Question for Founders: What decisions do you spend the most time on?
Hey fellow founders,
I've been reflecting on how the startup journey feels like this process of continuous discovery--we're constantly trying to answer what our customers want and how to steer our business within the markets we operate in.
Questions like "Will this truly solve my customers’ problems?", "What aspects of my product do my customers value most?", or "How do I know I'm doing the right things?"
Depending on the decision we may spend time with customers, look at analytics, or just go with our gut.
But I'm curious...What sort of decisions occupy a ton of your time and attention?
Which ones do you drill down with research or analytics? And on the flip side, when do you just go with your intuition and see what happens?
Thanks all!
In my opinion, it depends a lot on the project I have in mind. At the beginning, I dedicate a significant amount of time to exploring the market and the specific sector. In more advanced stages, I focus on aligning my product with what the market demands. If I manage to consolidate it, I concentrate on achieving greater profitability. It's a process, and you never know exactly which stage you're in, but just keep moving forward, and as another colleague mentioned, enjoy the journey.
Makes a lot of sense. What's your process for aligning your product? I imagine it's a combination of customer interviews and product analytics but curious how you take on those tasks day-to-day
Depends on the stage. When I'm trying to validate an idea, I talk to potential customers. Pre-launch, I focus heavily on iterating on the MVP. Once I launch, I spend a lot of time chasing customers where they are and monitoring the activity in the product. At least once a week, I go through the new user flow personally. This helps me identify roadblocks and smooth out onboarding. The rest is just marketing and product development. Sometimes one is more important, and sometimes the other is, but I always do both.
Makes a lot of sense. What questions do you find yourself asking the most when you're doing these activities?
It's like a never-ending game of where's the customer?" with some "how the heck do we make money?" thrown in there. But hey, at least we're having fun, right?
The tough days make the fun days worthwhile :)
Great question. I think it depends on a few different factors. Most notably business stage (do you have customers? Have you found PMF?) and type (product, service, marketplace etc).
I can only speak to where I’m at at the moment:
The majority of my decisions and thinking is currently around:
Positioning and messaging
Since I don’t have any customers (and have also had low traffic to the site) analytics aren’t much help. I’ve therefore been leveraging my existing network on LinkedIn or people that meet my ICP and having calls with them to get feedback and refine the messaging and value prop.
Acquisition channels
This is an area where I have very limited prior experience, at least in the actual execution part! As I’m trying to run this alongside a full time gig at an early stage startup, I also want to ensure I have the highest return on my efforts.
I have a few different ideas I’m trying out, in parallel to refining my messaging.
With regards to intuition, I will often use this when coming up with ideas or an initial direction/concept. However I will always look to validate either first hand through testing or interviews, or second hand through competitor research. The latter only being until I’ve got hard data around the success/failure of an idea.
Currently using a Trello board with “Now” “Next” “Later” (backlog) to try and keep myself focussed on the most important decisions I need to make. I also try to chunk them down to explicit decisions with a good level of actionable specificity.
For example, instead of “Refine landing page Headline” I’ve currently got “Ideate 3 alternative headlines to test with target market”
Hope this has been helpful!
Very helpful! Thank you for sharing your insights and I really love the tip of having "actionable specificity"
Your point about business stage resonates as well, especially with my experience offering Growth Strategy and Analytics consulting.
I had a hard time gauging what sort of messaging/content works from an acquisition>conversion perspective (beyond just seeing likes, view counts and some basic Google Analytics reporting).
Did you have similar challenges? And if so what help, tools, or tips did you look into in order to overcome them.
You're welcome, glad it helped!
Yeah, that's a tricky one early on with limited data (like I mentioned above.)
The way I'm tackling it, is leaning on my experience with product discovery and user research.
I'm doing this by:
I'm also planning on:
I'm very much figuring out as I go along and currently have zero budget to use more sophisticated tools such as Unbounce (A/B testing for landing pages) or survey tools like Pollfish.
Ooh I never considered creating multiple landing page variations! That's clever.
It's always been tricky to be totally objective during customer conversations. Your business is your baby and it's hard to hear that your baby's ugly.
Curious if you've encountered the same feelings and how you handle staying objective and rational so you can make the right decisions.
I was lucky enough (or unlucky, depending on your outlook) that the first 3 years of my design career were in the fashion industry. The highly subjective (and brutal) nature of fashion meant that I very quickly learnt to remove any emotional attachment from my designs.
However, I completely get it. These days, when I encounter the feeling, I think it’s coming more from a place of the “sunk cost effect”. One of the reasons its crucial to get feedback as early as possible and continually as you develop the product.
On the other hand, it’s also important to consider:
The type of feedback - if it’s opinion on the aesthetic direction, that’s something subjective and should be taken with a pinch of salt (unless it’s around the execution/quality of the design)
Is the person you exact target customer - again, you don’t want to put too much weight on feedback gathered from people to whom the product and even aesthetic aren’t relevant.
Frequency of issue - it’s important to not be too reactive to negative feedback. I often look for themes or re-occurring issues that come up before making a change. Unless it’s validating a problem you’re already aware of.
All in all, I think the best way to think of negative feedback, is that it’s an opportunity to improve your product and improve the chance of success.
Once you can make that shift, you actually end up seeking out negative feedback.
Hope that helps!
The long ones.
I acquired a product….
My goal was to pick a product that was a painkiller not a vitamin. A product that the customer will get their ROI on it. While searching, many products were highly valued for no reason, so it wasn't that easy to find a great product. Until i found a product that solved a real problem facing every SaaS. Churn!!
The product helps you understand your churn and also reduce it, ultimately increasing your $MRR. It does so via cancelation flows, and by showing you analytics on the reason customers churned. The cancelation flows can be also customized to offer discounts when the cancelation reason is high price, or by offering to extend trial, in case the customers wanted a longer trial period. Basically customized the way you want. From there everything will be on autopilot.
Check out cancelo
Super cool product! And I imagine very helpful in terms of shifting how startups plan their sales, product, and marketing activities.
For cancelo, what unique selling point has been resonating for your customers?
Hm, good question. Personally, I spend a lot of time making decisions about pricing and marketing related stuff.
On the other hand, for product-related stuff and features I just go with my intuition.
For example, I've just spent 2 weeks thinking whether I should add monthly and yearly prices to my lifetime plan offering.
At the same time, I just built a new customer portal on a whim, because I thought it made sense.
Super interesting! Curious why you think you spend more time on one vs. the other. Is it cause the product stuff feels more reversible?
Would also love to hear how you work through marketing and monetization decisions.
Hm, never thought about it, but I guess because I feel pretty confident in the area I am operating in (Ghost CMS hosting) and know my product's strengths and weaknesses. That makes it easy to actually develop the product.
For marketing, it's a lot of trial and error. It's a small market, so feedback loops often take longer than with mass products (cough cough AI cough cough). So, to actually make a decision and say "Yes, I am gonna invest 2–3 weeks into this activity" takes a bit of thinking. Once something starts paying off, doubling down on it is quite easy for the, though.