Product reasons ≠ Persona reasons. 🃏 Same same but different.
The fundamental premise for most low-touch/high-touch failures, segmenting org-wide goals, and onboarding early-access users in game-like ("progressively demanding") waves.
Hi there,
Welcome to the twenty-second 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 Crossbeam’s Bob Moore, Pipedrive’s Timo Rein, and Summit’s Matt Wensing.
#1: What needs to be true in order for a low-touch model to work — There are persona reasons. Then there are product reasons. Crossbeam’s co-founder and CEO, Bob Moore, shares how understanding that distinction lies at the heart of untangling the knotty, high-touch/low-touch challenge. (Source: Relay)
There are two key inputs when trying to roll out a low-touch model:
Does the buying motion of your user persona allow for it?
Can your product actually support a self-serve or low-touch user experience?
You need both of these to be true in order for a low-touch model to work, and they are both very difficult to change once the snowball has started rolling down the hill.
Many people don’t realize the persona issue until it hits them. Sooner or later, even with companies like Atlassian and Slack that you mentioned, you end up moving upmarket, selling to large enterprises, and hiring high touch sales reps. This is for persona reasons and not product reasons – people need a high touch just to survive their company’s procurement processes.
… with a very early stage business, it is probably still doable to move to a low-touch model, but it has to be part of a comprehensive strategy. Put lines in the sand around who your product is for and what their experience needs to be like in a low-touch UX, and commit to living in that world comprehensively across your business.
This happened to us at RJMetrics.
We marketed ourselves as a self-serve product and focused on end users who wanted to self-serve. But the product never caught up to the vision because so much of our functionality was built around the crutch of high-touch services from our early days. That gap was a major source of friction, contributed to churn, and ultimately was at the core of a lot of our biggest issues in scaling the company.
#2: Segmenting goals to create org-wide definition and meaning — Pipedrive’s co-founder, Timo Rein, on the three equally critical pillars to prioritize while thinking of company goals and the importance of arriving at a common language for communicating them. (Source: Geckoboard)
I’ve always kind of felt when we talk about goals in a business, it quite often steers you to think that the goal is financial….That’s revenue. For me what has been helpful is to break it down into three pillars so that I look at setting goals for three different paths.
One is definitely, obviously business. But the one that I think comes before that for us is the product itself. Because that is the driver of the business. And then also what comes before that is the organisation. The team that we’re building.
And having this breakdown, I’ve always looked at them as we should have goals for each, basically. So when we look at the product, we need to understand what we want to build over long term and short term. And then set goals…
And then when we talk about the organisation, we need to understand if we want to build something like this, what sort of people we need, what sort of teams we need, at what points we need them….Understanding what kind of an organisation you want to built, I’ve always felt that we’ve needed goals which are specific to organisation as well.
And then business, obviously. Just understanding what sort of business growth you should be on. I think that’s quite tricky. I think quite often companies are influenced by outside forces. Investors, obviously…
But it’s important to recognise what sort of growth you’re able to produce and also understand whether you’re in a game for 1-2 years and you don’t know what’s going to happen then or you’re building something sustainable over long term..
But definitely this breakdown is one thing that I’d point out, which we’ve done, to make sure that we can have definition and also meaning in goals.
I think the second point is as the company as grown…finding a common language that we can use when we speak about goals, I think that’s an ongoing process. Because as new people join, we need that all the time. We need to refresh what the language is.
And I think what’s maybe even more important is to find the right routines.
In terms of how we talk about the goals, where we talk about them, when we set them, what’s the cadence for setting and tracking, how we do it in teams and the whole organisation.
I think paying attention to the routines that we need in place to make sure that we can have goals and we can have a good tracking cadence. Language we understand when we talk about them, I think this is a second thing I’d mention here.
Note: We’re incredibly excited to be hosting Timo for a Relay AMA next Thursday (June 17th). If as a SaaS founder, you’ve ever wanted to learn how Pipedrive grew a global SaaS business from Estonia, their (still rare) early-stage localization bets and subsequent successes, scaling for hundreds of thousands of SMBs in a crowded market, or anything else, you ought to attend the session! Just respond to this email if you’d like an invite to Timo’s AMA session.
#3: “Invite early access users in waves, like you’d expect in a video game — progressively more demanding.” — Summit’s founder, Matt Wensing, has an inventive mental model for onboarding early-access users. (Source: Twitter)
Advance to the next wave once you’ve overjoyed the current wave.
Summit currently on wave #2. :)
Early access pitfalls:
Thinking 100% of your early access signups are in your target segment. This is very unlikely.
Thinking victory = quiet contentment. Victory = raving fanaticism.
Each wave represents a larger population, of course.
Once you turn the representatives of that larger population (in Wave #N) into raving fans, you should invite all of their constituents.
Moving through your early access signups is a zoomed in version of moving through your entire market.
Yes! Your early access list are all early adopters, but early adopters can be early early, early mid, or early late.
Markets are fractal.
Don’t forget yourself!
Yes, you’re blind; yes it’s your baby.
But if you are hellish demanding on yourself, you can proxy for a lot of waves, preferably ahead of that wave.
I use Summit at least 8 hours per day, every weekday.
Recently on Relay:
What am I missing: UnfoldML’s founder, Marco Zocca is wondering — “As much as I like building, I am quite fed up with working alone and I’d greatly enjoy having at least one cofounder with a matching ambition and complementary skills (not to mention that startup incubators won’t even consider solo founders). How do I find one?...Not to mention the depressing lack of in-person events (meetups! I loved those) due to the pandemic…do you have some ideas on where to look for a cofounder in this day and age?” Join the discussion and share your thoughts? 💭💭
AMA: With EnjoyHQ’s co-founder, Sofia Quintero. (Featuring: the many paradoxes and unknowns of being a SaaS founder, how qual triggers quant and quant triggers qual when it comes to feedback, how to know whether you’re building what customers most need/value, and more!)
Until next time,