"...don't onboard like Intercom" 🙅♀️📝
Driving customer adoption without a script, the "quiet" fundraising that must precede horizontal products, and formulating new categories with, not for customers.
Welcome to the thirty-fifth 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 Sunsama’s Ashutosh Priyadarshy, Bubble’s Emmanuel Straschnov, and Pocus’ Alexa Grabell.
Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches: The Simple, Always-Top-of-Mind, 4-Channels Model of Startup Growth: An Exchange on Finding Early-Stage Traction with Klaus’s Kair Käsper
#1: Moving customer onboarding calls down the funnel and other “selfishly” value-driven paths towards better engagement — Sunsama’s founder, Ashutosh Priyadarshy, on how they’ve imbued their customer touch-points with a thoughtful sense of relevance and progression. (Source: Better Done Than Perfect)
One of the things we’ve done a good job of is instrumenting a lot of different touch-points where we get more interesting and valuable insights into our customers. I think that’s been the core of our customer success strategy…
The next big touch-point we have is after people have actually upgraded to paid, we ask them sort of the standard NPS or product-market fit style survey.
And we actually read and respond to every single one of those. What we often do is to offer a one-on-one call to each of those people who upgrade with either myself or my co-founder Travis.
What we do on that call is to take a moment to hear them out and understand what do they do for work, what’s their workflow like, and then we have them share their Sunsama and we see if there’s ways we can improve how they’re using the product to better fit their specific workflow.
This actually came out of the onboarding call we had before, we actually moved it down the funnel to after people upgrade and have made it optional…
That’s the most interesting customer touch-point we have in terms of the long-term value we’re creating for customers. Because we can see after 14 days of using the product, how were people using it, what problems do they still have, what hasn’t clicked yet.
…
What happens when you onboard people on their first day ever, as the person doing the call, you’re basically going to say the same thing every time. You’re almost like on a script to some extent.
But what happens when you do it further down the funnel is that every call becomes really interesting and juicy. Because you’ve given people time with this tool.
And everybody’s lives are different. Like we’re building a tool that lets everyone from a product manager to a designer to someone who runs three breweries and a rock band, a way to plan out their work day.
So there’s so much diversity in there. And seeing what happens along the way, I think that has been selfishly the most exciting part like to see how people do it.
All of our best product improvements have come in from observing how people are using our product that far out and just seeing what clicked, what didn’t, and how are they still using the product in a way that’s suboptimal and what can we do in the product to get them to use it more effectively.
…
As part of the first-time [product] onboarding we try and figure out when you actually plan your day. So, if somebody says, ‘I like to plan my day at 8am,’ the email arrives at 7:50am…
So we keep it targeted, so that it’s actually available at the right time. I’m still to this day shocked at the fact how well that works, how many people read and respond thoughtfully to those emails.
To give you an example, we wrote some drip-style engagement emails a long time ago… we just took the best practices of whatever Intercom had said, you should have in your drip emails and I think that was a huge mistake.
Whatever emails you’re sending to your customers they have to be uniquely valuable to whatever it is that you’re building and what your customers are trying to do.
For me that was an aha moment, from thereon out we’ve been able to find that almost every email that we send has some value to the user, even if they don’t click the link or use the product. If you can accomplish that, then that email is not wasted in their inbox.
#2: The reasoning behind bootstrapping for seven years (mostly with a team of two) before raising a $100m round — Bubble’s founder and co-CEO, Emmanuel Straschnov, on why the traditional fundraising cadence doesn’t fit certain horizontal SaaS products. (Source: STATION F)
What I can say today, though, and it’s not something we articulated in the beginning is that it was the right move not to raise money. Had we raised money in 2012/2013, we 100% will be out of business today.
Because when you try to build a very horizontal tool. That is very open-ended, it takes a very long time before you’re in a position to deliver any real value to your customers.
And the challenge you’re going to have with fundraising is, even at the seed or angel stage, if you don’t have good charts to show 18 months later….It’s going to be very hard to raise a subsequent round.
And that’s usually when startups go out of business. Startups die when they cannot raise another round. And we saw that happen with our competitors. We had two competitors that started a year after us. They went to YC, one of them raised from a16z, as good as it gets, and it’s exactly what happened after two years. They went out of business because they couldn’t monetize…
And the interesting thing, more well-known thing today, if you think of horizontal tools out there today, Notion, Airtable to some extent, Webflow, Zapier, all of these companies had a pretty quiet fundraising time at first.
Webflow basically bootstrapped, they raised a tiny round, then they almost went out of business quite a few times before raising a new round, because it just takes time to get to a [horizontal] tool you can monetize.
#3: Letting the community articulate the bounds of a new category — Pocus’ co-founder and CEO, Alexa Grabell, on the bottom-up approach she has chosen to emulate from master category creators. (Source: Not Boring)
I’ve been very inspired by two leaders that have been big category creators in my mind. Alison Pickens, she’s the former COO of Gainsight. And Barr Moses, she’s the CEO of Monte Carlo. Alison really created the category of customer success. Barr the category of data observability….
One thing that they did, which I’m really emulating is that they wanted to learn from the community. They didn’t want to say, ‘this is the framework that is customer success, now, everyone go implement it!’
Instead they say ‘I want to learn best practices from you all and then help you to even grow further.’ And that’s really the move that we’re taking at Pocus. So it’s not just, ‘let’s push out a bunch of content and see what works. That’s going to be the category.’
We’re spending hours and hours…I spend most of my day just talking to customers whether they’re in my community or early customers or folks that work in sales at PLG companies.
And understanding really, ‘what has worked for you, what hasn’t worked for you? From there we are able to really define, [for instance] through all these data points what is a PQL? What’s the best practice for defining it? What should a sales team look like in a PLG world?
And then through the community and expertise, we’re able to synthesize all that and help others. And we’ve had workshops on these topics, folks battling it out…where we’re able to see broadly through every company to determine those best practices.
Until next time,