Grow Your Product By Finding Rough Edges And Fixing Them - Tactician #0044

"Tech Titans: The Rise of the Humble Innovators"

Five entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds unite to disrupt the tech industry. Their journey begins small and under-resourced, hailing from humble beginnings but armed with unique and complementary skills.

As their company grows to become the most successful tech enterprise in history, the story serves as inspiring testament to the power of diversity and unwavering determination in the face of adversity. 

Sam (Financial Brain): "Growing the product by fixing rough edges? In finance, that's like finding spare change in the couch. It's nice, but where's the rest of the money?"

26/01/2024

Grow Your Product By Finding Rough Edges And Fixing Them

Kyle Poyar, Operating Partner at OpenView, and Dani Grant, CEO at Jam.dev, explore the journey of Jam from initial struggles to massive user growth, providing insight and growth tactics in “From seven failures to 10x growth”

• Early Struggles and Persistence:

  • "Growing from 0 to 1,000 was A LOT harder than the next 999,000. This is when giving up didn't sound so crazy. It took 18 months and seven failed launches before the 8th finally worked."

• Internal Product Testing (Dogfooding):

  • "All the startup advice says you should launch early and get your product into users’ hands. But instead, we didn't let a single user in until we were happy using it ourselves. Those weeks of internal testing made all the difference. We were harsh critics, and the feedback loop was super tight."

• Focus on Product Quality:

  • "People say if you're not embarrassed by your v1, you've shipped too late. This is outdated advice. Today, quality is non-negotiable. We didn't ship until the product was bug-free. This made a huge difference in early usage."

• Selective Early User Pilots:

  • "We only let in a handful of early users. Our first goal was just five weekly active users (WAUs). We found them by posting in Slacks and subreddits. Then we validated their need for Jam before granting access."

• Retention as a Key Metric:

  • "We only tracked one metric in the early days: retention. You can't fake retention. If a product is not useful, you don't retain. Our team tracked usage in a simple Google Sheet and watched for streaks week over week."

• Building Community and Hosting Events:

  • "We started hosting events so we could meet more of the community in person. We had heard from an early employee at Figma that events were big for them in the early days and had a hypothesis it could work for us, too. Now we’ve done 10 events in four cities and are planning one event per month."

• Finding Rough Edges and Fixing Them:

  • "In product-led growth (PLG), the only thing that matters is the product and the product grows just by people using it. The most important thing to focus on at this stage is finding any rough edges of the product and fixing them so people keep using it and share it elsewhere."

How New Consumer Apps Can Win: Quick Execution

Li Jin, Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund present a strategy for consumer app startups to compete directly with large-scale social platforms in “Multi-Hit Wonders: Embracing Apps With Short Shelf Life”

• Challenge for New Consumer Apps in Competing with Large Social Platforms:

  • "The rise of scaled social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has made it increasingly challenging for newcomers to compete directly. Per network effect theory, for any innovation a startup can create, an existing network can quickly imitate and distribute to its own scaled user base."

• How Startups can Compete with Large Social Platforms:

  • "In a landscape now dominated by scaled incumbents, a viable alternate route for consumer builders is to embrace the dynamics of fleeting attention, build for transience and niche use cases, and—uniquely enabled by crypto—deploy tokens for cross-promotion and growth."

• Opportunity 1: Focus on intimate formats

  • "As a result, startups have shifted their focus toward more intimate formats, where their smaller user bases give them an advantage over incumbents."

• Opportunity 2: Build for Transience and Niche Use Cases:

  • "An alternative, less obvious, and likely more fun route is to create a series of smaller, transient hits... build and launch successive products that share operational resources such as user acquisition and personnel."

• Opportunity 3: Leverage Crypto and Tokens for Cross-Promotion:

  • "Crypto may not come immediately to mind […] but the use of tokens can help stitch together different experiences, transferring user attention between different app experiments."

• Quick Execution and Iteration is Critical:

  • "For founders, the benefit of following the venture studio strategy means more optionality than betting on one idea from the get-go... quick execution and iteration is critical in this model, mirroring the transient attention cycle with new applications."

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