31 - What is a “North Star Metric” and How Do You Go About Determining It?   THANK YOU We know your time is limited, so it means a lot to us that you would spend some of your time with us. If you have found this episode to be valuable, we would appreciate if you would share using one of the social media buttons bellow.   And if we are getting you hooked, don’t forget to subscribe, like, and recommend on your favorite podcast platform.   WHERE TO LISTEN The 33 Tangents video simulcast is now available on YouTube Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Google Podcasts Listen on TuneIn Listen on Amazon Music   WHERE TO FIND US Website: www.33sticks.com Email: Podcast@33sticks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/33Sticks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33sticks/  

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Retention is Everyone's Responsibility! A Conversation With Buffer's CPO

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 53:05


Recently, we have focused the lens of The Breakout Growth Podcast on the role of product in driving sustainable growth. We had a super-interesting conversation with Georgia Vidler, Canva’s former Head of Product, and this week we picked up that theme with Maria Thomas, Buffer’s Chief Product Officer. Buffer provides social media tools to facilitate authentic engagement with end-users. Customers can pre-schedule posts on multiple channels, engage with commenters, create reports, and more using the service. Maria is relatively new to the company, having previously served as VP of Product Management at Bitly, so it is interesting to hear her compare and contrast her experiences between these two fast-growing businesses. To Maria, the single biggest growth driver at Buffer has been “brand beyond the product.” She explains that brand recognition is a tremendously important factor for both Buffer and Bitly, but with different go-to-market strategies Buffer’s brand in the context of its mission is what she sees as the company’s secret sauce. The ability to speak to customers on a deeper mission-focused level has been a key factor in Buffer’s approach, and Maria explains that “Buffer was a product-led growth company even before PLG was cool.” From a product perspective, this has meant putting intense focus on building the user experience to power acquisition, retention, and expansion. We also learn that the company’s super-transparent culture that embraced remote work long before the pandemic began, has helped drive Buffer’s data-driven test/learn culture. However, it has also created interesting communications challenges along the way. As Maria describes how she has overcome these and other challenges, we get great insights into the world of growth from a product perspective. This is a fun one, enjoy! We discussed: * Getting used to Buffer’s super transparent culture (3:30) * How a well-known brand impacts growth, plus its impact on product (7:35) * Highlighting Bitly vs. Buffer when it comes to go-to-market strategies (7:50) * Key growth factors and challenges in Buffer’s Product Led Growth approach (8:34) * Advantages and challenges of a no-meetings culture and asynchronous communications (13:05) * Working with data; super-important but not a replacement for working with customers (19:41) * Why MAU is the right North Star Metric to drive growth at Buffer (24:28) * Organizational leadership where product and marketing are in constant communications (26:30) * Why Maria believes in a dedicated growth team approach (27:00) And much, much, more . . .

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Retention is Everyone's Responsibility! A Conversation With Buffer's CPO

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 53:05


Recently, we have focused the lens of The Breakout Growth Podcast on the role of product in driving sustainable growth. We had a super-interesting conversation with Georgia Vidler, Canva’s former Head of Product, and this week we picked up that theme with Maria Thomas, Buffer’s Chief Product Officer. Buffer provides social media tools to facilitate authentic engagement with end-users. Customers can pre-schedule posts on multiple channels, engage with commenters, create reports, and more using the service. Maria is relatively new to the company, having previously served as VP of Product Management at Bitly, so it is interesting to hear her compare and contrast her experiences between these two fast-growing businesses. To Maria, the single biggest growth driver at Buffer has been “brand beyond the product.” She explains that brand recognition is a tremendously important factor for both Buffer and Bitly, but with different go-to-market strategies Buffer’s brand in the context of its mission is what she sees as the company’s secret sauce. The ability to speak to customers on a deeper mission-focused level has been a key factor in Buffer’s approach, and Maria explains that “Buffer was a product-led growth company even before PLG was cool.” From a product perspective, this has meant putting intense focus on building the user experience to power acquisition, retention, and expansion. We also learn that the company’s super-transparent culture that embraced remote work long before the pandemic began, has helped drive Buffer’s data-driven test/learn culture. However, it has also created interesting communications challenges along the way. As Maria describes how she has overcome these and other challenges, we get great insights into the world of growth from a product perspective. This is a fun one, enjoy! We discussed: * Getting used to Buffer’s super transparent culture (3:30) * How a well-known brand impacts growth, plus its impact on product (7:35) * Highlighting Bitly vs. Buffer when it comes to go-to-market strategies (7:50) * Key growth factors and challenges in Buffer’s Product Led Growth approach (8:34) * Advantages and challenges of a no-meetings culture and asynchronous communications (13:05) * Working with data; super-important but not a replacement for working with customers (19:41) * Why MAU is the right North Star Metric to drive growth at Buffer (24:28) * Organizational leadership where product and marketing are in constant communications (26:30) * Why Maria believes in a dedicated growth team approach (27:00) And much, much, more . . .

En.Digital Podcast
#192 – North Star: la métrica para crecer

En.Digital Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2021 67:24


En este episodio nos centramos en el concepto de North Star Metric, la métrica que te ayudará a guiar el crecimiento de tu empresa.En este episodio voy a compartir contigo un concepto muy potente a la hora de desarrollar la estrategia de crecimiento de tu empresa: la North Star Metric o NSM.La North Star Metric es una métrica que siguen las empresas tecnológicas que más crecen, y que aporta mucho valor a la estrategia de las empresas al permitir alinear toda la compañía en la dirección de aportar valor a sus clientes y en la visión a largo plazo.A lo largo del episodio vamos a explicar a fondo este concepto, vamos a ver ejemplos de North Star Metrics de distintas empresas, vamos a revisar las claves para elegir una buena NSM y también cómo se descompone una NSM en métricas más accionables gracias al North Star Treemap y os explicaré varios ejemplos descomponiendo North Stars de distintas empresas en verticales muy distintos. Nuestro patrocinador de la semana es Product Hackers Go! Fórmate en Growth con nuestro equipo de profesionales de primer nivel: https://go.producthackers.com/ Pon en marcha lo que aprendas hoy con Printful. Visita printful, y descubre todo lo que puedes vender con un 20% de descuento por venir desde Redcast. Índice del episodio00:00Bienvenida y presentación del episodio 192 por parte de José Carlos Cortizo

En.Digital Podcast
#192 – North Star: la métrica para crecer

En.Digital Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2021 67:24


En este episodio nos centramos en el concepto de North Star Metric, la métrica que te ayudará a guiar el crecimiento de tu empresa. En este episodio voy a compartir contigo un concepto muy potente a la hora de desarrollar la estrategia de crecimiento de tu empresa: la North Star Metric o NSM. La North […]

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Tips for Building a Rocketship from Canva's Former Head of Product

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2021 59:42


Looking back after you have stepped away from something is often a great way to gain valuable insights, and in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan have the unique opportunity to gain retrospective learnings from a conversation with Georgia Vidler, who, until recently, was Canva's Head of Product. If you are not familiar with Canva, their tagline says it all: “Amazingly simple graphic design software”. With a huge library of templates and a super-intuitive interface, Canva allows non-designers to create high-quality logos, social media ads, infographics, and more to power their businesses. By delivering on that promise, Canva has become Australia’s fastest-growing startup with a reported valuation of over $6 Billion. Georgia has experience in product, marketing, and growth, and through that lens, she describes how Canva’s success took shape. It might surprise you to find out that the company bucked the “Lean Startup” convention and didn’t build a simple MVP, and when Georgia talks about data, you may find it refreshing when she explains that while she very much believes in metrics, she also feels that not everything that is worth doing is measurable. Her perspective reminds us that there is very little prescription in growth, but lots of inspiration! Canva wants to be “the Google of design one day,” says Georgia and she believes the company is well on its way with a philosophy that puts customer happiness before revenue, and a structure that is constantly evolving to meet the demands of a fast-growing business. While Canva may not be formulaic in its approach, she describes a culture that is systematic and intentional and focused on learning and growth. In this conversation, we walk through each component of Canva’s growth engine, gaining insights into how a cross-functional approach to improvements connects each piece of the business. We also see a great example of a North Star Metric helping to unify individuals and teams towards a common mission. So join us as Georgia Vidler takes a “look back” at her amazing journey to Head of Product at Canva. We discussed: * Georgia’s backstory from working in an incubator to heading product at Canva (3:28) * How the product “felt delightful” and “made with love” and why that matters (9:31) * Why Canva did not build a simple MVP (12:01) * How using the product every day drives team member contributions (19:01) * Metrics: they are not one-size-fits-all, or the be-all-end-all of growth (20:22) * Happy Active Users - a North Star Metric that puts users in focus (23:05) * Planning in seasons, not quarters (30:38) * Deep diving into Canva’s Growth Engine (36:30)

CHURN.FM
EP 107 | Ashvin Vaidyanathan - How Gainsight’s Customer Success and Product teams work together towards a common north star metric.

CHURN.FM

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2021 39:08 Transcription Available


Today on the show we have Ashvin Vaidyanathan, author and CCO at Gainsight.In this episode, we talked about the power and impact that Customer Success and Product teams have when joining forces, why Ashvin created a Customer Experience position to act as a liaison between the two teams and how they have a common north star metric they focus on.We also discussed how the CS team determines which pain points are important to act upon, what that process looks like, how they measure the impact of multiple teams sharing one metric, and how a customer success team of over 150 professionals is structured.As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Tips for Building a Rocketship from Canva's Former Head of Product

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2021 59:42


Looking back after you have stepped away from something is often a great way to gain valuable insights, and in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan have the unique opportunity to gain retrospective learnings from a conversation with Georgia Vidler, who, until recently, was Canva's Head of Product. If you are not familiar with Canva, their tagline says it all: “Amazingly simple graphic design software”. With a huge library of templates and a super-intuitive interface, Canva allows non-designers to create high-quality logos, social media ads, infographics, and more to power their businesses. By delivering on that promise, Canva has become Australia’s fastest-growing startup with a reported valuation of over $6 Billion. Georgia has experience in product, marketing, and growth, and through that lens, she describes how Canva’s success took shape. It might surprise you to find out that the company bucked the “Lean Startup” convention and didn’t build a simple MVP, and when Georgia talks about data, you may find it refreshing when she explains that while she very much believes in metrics, she also feels that not everything that is worth doing is measurable. Her perspective reminds us that there is very little prescription in growth, but lots of inspiration! Canva wants to be “the Google of design one day,” says Georgia and she believes the company is well on its way with a philosophy that puts customer happiness before revenue, and a structure that is constantly evolving to meet the demands of a fast-growing business. While Canva may not be formulaic in its approach, she describes a culture that is systematic and intentional and focused on learning and growth. In this conversation, we walk through each component of Canva’s growth engine, gaining insights into how a cross-functional approach to improvements connects each piece of the business. We also see a great example of a North Star Metric helping to unify individuals and teams towards a common mission. So join us as Georgia Vidler takes a “look back” at her amazing journey to Head of Product at Canva. We discussed: * Georgia’s backstory from working in an incubator to heading product at Canva (3:28) * How the product “felt delightful” and “made with love” and why that matters (9:31) * Why Canva did not build a simple MVP (12:01) * How using the product every day drives team member contributions (19:01) * Metrics: they are not one-size-fits-all, or the be-all-end-all of growth (20:22) * Happy Active Users - a North Star Metric that puts users in focus (23:05) * Planning in seasons, not quarters (30:38) * Deep diving into Canva’s Growth Engine (36:30)

1101podcast
E028 | North Star Metric

1101podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2021 22:02


La métrica de la estrella del. norte, o NSM. Conocer de que va esta métrica te puede servir: si buscas una mayor sensación de impacto y coherencia en el desarrollo del producto que estas haciendo. si buscas Una forma de trabajar más enfocada y menos reactiva. si necesitas abordar los problemas y oportunidades de los clientes sin solo desarrollar más funcionalidades. si necesitas un mayor Contexto para mejorar tus métricas actuales, como OKRs, roadmaps o KPI. Dale Play

