#4: “What does it mean to be a CEO?” 🤔 Advice on freemium, culture, and more.
Bridget Harris on how to create a solid freemium offering, Mathilde Collin's take on a unique performance report for the team, and Joshua Reeves on, well, being a founder! :)
Hi there,
Welcome to the fourth edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, select 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 YouCanBook.Me’s co-founder Bridget Harris, Front App’s co-founder Mathilde Collin, and Gusto’s co-founder Joshua Reeves.
But before we dive into it, a quick announcement: we have Pulkit Agrawal, founder, and CEO of Chameleon, joining us for a founders-only AMA on Relay on 10th September. He will be bringing his insightful, product-first lens to address questions on the dynamics between user onboarding, engagement, and retention, running product-led experiments, hiring in sprints, managing burn, enabling an asynchronous culture, and more!
So, if you aren’t already on Relay, reply to this email for an invite to the session. ✉️
All yours now!
1. Bridget Harris, co-founder and CEO at YouCanBook.me, on distinguishing the intentions (and overlaps) of freemium and trial users, and how they’ve thought about its implications on scaling support and product initiatives.
...it looks us a while to realize we were actually giving ourselves a double whammy of problems giving too much away on the free tool, and at the same time having to support those features because actually they were really complicated to use and set up! We could see that people who regularly sign up for free tools (of which I am one) aren’t necessarily interested in getting involved in support or the community — they just want something to ‘work’.
So conversations with these users weren't necessarily the most productive, which was one reason why we reduced access to support at the same time making the tool much more simple to use. But they are also different from people who are genuinely trialling the tool.
Separating out our signups based on these kinds of intentions has been invaluable for us to target conversations with the right people — generally, it’s much larger teams who are interested in our product roadmap and want to have active feedback on it. Others just want to know if we are getting a fix out for some niggling UI. Equally, we do conduct UX research across a broad range of users who we’ve invited to speak to us specifically who do not have any immediate concerns.
Having said that, we do have lots of ways to interact with everyone who uses YCBM — we have a community forum, we will set up question/survey tools which pop up after events that are particularly interesting to our UX researcher, and we will be in touch via email when appropriate. Anyone can email it, it’s just if they are on the free plan we don’t give them access to our support in our chat beacon.
The update on this is we’ve now switched to 100% free trial — so everyone has access to our support for 2 weeks, and can then track our conversations/conversions within these cohorts before they drop into the free plan.
2. Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front App, lays out the whys behind an exacting quarterly report that takes two weeks to put together, meant not for investors or customers, but for her team.
Here’s why I think LQAF [Last Quarter at Front] contributes to this [stellar employee engagement] greatly:
People know what the company’s mission is and believe in it. It might seem repetitive, but we go over our company mission every week in All Hands and again in LQAF. This showed in the survey results because 94% understand and believe in our company’s mission and strategy.
People know what they’re responsible for and how they are contributing to the company goals. When we’re setting quarterly and yearly goals, we make sure that the individual goals of every Fronteer line up to the team and company goals. And it pays off: 95% understand the expectations and responsibilities of their role, and 94% know how the work they do contributes to the goals of Front.
People find meaning in their work. We spend the majority of our days at work so it’s not surprising that people are increasingly demanding more meaning to how they spend this time. A certain kind of magic happens when you have an inspiring purpose, people understand how their work impacts that purpose, and they are given opportunities to grow personally and professionally. This is meaningful work and I couldn’t be prouder that 93% of Front employees feel that the work they do is meaningful.
People are happy because they feel part of the journey. When we discuss as a group how we’ve done and where we’re headed, people feel a part of something greater. LQAF contributes to this greatly. Cori, our first support team member, said, “LQAF is the moment I get most energy at Front.”
LQAF is critical to maintaining and increasing our employee engagement, making those hours I spend on it some of my most valuable hours of the quarter. From a business perspective, this investment is worth it because employees are your biggest assets, and attrition is your biggest cost. I do this for my employees because I believe they deserve this kind of deep involvement in the business.
3. Joshua Reeves, co-founder and CEO of Gusto, ponders over an existential question, “what does it mean to be a CEO?,” and concludes with three, central long-term responsibilities.
Another topic I get asked a lot about is how does the role of CEO evolve or change? What does it mean to be a CEO? And this is a question I asked myself a lot when I was at Intel as well where the CEO of Intel literally had I think at that point there were 70,000 employees and I wondered how does a person leading a 70,000 person company know how to spend his or her time.
You could literally have like an hour free and call a head of state or call a journalist or hire someone or do all these different tasks, how does that not just overload your synapses. And the answer is in some ways it’s all about delegation. It’s about firing yourself from as many jobs as you can, that’s a path I’ve been on since the early days of the company. But what that leaves is kind of where I’m focused. These are the three things that I’ve concluded are really my long-term responsibilities as a leader in a growing company.
The first is really making sure we have set good direction and strategy for the business. Everyone is looking to me to help facilitate but then ultimately drive what matters. Where are we focused? Why are we making this bet? Why is this the direction that’s best for the company? And that’s something that ultimately I have to be responsible for.
The second is how do we organize? How do we communicate? How many meetings do we have? When do we have meetings? Why should we have meetings? And then also, how do we hire? Which roles should we create, which teams should we create? And what responsibilities do we give to those individuals?
And then the third one is again really personal. It’s the chance to lead by example. It’s basically my actions being what everyone reads into. And most of that manifests in the context of hiring where I spend 50% of my time interviewing people. It kind of might seem crazy to hear that, but that’s the way it’s been for two years now. And that’s probably the way it will be for the next five or 10 years. And so interviewing is a really important skill.
Hope you enjoyed reading this edition of The Baton. We have a question for you: What’s the one piece of advice that has helped you make/think through an important decision as a founder? Tell us all about it and we’d love to feature it in an upcoming edition! 😃
Until next time,
Astha and Akash