As a CEO, I like to use the 'Closed-Door Meeting' tactic.

It's really just an excuse to watch cat videos on YouTube without anyone bothering me.

Tactics from the CEO of Clay 

• Why Read:

  • Gain insights on managing your psychology, focusing your product, and making sound business decisions.

• Featuring:

  • Todd Jackson (@tjack), Partner at First Round Capital and Kareem Amin (@kareemami), Co-founder/CEO at Clay (clay.com)

• Link: 

  • “Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year 'Overnight Success'”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Recognizing the Impact of Founder Psychology:

  • Point: Be aware of how your personality traits are amplified through the process of building a company.

  • "Your personality plays a major role in your success because building a company exaggerates all of your traits. You're influencing how things get done — for better or for worse. So you need to be able to clearly see what is going on in the organization and how your personality is being amplified through this process."

• Narrowing the Product Scope:

  • Point: Commit to a specific customer segment and use case to focus your product development and marketing efforts.

  • "When you narrow the scope, it feels claustrophobic. Why are we doing something that's smaller when we could be doing something bigger? Eventually, we realized that by narrowing down our scope, we were actually increasing our value."

• Avoiding the "Spiral" of Indecision:

  • Point: Commit to decisions and avoid constantly shifting focus based on individual customer feedback.

  • "We would make a decision to target salespeople. Then we would get sidetracked, pursue another type of user, and then we'd come back to the same spot. And we'd realize, 'Oh, this is why we made that decision in the first place,' and then we'd commit to it again. It took a couple of turns."

• Maintaining Product Discipline:

  • Point: Resist the urge to constantly add new features and instead focus on perfecting your core offering.

  • "There's a tendency when you're early to be like, 'We're just missing this one thing…' That actually masks the signs of PMF. When the need is large enough, people will buy your product and wait for you to build the rest of the features. That's actually the main indicator that you have a product that's worthwhile."

• Decoupling Personal and Professional Fulfillment:

  • Point: Separate your personal satisfaction from the company's success to make better business decisions.

  • "Now I've shifted my mindset. I've removed the psychological pressure — it doesn't have to be the biggest thing, it just has to be what other people think is useful. That enables me to find meaning in the micro-moments — like when a customer is excited and tells me they were able to do something that they couldn't have done before Clay — and that has actually helped me make better decisions as a founder."

Investment Loops in Onboarding

Why Read: 

• Understand a practical technique for increasing user commitment and conversion.

Featuring:

• Justin Jackson (@mijustin), Chief Executive Officer at Transistor.fm

• Link:

• “INVESTMENT LOOPS IN SAAS ONBOARDING”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding Investment Loops in Onboarding:

  • Point: Implement a low-friction entry point that allows users to start using the product before asking for sign-up information.

  • "An 'investment loop' in user onboarding occurs when users start using the product with a low-friction entry point (no signup form). As they progress through the onboarding, they become more likely to continue using the product. Only once they're sufficiently invested do you ask them to sign up with email (and perhaps their credit card)."

• Implementing a "Taste First" Strategy:

  • Point: Allow potential customers to experience part of your product before requiring payment or sign-up.

  • "When you land on their homepage, you can either click 'Buy Now' or 'Start Watching.' If you click 'start watching,' you're immediately taken into the course; no signup or credit card is required. You can watch the first two modules (Introduction, SQLite Internals) for free. It's only once you've progressed to the 'Schema' module that they ask you to pay."

• Leveraging Psychological Principles:

  • Point: Understand and utilize psychological effects such as the endowment effect, sunk cost fallacy, and the IKEA effect to increase user commitment.

  • "Once people start using your product, they begin to feel a sense of ownership. They've customized it, added their data, and now it feels like 'theirs.' [...] The more time a user invests in a product's onboarding, the more likely they are to keep going (even if it means pulling out their credit card). [...] People value things more when they've put effort into creating or setting them up."

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