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Why UK's Leading Online Pharmacy, Echo, Paused Growth at Height of Pandemic

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2021 57:20


“Ultimately, what it meant was we had to figure out ways we could resonate with an older audience . . . Stop talking to 18-year-olds and start talking to 50-year-olds!" This turned out to be a key, data-driven learning for Bradley Fehler, Echo’s Head of Growth, and fortunately, he and his team started to figure this out before 2020 brought unexpected and explosive growth. Brad joins Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr on this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast to share Echo’s story of growing into England’s leading online pharmacy. The journey began when the company’s two co-founders faced different health problems and saw an opportunity to create a mobile app to meet an unsatisfied need. For many, a trip to the pharmacy is just one of life’s minor inconveniences, but for some getting their medication is a matter of life and death. Before Covid, the business was growing well. The company had found ways to help consumers solve problems of adherence by creating a simple three-step process to get users to their first prescription delivery and then by optimizing notifications and reminders to ensure those same users were taking their doses and ordering refills as needed. But then Covid hit, and the company’s patient-base doubled in just three weeks. Brad explains the operational challenges of meeting that demand, and the mission-driven decisions the company made to ensure successful patient experiences. At one point the company actually paused acquisition efforts just so everyone in the organization could focus on helping customers get their medications. Echo is a business that depends on patient trust, and one late delivery could shatter that relationship. The company takes this responsibility very seriously. So dive in with Sean and Ethan as The Breakout Growth Podcast looks to uncover key growth learnings with Bradley Fehler, Echo’s Head of Growth. We discussed: * A mission to deliver the medications people need to get better or stay well (3:21) * Anxiety and Asthma, the co-founder’s journey that led to Echo (4:51) * Why Brad was excited to join a company with a patient-led approach (8:40) * Growth to nearly 400,000 patients, accelerated by the pandemic (12:01) * McKesson’s acquisition of Echo in June 2019 and its impact (16:34) * Driving profitability by talking to the right audiences (17:50) * Organizing for growth and using a North Star Metric (25:29) * Word of Mouth Growth efforts with regulatory challenges (36:03) And much, much, more . . .

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Why UK's Leading Online Pharmacy, Echo, Paused Growth at Height of Pandemic

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2021 57:20


“Ultimately, what it meant was we had to figure out ways we could resonate with an older audience . . . Stop talking to 18-year-olds and start talking to 50-year-olds!" This turned out to be a key, data-driven learning for Bradley Fehler, Echo’s Head of Growth, and fortunately, he and his team started to figure this out before 2020 brought unexpected and explosive growth. Brad joins Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr on this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast to share Echo’s story of growing into England’s leading online pharmacy. The journey began when the company’s two co-founders faced different health problems and saw an opportunity to create a mobile app to meet an unsatisfied need. For many, a trip to the pharmacy is just one of life’s minor inconveniences, but for some getting their medication is a matter of life and death. Before Covid, the business was growing well. The company had found ways to help consumers solve problems of adherence by creating a simple three-step process to get users to their first prescription delivery and then by optimizing notifications and reminders to ensure those same users were taking their doses and ordering refills as needed. But then Covid hit, and the company’s patient-base doubled in just three weeks. Brad explains the operational challenges of meeting that demand, and the mission-driven decisions the company made to ensure successful patient experiences. At one point the company actually paused acquisition efforts just so everyone in the organization could focus on helping customers get their medications. Echo is a business that depends on patient trust, and one late delivery could shatter that relationship. The company takes this responsibility very seriously. So dive in with Sean and Ethan as The Breakout Growth Podcast looks to uncover key growth learnings with Bradley Fehler, Echo’s Head of Growth. We discussed: * A mission to deliver the medications people need to get better or stay well (3:21) * Anxiety and Asthma, the co-founder’s journey that led to Echo (4:51) * Why Brad was excited to join a company with a patient-led approach (8:40) * Growth to nearly 400,000 patients, accelerated by the pandemic (12:01) * McKesson’s acquisition of Echo in June 2019 and its impact (16:34) * Driving profitability by talking to the right audiences (17:50) * Organizing for growth and using a North Star Metric (25:29) * Word of Mouth Growth efforts with regulatory challenges (36:03) And much, much, more . . .

La escalera podcast
#88. Impulsa el crecimiento de tu negocio con la North Star Metric

La escalera podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 16, 2021 42:52


Esta semana vamos a hablar sobre la North Star Metric, una métrica que te va ayudar a impulsar el crecimiento de tu negocio.

The Founder Coach Podcast
How Do You Encourage New Behaviours | Luke Fisher, CEO of Mo (Series A)

The Founder Coach Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2021 28:19


How do you encourage new behaviours? Meet Luke Fisher, CEO of Mo, SaaS software that allows teams and companies to share their wins and encourage new behaviours. In this episode, Luke Fisher explains how he 'dog-foods' his own product to celebrate wins in his team, how he adapted his fundraising approach during COVID, and how the North Star Metric framework links to OKRs. We also talk about the often conflicting needs of end-users and the economic buyer. Key links: Mo website: https://mo.work/ Luke Fisher profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lsfisher/ Key timestamps: [00:41] What was the context at WorldPay before you started the business? [04:12] How does Mo work? [08:15] Do you use the platform at your company? [10:52] What did you have to do to adapt to remote pitches during COVID? [14:06] What are the specific benchmarks that drive stress in your company? [16:00] How do you implement the North Star Metric framework? [18:00] How do align pricing with customer value? [21:00] How would Mo work in small teams? [25:00] How do you align a team when there's uncertainty? Thanks to Jason and Merlin for their great input. Got feedback? Email us at podcast@foundercoach.co. And don't forget to hit follow/subscribe so you don't miss out on new episodes.

Datadrivet
Process: Ta fram idéer & prioritera dem

Datadrivet

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2021 12:11


I Jasmins team har de tagit fram idéer för nya test och prioriterat dem tillsammans. Alla i teamet får komma med alla idéer de har, alla idéer är välkomna. Sedan klustrades idéerna ihop till olika kluster av så kallade teman eller spår vi skulle kunna tänkas jobba med. Därefter fick var och en rösta på vilket spår där vi skulle kunna lära oss mest och skapa mest värde för organisationen. Värde är kopplat till North Star Metric. Lärandet är viktigt för att organisationen ska kunna skaffa sig fler lärdomar än konkurrenterna så snabbt som möjligt. Att på ett enkelt och snabbt sätt få reda på om en taktik eller strategi är fel är mycket värdefullt. Inom ett spår behöver vi sedan tömma våra huvuden på ännu fler idéer på vad vi skulle kunna testa. Vi formulerar idéerna som hypoteser. En hypotes kan formuleras såhär: Genom att göra x kommer vi nå mål y. När vi har ett gäng hypoteser är det dags beskriva dem kort. Hur mäter vi testet? Hur ser testet ut? Hur många gånger uppskattar vi att vi behöver testa detta innan vi kan vara säkra på att resultatet är en insikt? Därefter behöver vi prioritera alla hypoteser. Det gör vi enligt en mall som vi länkar här nedan. Parametrarna som vi prioriterar efter är: Värde: 0 – 5 Lätt att göra: 0 – 5 Lärande: 0 – 5 Hög risk: -1 eller 0 Värdet av dessa räknas ihop till en score (100% är högst, och 0% är lägst) för hela hypotesen. När alla hypoteser fått en score kan de sorteras efter hög till låg score och teamet har en priolista att gå efter. Mallen är en justerad version av ICE-score-modellen: https://growthhackers.com/articles/a-simple-ice-score-calculator Just den här mallen är det Daniel Hansson på Signific som ligger till grund för. Länk till Signific: https://signific.se/ Länk till Google Spreadsheet med mall för prioritering av idéer: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OLfReMt4hTOB8Br1TKLqq4cChfOYxeKj8E3GVzAr29E/copy Vill du vara med och berätta om hur ditt företag jobbar med att mäta och minska churn? Hör av dig till oss på Linkedin. Vi som pratar heter Joni Lindgren och Jasmin Yaya. Producerat av Scilla Studio. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datadrivet/message

The Breakout Growth Podcast
From Onboarding to Healthy Habits, Noom's Growth is Powered by Psychology

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2021 68:44


We thought Noom was a weight loss company, but in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr discovered that weight management is actually just the gateway the company is using to meet much larger objectives. In-fact, as Artem Petakov, Co-Founder and President of Noom explains, Noom is the largest consumer-facing healthcare company in the world, and its goal is to help people make healthy choices and to change people’s lives. During the pandemic, Noom’s popularity exploded, but their journey actually began more than 12 years ago, when Artem and his co-founders began looking for the most meaningful ways they could make an impact in the world. Artem had studied behavioral science and knew that behavior change requires a big data set. He and his co-founders realized that using weight management as an entry point into people’s overall health could unlock the giant data set they sought. The company’s approach to solving weight problems is very different from other solutions as Sean realized when he recently began his own Noom customer journey. There are no point systems or physical locations, and the company’s mobile app focuses on intervention, not tracking. The system uses data and psychology to help change how people think about food. With this approach, breakout growth has come into focus, and Artem is intent on “building the machine to get things right.” Rigorous experimentation and a maniacal focus on people and process helped drive Noom’s 2020’s revenue to around $400 million dollars (nearly twice that of 2019), but throughout the conversation, it became clear that for Artem, this is just the beginning. The company measures success by Quality-Adjusted Life Years, which means success for them is not just about dollars, it is about helping people live longer, better and healthier lives. So join us as we find out how sustainable growth is being built every day at Noom. We discussed: * A mission much larger than weight management (3:18) * How the question, “what would we be proud of having done on our deathbeds,” helped drive Noom’s founders (5:17) * Why Noom chose to focus on the consumer as the ultimate decision-maker but has kept enterprise partnerships on its menu (8:46) * How an early consultation with Sean helped bring a North Star Metric and a test/learn approach into Noom’s process (11:30) * Leaning on psychology internally to drive a more effective organization (14:23) * What drove Noom’s tremendous year over year revenue growth (21:23) * Why Noom believes “brainpower is greater than willpower” (23:01) * Building healthy relationships with customers to impact healthy changes (28:28) * Why 60 or so steps to onboarding works for Noom in the context of its mission (33:21) * Why Artem believes a maniacal focus on people and process is key for sustainable growth (38:18) And much, much, more . . .

The Breakout Growth Podcast
From Onboarding to Healthy Habits, Noom's Growth is Powered by Psychology

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2021 68:44


We thought Noom was a weight loss company, but in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr discovered that weight management is actually just the gateway the company is using to meet much larger objectives. In-fact, as Artem Petakov, Co-Founder and President of Noom explains, Noom is the largest consumer-facing healthcare company in the world, and its goal is to help people make healthy choices and to change people’s lives. During the pandemic, Noom’s popularity exploded, but their journey actually began more than 12 years ago, when Artem and his co-founders began looking for the most meaningful ways they could make an impact in the world. Artem had studied behavioral science and knew that behavior change requires a big data set. He and his co-founders realized that using weight management as an entry point into people’s overall health could unlock the giant data set they sought. The company’s approach to solving weight problems is very different from other solutions as Sean realized when he recently began his own Noom customer journey. There are no point systems or physical locations, and the company’s mobile app focuses on intervention, not tracking. The system uses data and psychology to help change how people think about food. With this approach, breakout growth has come into focus, and Artem is intent on “building the machine to get things right.” Rigorous experimentation and a maniacal focus on people and process helped drive Noom’s 2020’s revenue to around $400 million dollars (nearly twice that of 2019), but throughout the conversation, it became clear that for Artem, this is just the beginning. The company measures success by Quality-Adjusted Life Years, which means success for them is not just about dollars, it is about helping people live longer, better and healthier lives. So join us as we find out how sustainable growth is being built every day at Noom. We discussed: * A mission much larger than weight management (3:18) * How the question, “what would we be proud of having done on our deathbeds,” helped drive Noom’s founders (5:17) * Why Noom chose to focus on the consumer as the ultimate decision-maker but has kept enterprise partnerships on its menu (8:46) * How an early consultation with Sean helped bring a North Star Metric and a test/learn approach into Noom’s process (11:30) * Leaning on psychology internally to drive a more effective organization (14:23) * What drove Noom’s tremendous year over year revenue growth (21:23) * Why Noom believes “brainpower is greater than willpower” (23:01) * Building healthy relationships with customers to impact healthy changes (28:28) * Why 60 or so steps to onboarding works for Noom in the context of its mission (33:21) * Why Artem believes a maniacal focus on people and process is key for sustainable growth (38:18) And much, much, more . . .

