#15: What Hiten Shah wishes he did differently 🙅♂️💭
Sequencing freemium the right way, painting an accurate (even bleak) picture of an org for senior hires, and obsessing over feedback from all directions imaginable.
Hi there,
Welcome to the fifteenth edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of FYI’s Hiten Shah, Piktochart’s Ai Ching Goh, and Sleeknote’s Mogens Møller.
#1. Hiten Shah, co-founder and CEO of FYI, boards the proverbial time machine, with a decade and a half of building and scaling behind him, to share the one thing —“better than any specific learnings I’ve had” — he’d do differently. (Source: Relay)
For Crazy Egg what I would do differently is instead of starting with a free plan, I’d start with a trial and paid plans only. I would use that time to discover both what people are willing to pay for and also develop a free plan in conjunction.
This way we would have a strong pulse on paying customers and their needs versus focusing on converting free customers to become paying customers. It’s a strategy that I don’t see mentioned often.
Folks are usually debating whether to have a free plan or not instead of focusing in the early days on exactly what needs to be built for customers in order for them to pay for the product. I’m a huge proponent of having a free plan, I would just sequence it in at the right time.
The one caveat I’d give is if you are in a market where free plans are the norm. Then you probably should start with a free plan that’s similar to competitors and build in appropriate upsell opportunities to start that mimic what the customers in the market are used to.
The above is even better than any specific learnings I’ve had. Overall the one thing you want to solve for early on with a product is maximizing the learnings, especially ones that help you figure out what people are willing to pay for.
#2. Ai Ching Goh, co-founder and CEO of Piktochart, on an exceptionally vulnerable letter she pens for potential senior hires, preferring an honest listing of a given team’s failings and areas of much-needed improvement over the usually exaggerated, cheery merits of joining a startup. (Source: Hello Mentor!)
What I do is, not with the JD because that’s public to the world. I write a letter to my future, for example, VP of (x), there I put a SWOT analysis of the company based on what I think the respective team is struggling with and what I would want the person to do. And all in a very transparent way. I share that with a few candidates that I’m having a very good conversation with.
It’s like my secret, usually I go around LinkedIn or whatever, whenever I have a good sense that this person could be a good fit. Then I’ll send them [this letter].
Because it’s not easy. Why would they trust a company based all the way in Malaysia, you know bootstrapped, not funded? It’s tough for them to have that trust.
There’s nothing good on the document. It’s all the bad stuff. That’s why I need the person to realize that you’re joining a company and these are the things. ‘The upsides I hope you discover.’ Most of the time, they’re like ‘you didn’t tell me they’re such nice people in the organisation.’
I’m like ‘yeah, but that’s for you to discover.’ The biggest part for me is that I need to paint a bleak picture. Because the right person will find this very challenging, saying, ‘I want this and I want this right now.
Note: Next Thursday, we’re really looking forward to hosting Ai Ching Goh for a Relay AMA. From figuring a sustainable operating cadence for remote work to being product-led and creating an exemplary, global SaaS brand out of Asia, Ai and team have quietly amassed many early milestones years before they became mainstream. Join in to learn from Ai’s hard-won founding perspectives!
#3. Mogens Møller, co-founder and CEO of Sleeknote, almost approaches feedback more as a verb than a noun; he talks about some curious instances that depict how this belief in hyper-learning is deeply woven into the operational fabric of the company. (Source: Out of Growth)
In general, when you’re building a company, it depends on what the founding team believes, like how do you believe the company needs to grow.
One of the things I know how to do is to ask people for feedback. It’s actually extremely simple. There’s no rocket science in it. There are no tools needed for it. But it takes a lot of courage to do that. To ask people for feedback.
And that is something I’m always willing to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s colleagues, if it’s partners, if it’s customers, feedback is implemented throughout the whole kind of company and the processes that we have.
To give a few examples, this is more on a company level, but every quarter I ask all the employees in Sleeknote an anonymous question. So it’s a survey I send out to all employees. If you were in my shoes as the CEO of Sleeknote tomorrow, what would you do differently. I think I read it in a book a few years ago and I just really loved it.
I use it in a lot of different situations. ‘If you were in my shoes, what would you do differently?’ So I ask employees about that every quarter and get a lot of different feedback. And after I did that for a few years, I decided why not ask our customers the exact same question.
I think we started this about half a year ago. And we have about 2,000 customers in Sleeknote so it takes some time. But I send out an email to all our customers where I ask the exact same question…
I will personally read all answers and reply to them individually. So I set aside around a week in my calendar to do nothing else and answer these emails. And, honestly, I can’t wait to do this again. Because it gives you so much honest feedback.
Because it puts customers in a situation, not only to say, ‘I need this feature,’ but more like, ‘if I were Mogens, what would I do differently. If I was the CEO of this company, I know I wouldn’t be able to do just this and that.’ But maybe it makes them think about what kinds of processes, what kinds of tools, what kind of stuff would I do if I was in his shoes.
I really love that kind of feedback. …
I could do a lot of other things that for some CEOs would make more sense. But that kind of brings me back to the first thing I said, that is what you believe in. I believe one of the most valuable things I can do as a CEO of a company is to know what our customers feel about our product. And why they decided to use us. Or why they decided not to use us.
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Until next time,
Astha and Akash