SaaS Growth Stacking - with Dan Martell
Finding Your North Star Metric (Examples from the Best SaaS Companies)

SaaS Growth Stacking - with Dan Martell

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2021 9:21


Exclusive Download: Precision Scorecard™ - Keep Your Leadership Team Focused & Accountable To Growth -https://bit.ly/3qnPRh5  -- What if there was a single number you could measure… one number that you focus all of your attention on... And it would make your business rain revenue like never before? Well thanks to Sean Ellis, founder of GrowthHackers, I believe I found one I call it the North Star Metric. See, after raising $1.6M in funding for my business Clarity.fm... I began drowning in an ocean of numbers. I lived in spreadsheets, followed every metric, and kept my finger on the pulse for every shifting digit across the entire company. We had a good SaaS product. Great tech and a great team. But I couldn’t find a way to crank up our profits! I phoned Sean Ellis, frustrated because I couldn’t find the right foothold for growth. “You’ve got to find your North Star Metric”, he told me. I had formulas crunching every damn metric you could think of in my spreadsheets… But a North Star Metric? This one was new. I called a meeting with my team, and we went straight back to the whiteboard, to decide what would become our North Star Metric. All of our teams - from support to development, to marketing, to sales - would prioritize their goals around it. One number. To today, I still thank Sean Ellis for opening my eyes to our North Star Metric… Because shortly after that, business TOOK OFF. Like… KA-BOOM.  Now I’d like to pay it forward in today’s video.  This, my friends, is how you find and calculate your own North Star Metric… and why it’s the one number that’ll save your business every time. A North Star Metric is not like other metrics you measure... It’s unique to YOUR business. To prove this point, in this video I’ll share with you the individual North Star Metrics for: - Airbnb - Facebook - Quora - Slate - Salesforce - Adobe It’s only 9 minutes. Play the video here, and let me know in the comments: What are you going to make your north star metric? -- Dan Martell is a serial entrepreneur, an investor in 40+ startups like Intercom, Udemy, and Unbounce and the creator of SaaS Academy, helping over 500 B2B SaaS founders scale faster. He’s founded five SaaS companies and successfully exited three of them. If you want to scale faster without hitting the usual roadblocks, make sure to follow him on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter. Exclusive Download: Precision Scorecard™ - Keep Your Leadership Team Focused & Accountable To Growth -https://bit.ly/3qnPRh5 

Framtidens E-Handel
11. Fedja Porobic - Datadriven hypergrowth: Så växer du ditt brand med growth hacking och misslyckanden

Framtidens E-Handel

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2021 67:25


Fedja Porobic är en av Sveriges främsta growth hackers. Han har lyckats 10X:a bolag på en vecka, och har vänt misslyckade e-handelssatsningar till miljonomsättning och lönsamhet. I dagens avsnitt av Framtidens E-handel går vi igenom vad growth hacking är för något, och hur man tillämpar Fedja´s beprövade growth hacking process. Vi får konkreta tips på vad man kan göra direkt för att växa en e-handel ännu snabbare. Vad är ett North Star Metric? Hur ser en growth hacking workshop ut? Hur växer man ett D2C brand med 0 kr på kontot? Vilka tillväxtdrivande aktiviteter är det som ingen gör men som alla borde göra? Missa inte dagens avsnitt av Framtidens E-handel!Här hittar du Fedja Porobic & Porobic Grouphttps://www.linkedin.com/in/porobic/https://porobicgroup.com/ Gillar du podden? Stötta oss & donera en slant

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Blinkist CEO Shares How Two Key Inflection Points Led to Breakout Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2020 61:12


“It is a superpower for anyone working in growth to know how to get their own data” CEO Holger Seim and his co-founders developed Blinkist to help users fit learning into their lives by reading or listening to “Blinks” - 15-minute summations of non-fiction books. He explains, “sometimes you need a three-course dinner, sometimes you need a snack, we are the snack.” In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast co-hosts, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr dive in with Holger to learn how the company has built a sustainable growth engine where focused effort on improving engagement spins a flywheel of paid acquisition and word-of-mouth expansion and it helps them avoid a dependency on venture capital. In the beginning, growth was slow for Blinkist. The team launched their mobile app in 2013 in their native German-language, and Holger calls this their biggest mistake. But we also learn how the company found traction in the US and then came to realize that adding audio content could improve engagement. Success then blossomed as a process of iterative learning through experimentation, and Holger describes how a cross-functional strike team approach that the company calls “missions” has worked to break down silos and motivate teams. One such mission focused on “cracking” paid acquisition channels proved to be the company’s largest driver of growth, but Holger is quick to point out that it is the product’s value to end-users that makes all growth possible. The Blinkist team always has the customer in focus, working to help them build positive habits around learning. From automatically starting a new recommended title after a user finishes listening, to adding “Shortcasts” (brief summations of podcasts) to its content lineup, Blinkist continuously pushes to improve the user experience. With that intentionality, it is no surprise to find out that the company has adopted a North Star Metric of “Monthly Engaged Users” to align teams against its broader mission to fit learning into people’s lives. So jump in with Sean and Ethan as they find out from Holger Seim how growth is built at Blinkist. We discussed: * How Holger and his co-founders struggled in their own lives to find time for learning, and why they saw a mobile app as the right solution to this problem (4:42) * Why launching in German to protect a non-existent brand turned out to be a poor decision in hindsight (8:42) * The impact of qualitative feedback and how that led to the addition of audio versions of Blinks (10:50) * How authors and publishers react to finding their content on Blinkist (12:15) * Why the company is focused on mobile apps as its key platforms (16:53) * The company’s push for annual subscriptions (21:27) * Why fast payback windows are profoundly valuable for helping the company optimize for independence (25:50) * The impact of Covid-19; why less commuting has meant less time for reading and learning but has ultimately helped Holger learn to say “no” and improve efficiencies (32:48)

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Blinkist CEO Shares How Two Key Inflection Points Led to Breakout Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2020 61:12


“It is a superpower for anyone working in growth to know how to get their own data” CEO Holger Seim and his co-founders developed Blinkist to help users fit learning into their lives by reading or listening to “Blinks” - 15-minute summations of non-fiction books. He explains, “sometimes you need a three-course dinner, sometimes you need a snack, we are the snack.” In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast co-hosts, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr dive in with Holger to learn how the company has built a sustainable growth engine where focused effort on improving engagement spins a flywheel of paid acquisition and word-of-mouth expansion and it helps them avoid a dependency on venture capital. In the beginning, growth was slow for Blinkist. The team launched their mobile app in 2013 in their native German-language, and Holger calls this their biggest mistake. But we also learn how the company found traction in the US and then came to realize that adding audio content could improve engagement. Success then blossomed as a process of iterative learning through experimentation, and Holger describes how a cross-functional strike team approach that the company calls “missions” has worked to break down silos and motivate teams. One such mission focused on “cracking” paid acquisition channels proved to be the company’s largest driver of growth, but Holger is quick to point out that it is the product’s value to end-users that makes all growth possible. The Blinkist team always has the customer in focus, working to help them build positive habits around learning. From automatically starting a new recommended title after a user finishes listening, to adding “Shortcasts” (brief summations of podcasts) to its content lineup, Blinkist continuously pushes to improve the user experience. With that intentionality, it is no surprise to find out that the company has adopted a North Star Metric of “Monthly Engaged Users” to align teams against its broader mission to fit learning into people’s lives. So jump in with Sean and Ethan as they find out from Holger Seim how growth is built at Blinkist. We discussed: * How Holger and his co-founders struggled in their own lives to find time for learning, and why they saw a mobile app as the right solution to this problem (4:42) * Why launching in German to protect a non-existent brand turned out to be a poor decision in hindsight (8:42) * The impact of qualitative feedback and how that led to the addition of audio versions of Blinks (10:50) * How authors and publishers react to finding their content on Blinkist (12:15) * Why the company is focused on mobile apps as its key platforms (16:53) * The company’s push for annual subscriptions (21:27) * Why fast payback windows are profoundly valuable for helping the company optimize for independence (25:50) * The impact of Covid-19; why less commuting has meant less time for reading and learning but has ultimately helped Holger learn to say “no” and improve efficiencies (32:48)

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Universe App Empowers Entrepreneurs to Build Websites Using Only Their iPhones

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2020 48:49


With the Universe mobile app internet entrepreneurs create complete websites using only their iPhones. Joseph Cohen, the company’s Founder and CEO started with the idea that if you could empower creators to “build the internet” you could unlock a wave of creativity (4:36). In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast he shares the Universe journey with Sean Ellis who is joined by Ethan Garr for the discussion. Universe was built based on the realization that today, creators use their phones to do everything from editing photos and making music, to shooting videos and writing books. Being able to build a website in that same environment is a natural next step for this mobile-first generation, and these websites allow users to create, promote, sell, and fulfill orders. Essentially, they can build fully-functional businesses without outside help using nothing more than a phone that fits in their pocket. Joe explains that his business model is tightly aligned with the goals of his audience. He feels strongly that the more Universe can help creators grow their businesses, the more successful the company will be. In this episode, we will learn how this approach has unlocked word-of-mouth growth, how experimentation helps the company find and amplify opportunities, and how a ship early and often mentality is embraced and shared with users. Through the lens of Universe’s growth story, including its recent $10 million funding round, this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast offers unique insights into the challenges and opportunities facing mobile companies looking to accelerate growth. We discussed: How the democratization of the web in things like photos on Instagram and video with TikTok has created a mobile-first creation mindset (5:00) The challenges of creating a website-building tool specifically for the small screen of a mobile phone (5:55) Universe’s original pivot to its current business model (11:35) How the companies North Star Metric closely aligns with customer success (38:30) The company’s approach to growth through experimentation and continuous improvement (39:45)

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Universe App Empowers Entrepreneurs to Build Websites Using Only Their iPhones

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2020 48:49


With the Universe mobile app internet entrepreneurs create complete websites using only their iPhones. Joseph Cohen, the company’s Founder and CEO started with the idea that if you could empower creators to “build the internet” you could unlock a wave of creativity (4:36). In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast he shares the Universe journey with Sean Ellis who is joined by Ethan Garr for the discussion. Universe was built based on the realization that today, creators use their phones to do everything from editing photos and making music, to shooting videos and writing books. Being able to build a website in that same environment is a natural next step for this mobile-first generation, and these websites allow users to create, promote, sell, and fulfill orders. Essentially, they can build fully-functional businesses without outside help using nothing more than a phone that fits in their pocket. Joe explains that his business model is tightly aligned with the goals of his audience. He feels strongly that the more Universe can help creators grow their businesses, the more successful the company will be. In this episode, we will learn how this approach has unlocked word-of-mouth growth, how experimentation helps the company find and amplify opportunities, and how a ship early and often mentality is embraced and shared with users. Through the lens of Universe’s growth story, including its recent $10 million funding round, this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast offers unique insights into the challenges and opportunities facing mobile companies looking to accelerate growth. We discussed: How the democratization of the web in things like photos on Instagram and video with TikTok has created a mobile-first creation mindset (5:00) The challenges of creating a website-building tool specifically for the small screen of a mobile phone (5:55) Universe’s original pivot to its current business model (11:35) How the companies North Star Metric closely aligns with customer success (38:30) The company’s approach to growth through experimentation and continuous improvement (39:45)

The Breakout Growth Podcast
How Tally Overcame the Challenge of Trust for a New Financial Service to Drive Breakout Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2020 42:42


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers money as they reduce their debt. Tally only makes money when their customers derive this value, and this deliberate “alignment with users” is an underlying theme of Tally’s breakout growth success story (24:58). Making users less stressed and better off financially is the company’s mission, and to make this actionable the company has built teams and processes around a North Star Metric that focuses on how quickly users are getting out of debt (23:40). This informs and drives a test, learn and adapt growth approach driven by Tally’s dedicated growth team, but embraced company-wide (13:05). In this episode, we will learn how Tally drives growth through cross-functional alignment and how intentional growth leadership has made this possible even as the company has grown to a team of 132 employees from just 8 four years ago. We will also dig deep into Mark’s approach to high-velocity experimentation and learn how the development and prioritization of tests leverage quantitative learnings from analytics paired with qualitative information from user research and customer support feedback loops. For fans of Sean Ellis’ “Hacking Growth” this episode will certainly resonate, as Mark and his team have embraced the book’s key principles on their way to breakout growth success. In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers money as they reduce their debt. Tally only makes money when their customers derive this value, and this deliberate “alignment with users” is an underlying theme of Tally’s breakout growth success story (24:58). Making users less stressed and better off financially is the company’s mission, and to make this actionable the company has built teams and processes around a North Star Metric that focuses on how quickly users are getting out of debt (23:40). This informs and drives a test, learn and adapt growth approach driven by Tally’s dedicated growth team, but embraced company-wide (13:05). In this episode, we will learn how Tally drives growth through cross-functional alignment and how intentional growth leadership has made this possible even as the company has grown to a team of 132 employees from just 8 four years ago. We will also dig deep into Mark’s approach to high-velocity experimentation and learn how the development and prioritization of tests leverage quantitative learnings from analytics paired with qualitative information from user research and customer support feedback loops. For fans of Sean Ellis’ “Hacking Growth” this episode will certainly resonate, as Mark and his team have embraced the book’s key principles on their way to breakout growth success. We discussed: How lessons of the last financial crisis have helped Tally through Covid-1

The Breakout Growth Podcast
How Tally Overcame the Challenge of Trust for a New Financial Service to Drive Breakout Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2020 42:42


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers money as they reduce their debt. Tally only makes money when their customers derive this value, and this deliberate “alignment with users” is an underlying theme of Tally’s breakout growth success story (24:58). Making users less stressed and better off financially is the company’s mission, and to make this actionable the company has built teams and processes around a North Star Metric that focuses on how quickly users are getting out of debt (23:40). This informs and drives a test, learn and adapt growth approach driven by Tally’s dedicated growth team, but embraced company-wide (13:05). In this episode, we will learn how Tally drives growth through cross-functional alignment and how intentional growth leadership has made this possible even as the company has grown to a team of 132 employees from just 8 four years ago. We will also dig deep into Mark’s approach to high-velocity experimentation and learn how the development and prioritization of tests leverage quantitative learnings from analytics paired with qualitative information from user research and customer support feedback loops. For fans of Sean Ellis’ “Hacking Growth” this episode will certainly resonate, as Mark and his team have embraced the book’s key principles on their way to breakout growth success. In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers money as they reduce their debt. Tally only makes money when their customers derive this value, and this deliberate “alignment with users” is an underlying theme of Tally’s breakout growth success story (24:58). Making users less stressed and better off financially is the company’s mission, and to make this actionable the company has built teams and processes around a North Star Metric that focuses on how quickly users are getting out of debt (23:40). This informs and drives a test, learn and adapt growth approach driven by Tally’s dedicated growth team, but embraced company-wide (13:05). In this episode, we will learn how Tally drives growth through cross-functional alignment and how intentional growth leadership has made this possible even as the company has grown to a team of 132 employees from just 8 four years ago. We will also dig deep into Mark’s approach to high-velocity experimentation and learn how the development and prioritization of tests leverage quantitative learnings from analytics paired with qualitative information from user research and customer support feedback loops. For fans of Sean Ellis’ “Hacking Growth” this episode will certainly resonate, as Mark and his team have embraced the book’s key principles on their way to breakout growth success. We discussed: How lessons of the last financial crisis have helped Tally through Covid-1

Ivan Tree Podcast
07.- #Dailycast North Star Metric & The Undercover Dream Lovers

Ivan Tree Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2020 33:07


Bienvenidos a entre marketing, libros y música; Un podcast para los amantes del marketing digital. Aquí encontrarás noticias, metodologías y herramientas para tu estrategia digital, además vamos analizar los mejores libros que te van ayudar a ser un mejor profesional, todo esto acompañado de recomendaciones musicales.. Así que acompáñame todos los martes y jueves en un nuevo episodio!….

Editor and Publisher Reports
23 Financial Times Reaches 1-million Subscribers with "North Star" Metric

Editor and Publisher Reports

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2020 52:57


The Financial Times understands what it’s like to be a digital leader. It launched its first paywall in 2002 and over the last decade, the paper has focused on a “north star” metric based on reader engagement. In April 2019, the FT reached 1 million paying readers, one year ahead of schedule. Due to its digital success, E&Precently named the FT as one of their 10 News Publishers That Do It Right. E&P editor-in-chief Nu Yang goes 1-on-1 with FT chief data officer Tom Betts to discuss their formula, the launch of their boutique consultancy firm FT Strategies, and how publishers can find their own metric "north star."

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Minna Technologies CMO, Christoffer Pettersson, Explains the Advantages of Starting B2C and then Pivoting to B2B

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2020 42:58


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Christoffer Pettersson, CMO of Minna Technologies, a SaaS product for banks. The product empowers banks to make recommendations to their customers of ways to save on recurring subscription fees. Initially, Minna Technologies focused on offering this functionality directly to consumers but over time realized the best way to monetize was via banks. However, because of their early B2C efforts, Minna Technologies was able to really refine their user experience based on a deep understanding of consumer behavior. They continue to maintain a direct to consumer user base as a “sandbox” for driving improvements in both the product and the way customers engage with the product. This direct to consumer sandbox overcomes one of the largest challenges of working in a B2B banking environment, which is understandably a low risk tolerance. By the time a bank wants to consider rolling out an improvement, Minna Technologies can present data showing that it really is an improvement. In the conversation, Sean and Christoffer also discussed the typical communication challenges of growing a team from 5 people to 55 people. They explored how to use both a North Star Metric and OKRs to help drive alignment and coordinate execution cross-functionally. Learn more about CMO Christoffer Pettersson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christofferpetterssongbg/ Learn more about Sean Ellis at www.SeanEllis.me

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Minna Technologies CMO, Christoffer Pettersson, Explains the Advantages of Starting B2C and then Pivoting to B2B

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2020 42:58


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Christoffer Pettersson, CMO of Minna Technologies, a SaaS product for banks. The product empowers banks to make recommendations to their customers of ways to save on recurring subscription fees. Initially, Minna Technologies focused on offering this functionality directly to consumers but over time realized the best way to monetize was via banks. However, because of their early B2C efforts, Minna Technologies was able to really refine their user experience based on a deep understanding of consumer behavior. They continue to maintain a direct to consumer user base as a “sandbox” for driving improvements in both the product and the way customers engage with the product. This direct to consumer sandbox overcomes one of the largest challenges of working in a B2B banking environment, which is understandably a low risk tolerance. By the time a bank wants to consider rolling out an improvement, Minna Technologies can present data showing that it really is an improvement. In the conversation, Sean and Christoffer also discussed the typical communication challenges of growing a team from 5 people to 55 people. They explored how to use both a North Star Metric and OKRs to help drive alignment and coordinate execution cross-functionally. Learn more about CMO Christoffer Pettersson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christofferpetterssongbg/ Learn more about Sean Ellis at www.SeanEllis.me

The Breakout Growth Podcast
The Templafy Story: Can Growth Hacking Work in an Enterprise SaaS Business?

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2020 57:48


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Casper Rouchmann, Templafy's head of growth and product owner, Oskar Konstantyner. Templafy is an Enterprise SaaS platform for helping companies stay consistent with their branding and compliant in their messaging. Their solution helps teams keep templates consistent ranging from PowerPoint to email. Templafy is one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe and was recently ranked as the fastest-growing company in Denmark. Oskar and Casper explain that some of the key advantages supporting this rapid growth are a great product, rapid deployment across an organization once it has been purchased and a very low churn rate. Oskar and Casper have both worked to further accelerate growth with growth hacking. In the interview, we explore the challenges and opportunities of using growth hacking when a product is relatively expensive, has a long sales cycle and has multiple stakeholders involved in a purchase decision. We agree that cross-company alignment around the right North Star Metric is critical for unlocking the power of growth hacking and go on to discuss potential North Star Metrics for the business. Despite the challenges, Oskar and Casper are confident that a strong team and a clear focus on enterprise customers make an affective growth hacking approach possible. Learn more about Casper Rouchmann at https://www.linkedin.com/in/casper-rouchmann-growth-hacker/?originalSubdomain=dk Learn more about Oskar Konstantyner at https://www.linkedin.com/in/konstantyner/?originalSubdomain=dk Learn more about Templafy at www.templafy.com

The Breakout Growth Podcast
The Templafy Story: Can Growth Hacking Work in an Enterprise SaaS Business?

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2020 57:48


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Casper Rouchmann, Templafy's head of growth and product owner, Oskar Konstantyner. Templafy is an Enterprise SaaS platform for helping companies stay consistent with their branding and compliant in their messaging. Their solution helps teams keep templates consistent ranging from PowerPoint to email. Templafy is one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe and was recently ranked as the fastest-growing company in Denmark. Oskar and Casper explain that some of the key advantages supporting this rapid growth are a great product, rapid deployment across an organization once it has been purchased and a very low churn rate. Oskar and Casper have both worked to further accelerate growth with growth hacking. In the interview, we explore the challenges and opportunities of using growth hacking when a product is relatively expensive, has a long sales cycle and has multiple stakeholders involved in a purchase decision. We agree that cross-company alignment around the right North Star Metric is critical for unlocking the power of growth hacking and go on to discuss potential North Star Metrics for the business. Despite the challenges, Oskar and Casper are confident that a strong team and a clear focus on enterprise customers make an affective growth hacking approach possible. Learn more about Casper Rouchmann at https://www.linkedin.com/in/casper-rouchmann-growth-hacker/?originalSubdomain=dk Learn more about Oskar Konstantyner at https://www.linkedin.com/in/konstantyner/?originalSubdomain=dk Learn more about Templafy at www.templafy.com

The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 284: Why We Need To Remove The Title of CRO, What Happens If You Apply Customer Success To A Venture Portfolio & Why Net Retention Is The Most Important North Star Metric In SaaS with Travis Bryant, Partner for Founder Experience @ Redpoint Ven

The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2019 37:36


Travis Bryant is Partner for Founder Experience @ Redpoint Ventures, the venture fund with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Netflix, Zuora, Hashicorp and Juniper Networks just to name a few. As for Travis, prior to joining Redpoint, Travis was head of Customer Growth at Front, after spending 5 years building the global Sales organization at Optimizely, the world’s most popular experimentation platform. During his time at Optimizely, the company grew from from $7 to >$90M in ARR and from 40 to 400 people. Before Optimizely, Travis spent 6 years at Salesforce in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Travis made his way into the world of venture as the first ever Partner for founder experience at Redpoint? What were the 2 biggest lessons Travis took from Salesforce? How transformational is the 12 quarter year for Salesforce? Why does Travis believe we need to abolish the title of CRO? Why does it suggest misalignment between customer and vendor from Day 1? What aspects of CRO’s roles is Travis in favour of? What elements is he not in favour of? What does Travis advise founders when it comes to uniting customer facing teams?    Why does Travis believe that SaaS has upended the economic model but not the engagement model? How does the engagement model with customer need to shift? What does this do to the structure of the conventional funnel?  Why does Travis believe net retention must always be the guiding North Star? How does Travis think about the different steps to customer qualification today and what makes the best SDR’s? What does Travis advise founders when it comes to churn analysis? What questions must you ask? What metrics must you look for?  Travis’ 60 Second SaaStr: What motto or quote do Travis frequently revert back to? What is the most challenging element of Travis’ role with Redpoint? How should startup operators coming out of larger organizations determine which startup to join?  Read the transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Travis Bryant

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Explosive marketplace growth: GenM CEO, Moe Abbas, shares how they built a rapidly expanding two-sided marketplace that connects apprentices to real-world job experiences

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2019 44:57


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Moe Abbas, CEO of GenM, a marketplace for digital marketing apprenticeships that has attracted over 60,000 students and 30,000 businesses in its first 2 years of business. Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for GenM’s marketplace. GenM’s growth starts with strong product/market fit and a worthy mission of fixing the broken internship model. Their solution connects students with businesses for digital marketing apprenticeships. The language of “apprenticeships” is an intentional departure from the more traditional language of internships. But the solution goes beyond language to actually require that new businesses sign a commitment to true mentorship and teaching for students. GenM complements this hands-on training with courses that help the students bring real marketing skills to the relationship. GenM’s business model makes the program free for students and businesses pay just $89/month. The GenM team optimized to this price point after realizing that higher price points changed the nature of the relationship between the apprentice and the business. At this price point, businesses are willing to mentor and teach the apprentice. The North Star Metric for the entire team is to expand the weekly active apprenticeships. As a two-sided marketplace, this North Star Metric is driven by distinct growth engines for both the business and the student sides of the marketplace. Students are largely attracted to free education and on the job experience. Businesses, on the other hand, are attracted to the idea of mentoring and teaching an apprentice in exchange for 10 hours/week of marketing help. In his role at GenM as CEO, Moe Abbas has worked to nurture a “test and learn” growth mindset across the company. This is evident in the rapid experimentation that the team has with everything from how they onboard new businesses and students to the prices that they charge for the service. Learn more about Moe Abbas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moeabbas/?originalSubdomain=ca And learn more about GenM here: www.genm.co

The Breakout Growth Podcast
Explosive marketplace growth: GenM CEO, Moe Abbas, shares how they built a rapidly expanding two-sided marketplace that connects apprentices to real-world job experiences

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2019 44:57


In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Moe Abbas, CEO of GenM, a marketplace for digital marketing apprenticeships that has attracted over 60,000 students and 30,000 businesses in its first 2 years of business. Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for GenM’s marketplace. GenM’s growth starts with strong product/market fit and a worthy mission of fixing the broken internship model. Their solution connects students with businesses for digital marketing apprenticeships. The language of “apprenticeships” is an intentional departure from the more traditional language of internships. But the solution goes beyond language to actually require that new businesses sign a commitment to true mentorship and teaching for students. GenM complements this hands-on training with courses that help the students bring real marketing skills to the relationship. GenM’s business model makes the program free for students and businesses pay just $89/month. The GenM team optimized to this price point after realizing that higher price points changed the nature of the relationship between the apprentice and the business. At this price point, businesses are willing to mentor and teach the apprentice. The North Star Metric for the entire team is to expand the weekly active apprenticeships. As a two-sided marketplace, this North Star Metric is driven by distinct growth engines for both the business and the student sides of the marketplace. Students are largely attracted to free education and on the job experience. Businesses, on the other hand, are attracted to the idea of mentoring and teaching an apprentice in exchange for 10 hours/week of marketing help. In his role at GenM as CEO, Moe Abbas has worked to nurture a “test and learn” growth mindset across the company. This is evident in the rapid experimentation that the team has with everything from how they onboard new businesses and students to the prices that they charge for the service. Learn more about Moe Abbas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moeabbas/?originalSubdomain=ca And learn more about GenM here: www.genm.co

Growthpodden av Rebel & Bird
Growth ur ett ledarperspektiv – Från mindset till budget.

Growthpodden av Rebel & Bird

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2019 33:17


Säkra digital tillväxt - 5 fokuspunkter för företagsledare. Jasmin och Joni ger dig detaljerade steg till vad du ska fokusera på för att få ditt företag att växa. Ett avsnitt där de också generöst förklarar vad en prioriteringsmodell och en North Star Metric är, samt några intressanta exempel från kundcase. Prata med företagsledaren om dessa punkter: Ledaren skulle inte hålla datan ren, men tilldela till exempel en budget för det. 1. Företagsledare måste avsätta en ordentlig budget för insamling och underhåll av data. 2. Du som ledare måste sätta och kommunicera mål som driver affärsnytta och användarnytta (North Star Metric). 3. Ledarskaps-mindset: Lära sig snabbt genom experiment. 4. Vad ska ledaren göra och vad ska delegeras till andra? 5. Se till att din organisation följer upp effekterna av varje ny insikt som implementeras.

Experiencing Data with Brian O'Neill
017 - John Cutler on Productizing Storytelling Measuring What Matters & Analytics Product Management

Experiencing Data with Brian O'Neill

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2019 48:29


John Cutler is a Product Evangelist for Amplitude, an analytic platform that helps companies better understand users behavior, helping to grow their businesses. John focuses on user experience and evidence-driven product development by mixing and matching various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. In today’s episode, John and I discuss how productizing storytelling in analytics applications can be a powerful tool for moving analytics beyond vanity metrics. We also covered the importance of understanding customers’ jobs/tasks, involving cross-disciplinary teams when creating a product/service, and: John and Amplitude’s North Star strategy and the (3) measurements they care about when tracking their own customers’ success Why John loves the concept of analytics “notebooks” (also a particular feature of Amplitude’s product) vs. the standard dashboard method Understanding relationships between metrics through “weekly learning users” who share digestible content John’s opinions on involving domain experts and cross-discipline teams to enable products focused on outcomes over features Recognizing whether your product/app is about explanatory or exploratory analytics How Jazz relates to business – how you don’t know what you don’t know yet Resources and Links: Connect with John on LinkedIn Follow John on Twitter Keep up with John on Medium Amplitude Designing for Analytics Quotes from Today’s Episode “It’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. My advice is to fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business.” – John “We definitely ‘dogfood’ our product and we also ‘dogfood’ the advice we give our customers.” – John “You know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. […] there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is, fight for it, because you know that it is important, and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem.” – John “It’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want.” – Brian “We got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked, and it’s so powerful” – Brian “Instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to consider, [I sometimes suggest teams] write in plain English, like in prose format, what would be the value that we could possibly show in the data.’ maybe it can’t even technically be achieved today. But expressing the analytics in words like, ‘you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.’ This method is highly prescriptive, but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience.” – Brian Transcript Brian: My guest today on Experiencing Data is John Cutler who is a product evangelist at Amplitude Software. I have been really enjoying John’s commentary on Twitter and some of his articles on medium about designing better decisions of work tools. If you’re in this space and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I get into the heads of what our customers need? What types of data is actually important to track?” Especially, if you’re looking at longer term outcomes that you want to be able to measure and provide insight on, I think you’re going to enjoy my conversation with John. Without further ado, here’s my chat with John Cutler. All right, we’re back to Experiencing Data, and today we’ve got the cutlefish as your Twitter handle is known, right is it cute-l-fish or cutlefish? John: We’re going to go with cutlefish, not cute-l. Brian: That’s what I thought. John Cutler is here from Amplitude Software, which is a product analytics company, and I wanted to have John on today, not because he is cute necessarily, but because I’ve really been enjoying what you’re espousing about customer experience, and particularly, product management. Which for some of our listeners that are not working in tech companies necessarily, there’s not really a product management kind of role explicitly by title. But I think some of the, as you will probably account to, the overlap between design, user experience, and product is sometimes a gray area. I think some of the things you’re talking about are in important in the context of building analytics tools. Welcome to the show, fill in, make corrections on what I just said about what you’re doing. You’re a product evangelist at Amplitude, so what does that mean and what are you up to over there? John: Well, we’re still trying to figure out the evangelist part because I don’t necessarily sell or evangelize our product, I think our product is great and I like to say it sort of sells itself. But what I’m really focusing on is helping up level teams, now that could be like our internal teams, our customers, but largely to just prospects and teams that have never even heard of Amplitude. What we’re really looking with this role is to do workshops, provide content, I do these coaching sessions with just random teams, so it’s like one hour coaching sessions. But generally trying to fill in the blanks, I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m just going to purchase this analytics tool or this product analytics tool,” and suddenly it’s going to answer all our questions and everything’s going to be fine. But what they don’t quite realize is that you really have to tweak a lot of things about how you work as a product development team to really make use of the great tools that are available. There are amazing tools available. I believe Amplitude is one of them, but there is so many good software as a service products to help product teams. But really at the end of the day, it’s about the team also being aligned and things like that. I really try to take a broad view of what it will take to help people make better products with this role. Brian: Yeah. Can you give an example? I think I know where you’re going with this, but give an example of where someone had to change their expectation? You need to change the way you’re working or let’s figure out what’s important to measure instead of just expecting. I think you’re alluding to like, “Oh, buy our tool, we know what the important analytics and measurement points are that you should care about and we will unveil them.” Instead it’s like, “Well, what’s important to track? Does time on the site matter? Does engagement in the application matter? Does sharing matter? What matters, right?” Can you talk about maybe where there was a learning experience? John: Oh, absolutely. I think maybe a good way to describe this as well is a lot of the learning, a lot of the questions begin way before the team is unwrapping the problem, unraveling the problem. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly but I think we could lead into something more specific. But imagine you’re a team and someone says, “It’s the second half of 2018, what’s going to be on your roadmap?” You think about it and you know what you know and you’ve heard customers tell you things, and the CEO of the company has subtly but not so subtly hinted he’d really like to see X or she’d really like to see X. You put together this roadmap, and at that point once you’ve got people thinking that those solutions are the right solutions, and you force that level of convergence, there’s not a lot of… measurement will not save you at that point, you’ve already committed at that point to deliver those things in that particular setting. One example of a practice that might change to further or amplify the use of measurement would just be not making… committing to missions, committing to move particular metrics that the company believes are associated with mid to long-term growth of the company, and commit to those things instead of committing to build features. An example, a real world example, maybe for someone’s effort, maybe what you’re shooting at before is do they shift from same time on site was important to something else? But for a lot of these teams, it’s shifting from build feature X to something like shortening the time it takes for a team to be able to complete a workflow. That’s the big shift for that. It’s nothing-to-something that makes sense, not necessarily even something-to-something. Brian: One of the things we talk about on the show is designing for outcomes instead of designing outputs. John: Yep. Brian: Because it’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want let alone measure them. Do you run into the problem when you… If you’re coaching someone and getting them into this mindset of designing around an outcome and building your sprint or your next, maybe it’s even a strategy for the next six to 12 months around outcomes? That the important things to measure are not quantifiable in the tool? Do you work yourself out of a customer sometimes because the tool can’t actually measure what’s important? Does that ever happen? John: That’s a great question because I think that I do a fun exercise with people, which is called let’s predict the success of a relationship. We start with this activity and we just we forget about what we think is possible to measure and we just start mapping our beliefs. The team will say something like, “Well, I think that they shouldn’t have arguments.” Then someone will say, “Well, yeah, but it’s not just,” and maybe they’re talking about their own life like, “Well, we argue a lot, but we resolve our arguments pretty, we become stronger once we have the arguments.” Then the team will sit there and go, “Huh, okay.” It’s not just about the number of arguments, it’s ability to resolve your arguments. Brian: Resolve. John: We keep playing this game and we map our beliefs out to predicting these things, and some of these things we have more confidence about and some of these things we don’t have a lot of confidence about. Some of these things we strike and we get this big messy network of nodes and edges on the wall and that’s what we start working with. What’s really, really interesting is that we actually, as a company, there’s almost always some percentage of these things that we can contribute to in terms of what they can instrument in using our product. It’s not like…we would much rather our customers map the universe of things and acknowledge some things that might be difficult to measure or they’re just beliefs at the moment, they haven’t figured out how to measure them. Because really what Amplitude is very powerful at is doing behavioral analytics about these long standing customer journeys through products and those types of… Anyone who’s done a 15-table join and tried to communicate it to other people in your company and then tweak it and have people collaborate with it just knows how painful that is. That’s the type of pain that we solve. But back to the particular question, all the coaching really centers around mapping all the beliefs, and we’re usually confident that there are ways to measure some percentage of those things using our product, and that’s fine by us. Brian: There’s almost like a meta-question, right? John: I like, I’m meta, yeah, I got it. I’m there with you. Brian: You’re like analytics, you’re an analytics product and you talk to your clients about what’s important for them to measure. But then at some point, you have to know what’s important to measure to know that your customers are getting the value. John: Yeah. Brian: Is it directly…are you interested in what they’re setting up to measure and then that becomes your measurement? Do you piggyback off that or do you… How do you justify that the sprint or the epic we worked on last quarter provided business value? How do you…? John: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we definitely dogfood our product and we also dogfood the advice we give people usually first. To give you an example like in 2018, we had this North Star Metric called “Weekly Querying Users”, WQUs. That seemed about right and we did some analysis and it looked like, “Well, for increasing WQUs, it’s probably going to mean this and this and it’s going to be some early indicator that our monthly recurring revenue is going to keep going up”, etc. But there were obvious problems with that and we saw that. And as 2018 went along, we started to look at it more, and for any SaaS company, there’s a point at which your expansion within existing accounts starts to be really, really important in terms of percentage of revenue that you’re in. We thought, “Well, is that metric, can you hand WQUs to any new team member and say move that or move something that you think moves that,” and then be 100% confident they’re going to make good decisions? It broke down after that. What we did is we shifted to weekly learning users. Now a weekly learning user is not just someone querying, because anyone who uses one of these tools knows you could just sit there and query all day and not get an answer. In fact, querying more might indicate that you are not getting an answer. Not like doing anything with it. A weekly learning user is actually someone who shares some piece of digestible content whether it’s notebook, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a chart, and they share it. We actually have this North Star, which is weekly learning users, we believe these three inputs drive weekly learning users and those are activated accounts. They need to know what they’re doing, they’re broadcasted learnings, which is the ability for the user to attempt to broadcast some number of learnings, and then a metric that is a consumption of learning metric which is the broad consumption across the organization of that particular piece of learning. This is all sounds really heady, why would we go to all these lengths to do this, and Weekly Querying User sounded good. But to us this really encapsulates a strategy. I think that that’s an important thing that a lot of people from pure analytics backgrounds or who are used to sitting with a queue of questions and answering those questions are maybe not used to the idea of moving towards a cohesive strategy as expressed by a number of metrics and the relationships between those metrics. That’s something that we really encourage our customers to do, it’s not data snacking. It’s not like, “Oh, I got this itch today so I’m going to answer this question.” That took a lot of work to come up with that, and we’re confident about those relationships between those things. But more importantly, it helps any new team member like all you need to do is show a skilled product manager or a skilled designer or a developer even and say, “This is our current mental model as described by the relationship between these things. Where do you want to slot in? What do you have in mind?” That’s really, really powerful. I don’t know if that roundabout way of saying we take this really, really seriously. Brian: If I can sum this up, and I’ll need you to repeat part of it, but you have monthly querying users, so what I take that to be is I, the customer, using, paying for the Amplitude software, a querying user means I went in and I looked for content or I literally used a search interface to probably look up an analytic or some stat. You moved away from the number of people doing that and how often they’re doing it as a measurement of your company’s success to this three-stage kind of thing that I heard included sharing some knowledge. But can you repeat what those three grains were? John: Oh, yeah, sure. The North Star is what we call “Weekly Learning Users”, so WLUs. Those are users performing the behavior of interest, which is sharing, distributing some piece of content. Then we believe there are three inputs that explain that metric or three inputs that we really focus on. One is that the accounts are activated, which are meaning that does this account just have a minimum number of people doing that? The next one is broadcasted learnings, which is me, “is the initial attempt to broadcast the learning?” Then consumption is the actual long tail consumption of that particular learning. Let’s say it is a story like I sign up with Amplitude, no one’s really using it all because we haven’t really onboarded and we haven’t really instrumented, we haven’t done any of that stuff. Okay, well, then we get that done, so we get just that we’ve activated, we have at least a certain number of users learning, some amount. I’m in the tool, I’m in a notebook that is really interesting that I’m putting together that tells a story with data, very interesting about the mission that I’m working on. I attempt to invite people to that notebook or get them involved, that’s the broadcast. Then, finally, the consumption of learning would be the accumulated interactions with everyone with a notebook. If that sounds too complex… Brian: Got it. I don’t know, I- John: But the whole idea is for people listening and I think especially folks, designers and other folks is that their experience with analytics might be something very simple like “what percentage of people used feature?” Or something. What they’re not getting is the context, the relationships, and what I’m describing here, there’s amazing belief networks, there’s causal relationship diagrams, there’s just simple stickies and string on the wall, whatever you want to call them. But we’re describing our beliefs as it relates to the data, and I think that, that’s really important. For some background too, I’m not a data scientist, I’ve been a product manager and a UX researcher and that’s been my focus for a long time. It’s not like I’m a pro at this stuff, and even for me, though, it grounds me in what I’m working with and makes my analysis a lot easier. Brian: I imagine you may have some, not resistance, but when you’re working with quote data people or analytics people or data science people in your staff, in Amplitude, are there routine things that you wish they would hear that would sink in or problems that maybe they’re not aware of that you think they should be like, “We need to look at the problem differently.” Maybe you encapsulated that and that’s why you have this three stage thing as a reaction to the data snacking mentality, which is “What data do we provide? Great, they have it, now they can eat it.” Is that their reaction to that or are there other things that… I’m thinking of our listeners, we do have data scientists and analytics type people, and I’m wondering if you were to work with them, it’s like, “Here are the things that I want you to think about here to get our head a little bit out of the tech for a second and into the decision support mentality.” Anything, what would you espouse or advocate? John: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a little bit with a story. I was the PM for search and relevance at Zendesk, like support software. My background is not in information retrieval or the guts of search but very, very early on working on a team with very, very talented people, data scientists, data engineers really, at the end of the day. One thing that I very much advocated for is we needed to be able to get everyone in the same room, we needed to get the people who were experts in what I would just call the actors, the support agents, or the support managers, or the the person trying to get help on their Uber app. There’s experts in that, there’s domain experts. There’s also people who are experts in the surface area, the surface, like the interface. There’s people who are really, really good at searching or finding information on mobile. There’s people who’s very good at finding information on, in our case, like the support agents view in their web browser. Then you had our people who are really smart and creating data as it related to search and they were great at data engineering, etc. The main thing that I noticed was that there’s just a silo-ing, and the people on my team were just craving, craving to be sitting next to someone who understood these other things really well. I think that for a lot of listeners it’s probably you know that, you know that from a first principles angle, you’re like, “Well, I know that there’s a bigger picture here.” I know that just in our case of searching like we knew that raising the mean reciprocal rank of a search term, we are searching it, where does the person click? Do they click on the second item, the fifth item. In theory, raising that would make a difference but when we look more broadly, it really didn’t relate to deflection of tickets and things like that. Our traditional metrics, the way we were measuring success is locally related to search. If we broadened our horizon to what makes a difference for the human beings out there who need their support tickets resolved or the support agents or things, that perspective was so helpful. What I would say to the folks on listening, it’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think, organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business. Brian: Sure, and you’re echoing sentiment I had a Data Center from the Broad Institute on, he was mentioning how much he’s like, “My work is so much more powerful when I have a great domain expert with me who really knows the space.” We met over music, I’m a musician as well and he was trying to explore creativity in the context of jazz. He’s a enthusiast in terms of music, he’s not a musician, but he’s an enthusiast so he understood some of it but he didn’t have the lingo. It’s just interesting when you look at someone working in that space trying to answer a question about like, “How does creativity work in jazz?” They don’t have all that domain lingo. Being on for a change, being the domain expert, it was fascinating for me to be on the other side because usually I’m the hymn advocate, even though I’m not a data scientist, as a designer and a consultant, we deal with this all the time. It’s like, we got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked and it’s so powerful so I totally agree with you on the need to provide that bigger context sometimes so you don’t just- John: Jazz is just a mistake played more than once, right? Brian: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of them, there’s no wrong notes, just bad choices. John: It’s very easy for them to create the model for that. You’re just making a mistake and play it more than once. Brian: Exactly. John: Then you go back to the top. Brian: Exactly. Well, even that, like play the head again. Well, what’s a head? Oh, okay. Well, it’s just one form of the tune and they cycle through it and play chorus. Well, what’s a chorus? Okay, shit. But even having that, you can imagine that on the business client, this was like a fun side project he was working on. But you can imagine that in a business context where you don’t even know what you don’t know yet about it yet. I hear this as happening, they’re still in the, especially, in the non-tech company space, the more traditional companies that are, “Oh, we have 100 years of data and let’s go, we need to go buy some data scientists and throw them at this pile of data and then magic will come out the other end.” John: Oh, I think that that happens in tech companies, too, though. I think that that’s the number of data scientist friends who’ve been hired in is like some large effort. Then, one, they’re like, “Yeah, and data engineering was the actual problem.” Okay, we spent our first year there just going around in circles on solving that problem, and then, yeah, the number of friends I have who’ve been frustrated by that dynamic, even in tech companies, I think it’s a pretty common, more common everywhere than we would think. Brian: Tell me a little bit about, so we’ve been talking about the analytical part of all this, the quantifiable parts largely but you have a UX research background as well. We talk, on this show, we talk about empathy, we talk about the needs to go talk to people to ask good questions, to ladder up, get into all that. How does that fit in? When you’re working on an analytics tool, can you fill us in on your approach to qualitative research and more the soft, mushy stuff that UX people deal with? John: Yeah, and it’s interesting. For context, I’m not a UX researcher at Amplitude but I’ve done that in prior environments that required the chops. But in talking to teams and doing it, I think so many of the basics apply in the sense that you’re really… Not to overuse the jobs-to-be-done stuff, you’re really, really trying to understand what decision this person is hoping to make. You’re really trying and then what impact that decision has on the rest of the organization and who is involved in it. I think anyone who’s done this knows that even as a UX researcher, if I do like a co-design activity with customers related to anything analytics oriented, it’s just, “Oh, we’re going to do an Excel mock up or you know.” Anytime you get customers involved with that, it’s so easy. If either side, and I’ve been on both sides of this, it’s so easy to forget what you were trying to do. I think that has a lot to do with the exploratory aspect of data in general that we have a gut instinct that if we just saw this stuff organized like this, then it would somehow be valuable for something we have to do. I think that for, and I don’t know if it answers the question, but I think it requires the same chops but also understanding that people just have a hard time, users have a hard time talking about what they are looking at and what they’re hoping to get out of the data when they’re looking at it over and over and over. I think that really, it really you have to use all the tools in the tool shed. To give you an example, there was… I don’t know if you’ve done these things too, I’ll do these exercises where it’s like, “Okay, we’re revamping the app, it’s just going to be this mobile browser with three numbers on it.” That’s it, that we’re not going to have all these fancy charts, we’re not going to have all this stuff. And three numbers and then one piece of narrative advice, like “Consider this or do this.” I love activities like that from a UX researcher standpoint when I’m working with people because it really, really forces them to just get out of their own head to think about it. That’s like a common trick and you probably have a lot more. But, yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question but it’s a lot of the same tools. But I think also you have to really… It’s a job environment, they’re making decisions, they’re hiring these analytics to do a job. But then with this added layer that I think that people are just incredibly, they find it incredibly difficult to talk about the numbers that they’re looking for. Brian: When you say it’s difficult for them to talk about it, are you talking about their digestion of what’s on the screen or their expression of what’s important to them to actually find out? What do I actually want to learn about? Is it… John: Both really, and that’s the thing that I think just makes it doubly as hard. It means that if you show them something, and I think that we can all relate to it too, like any of us who have been shown some mock or some prototype of information on the screen, you can see your gears turning. You’re having to process it and where did this come from? Can I trust it? What is it? We see that all the time just in Amplitude, it’s people… Our understanding of how people experience some of these querying screens that we have, when you actually ask them to just talk through what they’re thinking about as they move through it, it’s just it’s so complex. Data trust, where is this stuff coming from, data over time, their challenges with certain visualization techniques, even if it’s “the right technique” like, “Well, I just need a radar chart.” Just like no you don’t really. But that’s how they’ve been anchored or whatever. It’s just complex. I don’t have a fancy answer, it’s just complex. Brian: What you just told me reminds me of you had mentioned you do this exercise, and I’m wondering if it’s the same exercise that I’ve done as well with analytics tools, especially, in the context of monitoring applications. There’s some system that’s monitoring stuff and it’s supposed to advise you on what should I do next or what happens with something like this? It’s like “instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to do”, it’s “write in plain English like a prose format what would be the value that we could possibly show”, and maybe we can’t even technically do it today. But it’s “express the analytics and words like you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.” It’s highly prescriptive but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience. How close to that can we get to it, where I don’t have to infer from charts or whatever the date of this format is, how close could we get to something that prescriptive and then try to work backwards from that. We probably can’t get right to that full prose. Is it something like that where you jump to this conclusion, like value conclusion or something like that? John: Yeah, and I do a couple of these like that, one is if I have an Alexa or if I have a tube of crackers or whatever I’m like, “This is the interface now.” You can ask Alexa, that’s your interface. This is a beautiful future world where you just have your smart person, your smart assistant to do these things. Yeah, similar type of, I think, what it does is it creates just enough dissonance to snap people out of just immediately trying to unravel the visualization, which can be I think all of us do that. I think that that’s our instinct whenever we look at something like that. Brian: The default next question is how should we visualize this data that we’ve captured? That’s the itch that we may not be the one to scratch? John: Yeah, but I think that’s also what we can test with, that point, when we’ve got that need to fill, that’s when we can try multiple approaches, I think to see that. That’s my experience, there is that point at which you need to you go back to the drawing board. Although, I would say that depending on the subject, the user in that case or the person you’re working with, some people are really, really good at just the co-design aspect. I don’t know your experience with that, but it seems to have a lot to do with what the people do each day and how they think about visualization and stuff. But I’ve done co-design sessions with people who the next step was, “Well, let’s start thinking about, let’s start drawing, let’s start doing some other things to do it.” I think that depends a lot on the background of the people that you’re working with. Brian: If you were starting over today with Amplitude, is there either a… Not necessarily a feature you would change but is there something that you would approach differently? If someone says, “Hey, we have this JavaScript widget, you paste it in your, all your app or whatever, and we can track almost anything, any activity, whatever. What should we show?” Is there something you would change about maybe how you guys went, the process you went about arriving at the current product that you have? John: That’s interesting. I wish Spencer and Jeffrey were here to answer because they’re the founders of the company. But I think that it’s funny how products have their history about them, so Amplitude, for example, it was a Y Combinator. The founders didn’t go to Y Combinator, they had this fancy voice app or something that they were working on, and this was actually just their effort. They were like, “Well, we kind of had this app,” and they surveyed what was available and then just said, “We really need, there’s a thing, it’s a little different. It’s like an event based measurement thing. We really want to instrument this app and know whether people are using it or not.” That was the founding story, it wasn’t their key thing. A lot of the early customers were folks from Zynga or Facebook or other places that had moved on to other startups and then they wanted something that helped with the 90% of product questions that they had around retention and engagement and complex behavior patterns. Does this behavior predict this or is there a relationship between these things? That’s the founding story, these discerning teams that had a fair amount of autonomy and were tasked with working in these environments and that they wanted a product that they could do that with. When I’m thinking about what I would change as the newcomer to the company, now maybe five years on, was it, yeah, or six years or seven years on, I think it’s what they’re starting to do now, which is interesting. This notebooks feature to me is just so, so, so good and it gets away from a traditional dashboard. But with a notebook, it’s very similar to a data science notebook, you can weave this story and this narrative and you can make the charts live and you can communicate it and you can do those things. As a product manager, that is pure gold to me, and it’s just we’ve started to do those things. I think that the answer would be more of what they’re really digging into now, which is around this learning user concept and how do you create stories with the data to motivate your team and keep everyone aligned and things. I think if it hadn’t existed and I joined a year ago, I would have been like, “Oh, you’re missing this little element like the actual part that integrates it into day to day product development.” But they’ve just started doing that now, so they stole my answer. Brian: Nice, and just for people that don’t know, tell me if I got this right, but the notebooks for people that aren’t data scientist, it’s effectively a collection of both quant data like maybe charts or tables, stats, data collection that you guys have put into some visualized widgets or whatever it may be insights plus qualitative stuff like my commentary on it. Like “Why do we care about this? Well, design is currently tracking these metrics because we’re running a study on dah, dah, dah, and we think we can move this up” and that’s a proxy for this other thing. You can provide all this context in that storytelling mentality so that when someone new comes in, they’re like, “Why do I care about time on site or whatever the metric?” John: Exactly, and that’s the huge thing. One thing that we learned, we’re in this business of teams getting going and it’s like it’s so easy to get to the point where you’ve instrumented your products and any new person joining your company can’t make heads or tails of anything. It’s like you’ve got all these events, are these duplicate events? We’ve invested a lot of time in this taxonomy feature, which helps manage your taxo- It’s way, way, when people try to build this stuff in-house, they just forget about all that stuff. Like, “Oh, it’s just events, it’s semi-structured information, we’re going to put it here and then we’re just going to run queries on it.” But all that’s really, really important, so back to the notebooks thing, one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen in notebooks is people using them to onboard people and orient them with all the available analytics that and metrics and things that are being recorded. That’s actually a really good testament to show that need. Brian: They use it to actually show how they use Amplitude at the- John: Right, it’s pretty meta. Brian: Wow, that’s awesome. John: Yeah, we see them do that or even some of them use it for training like, “Okay, let’s start with this idea that we’ve got this whole universe of users. Well, how would we segment those? Well, here are the key ways that we segment.” Okay, that we’ve gone down one layer, and so I think that that’s kind of cool. But, yeah, for people who don’t know about these data science notebooks, it is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, you can embed charts that are live or you could embed point-in-time charts, you can make comments, and you can do various things. I think for a lot of people who don’t do this for a living, they get intimidated and it’s not, a lot of the stuff is not rocket science, but it’s just annoying to have to go to someone in your company and say, “Hey, can you spend like three or four hours just explaining our information to us.” That’s really hard to do, so these notebooks help with that particular thing. I think that type of stuff is really the future of moving away from just very, very stayed dashboards and things like that. Brian: Right. I don’t know if there’s much in terms of predictive or prescriptive intelligence in the tool, does the tool provide that as well or is it mostly rear view mirror analytics? John: It’s interesting you say that, so we have this new feature called Impact Analysis, and so in Impact Analysis you are able to go from day zero of a particular use of a particular feature and then see the impact that it has on another set of things. We give some statistics and we give some other values in there. So we’re middle of the road moving to more and more complex questions. But one thing that our team realizes that anything… To prevent people from making bad decisions or making poor statements, you need to be so, so, so careful about presenting what you’re actually showing if there’s a correlation between something or even implying that there’s causation without doing the background on it. We’re not completely rear view and we’re in this middle ground, but we’re also going to go on record and say we’re predicting what this value’s going to be in six months. Brian: Right, and the reason, and not just the hype of machine learning, blah, blah, blah, that’s not my main reason for asking was going to lead into my next question, which was do you struggle at all with the expression in the tool of the evidence that backs up any types of conclusions that you’re showing? Do your customers care? Well, how did you guys arrive at this? John: They absolutely care, and so like one of the… We spent a lot of time in the ability, in Amplitude, any data point that you see, usually, if you hover over it, there’s a message it says, “Click to inspect,” or you can create a cohort off of that or you can see the paths to that particular thing. What we really made this effort to do is exactly right, is that people… Working at two analytics companies now, Pendo and now Amplitude, data trust and people being able to unravel what that number means in a way that makes sense to them seems like one of the massive limiters. It’s just that thing that it’s best laid plans start, that’s the entropy that exists with these tools as people use them more and more. There’s just it gets messier, a bunch of hands, a bunch of people are playing around. At least with Amplitude, they try to make a really big effort to like if you want to understand why that number is there and what is behind it, we try to make that really easy. John: But we could always do better because in my mind this is the number one difference between the more data snacking approach like “it kind of looks interesting, that number,” something that you can really pin your business on, which I think is what people… That’s the dream of all this, but then once people start to ask good questions really, it really challenges the tool. Brian: John, this has been fantastic chatting with you, I really appreciate you sharing this with our listeners. Do you have any parting wisdom or anything you’d like to share with people that are maybe working more on the tech side or the data side of the thing and the vents and they’re trying to, “I want to produce more use, whether it’s reports or actually software applications. But we’re trying to provide better stuff, more engaging, more useful…” Any closing advice you might give to someone like that? John: I’m going back to what we were talking about from the UX research angle is that I think that in this area, there’s so much temptation to any one of us who’ve done this is that there’s this constant push and pull between customizability and then this promise of preemptive insights like smart system, it’s intelligent, it’s doing these things. Then so how prescriptive are you? Is what you’re presenting and actually helping someone to do their job. I think that it’s probably reflective of my learning at Amplitude is that really going to human centered design, like really thinking about if the person is able to effectively do their job and really able to answer the questions that they’re answering. I think that what happens is all of us want that, but then we hit this wall and we start to get really some conflating information from users and we start to… Then we’re like, “Well, okay, we’re just going to let them find what they want to find. I think that, that exploratory type of research should be something that’s possible in these tools. In fact, I think that leads to asking some of the best questions when users can do that. But I would really hope that people don’t abandon the idea of being really patient and seeing if before they just throw their hands up in the air and will say, “Well, we’ll just make a query builder and that’s it, that’s it.” Like really seeing if that thing can solve the problem. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s something that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. Brian: Yeah, I talk about sometimes like with clients and people in this space about knowing whether or not you’re producing an explanatory product or an exploratory product. It doesn’t mean you can’t necessarily have some of both but there’s a big difference between the value, like in your case, I’m guessing a lot of these people really want some explanations when they tell us about what we can do to make our software better. They’re not there for fun, but they might run across some things they didn’t know were possible which begins the questioning. But if you put all the effort on them, you’re just shifting the tool effort over to the customer. You’re making it much harder for them to get the value out at which point they may abandon or quit. It’s not just knowing are we explanatory or exploratory or at least there’s this feature or there’s this outcome that this goal that we’re working on, the sprint. But just being aware of that I think is part of the challenge. Like should they be able to walk away with… I should be in the six to 19 apple’s range, whatever that means, like, should I be able to walk away with that level of clarity or not? I don’t know. John: I think that it’s also something like, that’s interesting you said that, because a lot of features that we’re experimenting with, one thing that Amplitude does is anytime you… We built an undo feature, so we try to make it really easy to go really deep and then just back out really gracefully. It’s like infinite, every version of the chart as you work on one is saved. You can back out of it. There’s a lot of features like Save As or you’re built like you could go to someone else’s chart, and if you have some idea of where you want to take it, you could edit it. But you’re not editing their chart, you’re editing a copy and you can think about it. But back to that point is I think that there’s many things that you can do to encourage, that you can juggle those needs concurrently for having definitive things and then also encouraging exploration. We’ve found that with our product as we experiment more. One, I just told you about it, like the ability to telescope into a metric and then do more exploration around it. That didn’t exist before and then we were like, “Oh, well, how about when you hover over any data point and you allow them to inspect that or explore that?” I would say that there are ways to accommodate both at least from our perspective and what we’ve learned. Brian: Right, and I think there’s always some of both of that, and I don’t think most people are going to take everything on its face value. But I hear what you’re saying. One of the things I’ve been recently working on is a UX framework for this called the CED framework, just conclusion, evidence, and data. It’s not necessarily a literal expression of “Where should the screens go? What goes on every screen?” But the concept that when possible, if the tool can provide conclusions with the second tier of being the evidence by which the tool or application arrived at this conclusion. Level three might be really getting into the raw data like, “What are the queries? What was the sequel that actually ran?” Or whatever the heck it may be, there’s times when maybe that data is necessary early on a customer journey. It may just be, “We need to build trust around this stuff.” We can’t be totally black box, but we don’t actually expect people to spend a lot of time at the D-level. We really want them to work in the C level, but it’ll take time and evidence is required sometimes if you’re going… Especially, I got to go to the boss, I can’t just tell him it’s 18, we should be at 18, not 12. It’s like, “Well, how did you arrive at that?” John: We find a lot is the instrumentation rigor is like that’s one of our big problems to solve really is there are these products on the market that do just try to record everything for it. There’s a lot of entropy there and there’s a lot of issues. They’re very fragile, in some ways, so we as a company definitely believe in explicitly instrumenting these events. But at the same time, you’d be amazed how many product teams… There’s this thing called a user story, you write a user story that’s from the user’s perspective, what are you trying to do? Now you would think that like, “Okay, well, we’ll tack on to the acceptance criteria for any story that you’ll use a noun and a verb, and you’ll get these properties and you’ll get these things. Integrating instrumentation on the product level, not necessarily like, “Okay, we’re instrumenting how our servers are working or anything,” but just, “What did the user do?” That’s still relatively new. People who’ve worked in environments that just do that as second nature that, okay, they’re in another thing, but we find that companies even need to change that approach. You’ve mentioned your CED thing like what’s interesting is that extends to the UX of instrumenting. It’s pretty interesting from that, it’s you’re the user trying to draw some conclusion, you’re doing these things. But it’s almost like service design, in some sense, because you need to design the approach to even instrumenting this stuff. It makes your head hurt sometimes. Brian: Yeah, all this stuff makes my head hurt. But that’s why we have conversations, hopefully, we’re knowledge sharing and it’s like giant aspirin conversations or something, I don’t know. But I found this super useful, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people follow you? I know I found you on Twitter. I forget how but what’s your [crosstalk 00:47:23]- John: Twitter is good, I’ve installed a Stay Focused app to prevent more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter. But you will find me eventually there. I write a fair amount on Medium and it’s pretty easy to find me there. Brian: Okay. John: If you just type in “John Cutler product”, I have about 400+ posts on Medium. Some are better than others but- Brian: Awesome. John: … yeah, that’s the best way for right now. Brian: Awesome. Well, I will definitely link both of those, your Medium page and your Twitter up in the show links. Man, John, it has been really fun to chat with you here. Thanks for coming on the show. John: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Brian: Yeah, super. All right, well, cheers. John: Cheers, bye-bye.

Podcast.lu
#3 Johnny Lagneau - Warrigal Innovation Studio (#startup)

Podcast.lu

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2019 47:11


Aujourd'hui, Stéfanie est avec Johnny Lagneau, coach de la méthodologie Lean Startup et co-fondateur de la startup Warrigal Innovation Studio située à la House of Startups de Luxembourg. Après ses multiples expériences en tant qu'enseignant, formateur et chef d'entreprise, il a créé avec son associé, un studio d'innovation qui accompagne les porteurs de projets innovants et développe leurs outils numériques. Pour ce premier podcast startup, Johnny nous en dit plus sur le Minimum Viable Product d'une startup, sur la méthodologie Lean startup, sur l'écosystème des startups à Luxembourg, il nous parle aussi de sa relation avec son associé et de son North Star Metric. Plus personnellement, il partage avec nous sa routine, ses podcasts préférés et revient en détails sur son challenge personnel : rencontrer 3 personnes par jour pendant un an. Bonne écoute !

Deliver It Cast
EP83 - Idea Funnel

Deliver It Cast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2019 20:07


  Many times as Product Owners we are asked to do more than the team can handle. Having a way to sort through all of the ideas, problems, and yes even requests are sometimes necessary to put in place. In the first episode of Season 5, the notion of a funnel to sift those items though is discussed, some thoughts on how to do it, how to make sure you focus on those things valuable enough to say yes to, and ways to show the scope of all those asks to everyone. Welcome back everyone!   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Bob Galen - Scrum Product Ownership, 3rd Edition Justin Bauer - We’re Evolving Our Product’s North Star Metric. Here’s Why. Ash Maurya - The Idea Funnel CPrime - Getting from an Idea to Actionable Backlog Teresa Torres - Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions  

Elevate: The Official Podcast of Elite Agent Magazine
Episode 79: How to growth hack your business like Uber and Facebook with Anton Babkov

Elevate: The Official Podcast of Elite Agent Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2019 19:56


Want to hack your way to growth like the big guns of Silicon Valley? In this week’s edition of the Elevate podcast, Anton Babkov, CEO of Rexlabs, explains the mechanics of how to use the measurement tool they use - The North Star Metric or NSM.

Growth Makers
#60 - Yubo : Atteindre 20M d'utilisateurs, avec Sacha Lazimi, CEO

Growth Makers

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2019 27:14


Comme toute son équipe, Sacha est un passioné de réseaux social et de consumer app. Avec Yubo, ils n'ont qu'un seul objectif : atteindre le milliard d'utilisateurs. Pour l'instant, ils décomptent 20M d'inscrits dont 500 000 utilisateurs actifs par jour.Sacha parle de la North Star Metric de Yubo (le nombre d'utilisateurs actifs journalier) et des KPIs qui l'accompagne (rétention n-day, nouveau utilisateurs, etc.) avant d'expliquer l'importance d'avoir une forte rétention utilisateurs pour accélérer sa croissance.La starification est un phénomène de société dont Sacha et son équipe ont réussi à tirer le meilleur parti pour accélérer leur croissance et attirer de nombreux utilisateurs sur leur plateforme. En effet, Yubo a surfé sur la mode suivante : partager son pseudo snapchat à des inconnus un peu partout sur le web afin d'avoir de plus en plus d'abonnés (ou followers), ce qui leur a amené plusieurs millions d'inscriptions.On discute d'un autre hack, celui d'une vidéo satirique partagé par un internaute que Yubo a mis en avant et qui leur a permis de diviser par 3 leur cout d'acquisition d'un utilisateur.Yubo est une startup proposant un réseau social pour teenager ayant levé plus de 10 millions d'euros.Au programme :Pourquoi la rétention est la clé de la croissanceComment Youtube a permis à Yubo de diviser son CAC par 3Comment Yubo a levaragé Snapchat pour générer plusieurs millions d'utilisateursRessources de l'épisode : bit.ly/growthmakers60Pour soutenir le podcast :1. S'inscrire sur Growth Makers pour ne rater aucun épisode.2. Mettre 5 étoiles sur Apple Podcast pour aider d'autres startupers à découvrir le podcast.Pour accélérer sa startup :1. Des intervenants d'Uber, Intercom, Zalando et Frichti pour vous former à la growth.2. Travailler avec moi par le biais de l'agence : Bryte. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

Growth Makers
#57 - Livestorm : 20% de croissance par mois depuis 2 ans, avec Gilles Bertaux

Growth Makers

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2019 41:30


Gilles est co-fondateur et CEO de Livestorm, un outil de webinar simple et intelligent faisant en moyenne 20% de croissance chaque mois depuis maintenant 2 ans.Contrairement à Alan, la culture s'est dessinée tardivement chez Livestorm (au fil de l'eau comme dirait Gilles) mais aujourd'hui elle se dessine à travers trois valeurs bien concrètes : la curiosité, l'humilité et l'application. L'humilité tout simplement parce que "les échanges sont plus riches quand l'ego est mis de côté". L'application entraine un ralentissement de la cadence de production (au niveau du produit), mais Gilles préfère le "moins mais mieux" (ils ont tout de même lancé plus de 20 features l'année passée).Parlons peu, parlons marketing, Gilles dévoile comment ils ont fait de Quora leur premier canal d'acquisition ou encore comment il a automatisé la demande de reviews lui ayant permis d'en récolté 50 en 2 mois.North Star Metric vs MMR, on s'écharpe avec Gilles sur le besoin d'avoir une métrique prouvant que le produit apporte de la valeur à l'entreprise et à l'utilisateur. Mais comment trouver et définir cette métrique ?On clôt l'interview en discutant d'activation : comment Livestorm définit un utilisateur activé ? Le cas échéant comment ils ont automatisé l'onboarding grâce à une séquence d'emails personnalisés.Au programme :Comment Livestorm a généré 50 reviews en 2 mois automatiquementLe process de création de nouvelles features de LivestormComment Livestorm a automatisé la création de roadmap suivant les conversations Intercom avec les utilisateursRessources de l'épisode : bit.ly/growthmakers57Pour soutenir le podcast :1. S'inscrire sur Growth Makers pour ne rater aucun épisode.2. Mettre 5 étoiles sur Apple Podcast pour aider d'autres startupers à découvrir le podcast.Pour accélérer sa startup :1. Suivre le MOOC Growth Management pour trouver ses prochains leviers de croissance (nouveaux pricing et lancement du coaching en Janvier 2019).2. Travailler avec moi par le biais de l'agence : Bryte. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

B2B Growth
867: The Role of a North Star Metric & Empathy in Your Website Redesign w/ Dave Cook

B2B Growth

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2019 16:50 Transcription Available


In this episode we talk to Dave Cook, Head of Growth Marketing at Plaid. Click here to connect with this guest on LinkedIn.  

33 Tangents
33 Tangents - Episode #31 - What is a “North Star Metric” and how do you go about determining it?

33 Tangents

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2018 37:47


Created and defined by GrowthHackers (https://growthhackers.com/articles/north-star-metric), “The North Star Metric (NSM) is a powerful concept that has emerged in recent years from Silicon Valley companies with breakout growth. It helps teams move beyond driving fleeting, surface-level growth to instead focus on generating long-term retained customer growth.  The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.”   This week Jim, Jon, and Jason discuss the concept of a North Star Metric, the value an organization can see by defining and measuring one, and some real world examples of where it has been used.     Website: www.33sticks.com Email: Podcast@33sticks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/33Sticks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33sticks/

Inside Intercom Podcast
Sean Ellis, CEO at Growth Hackers

Inside Intercom Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2018 28:38


From finding a North Star Metric to experimenting across the full customer journey, Sean Ellis, founder and CEO at GrowthHackers and Dropbox's first marketer, shares his formula for creating sustainable, long-term growth in a business.

Growth Makers
#7 - The Family : l'envers du décor, par Côme Courteault.

Growth Makers

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2017 34:10


Au programme :Pourquoi Côme ne croit pas au concept de North Star Metric.Pourquoi le premier canal d’acquisition se fait de manière naturelle et selon les compétences des fondateurs.Pourquoi la résilience est la qualité première d’un bon entrepreneur.Découvrez le nouveau pricing du MOOC Growth Management (et le lancement du coaching) Pour soutenir le podcast :1. S'inscrire sur Growth Makers pour ne rater aucun épisode.2. Mettre 5 étoiles sur Apple Podcast pour aider d'autres startupers à découvrir le podcast.Pour accélérer sa startup :1. Suivre le MOOC Growth Management pour trouver ses prochains leviers de croissance (nouveaux pricing et lancement du coaching en Janvier 2019).2. Travailler avec moi par le biais de l'agence : Bryte. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
128: To Attract and Retain (Dan Croak)

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2015 47:44


Chad talks with thoughtbot CMO Dan Croak about our content marketing strategy, managing the flow of new media, and the origin of our growth team. Bourbon Paperclip thoughtbot Playbook How To Scale a Development Team- Adam Wiggins Semantic Linefeeds- Brandon Rhodes Coelevate Hound North Star Metric Words to Avoid Dan on Twitter