Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Isford: Onboarding should ask user intent directly rather than inferring from email domains

Lauryn Isford · Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 19, 2023 · at 14:51

Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth at Notion, discusses how horizontal SaaS platforms should approach onboarding across diverse user segments.

0:00 / 0:50exact quote · 50.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Something that we do at Notion that I think generally is tried and true is to ask someone what they're here for. Many businesses will actually cast or assume or segment that a user is a certain kind of user. Maybe they sign up with a Gmail account, and one might assume that they're there for a personal use case, but it's possible that They used their Gmail, but are actually evaluating your tool or your product to deploy at their business. And just starting with that simple question of, are you here to do work with your team? Are you here as a student? Are you here for personal projects? Can really help you as the builder of the product, understand the value the customer is seeking and reflect it back to them.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Lauryn Isford

Insight
A heavy bias towards product experimentation is a growth hiring red flag
“The biggest red flag to me is when I hear a heavy bias towards experimentation. So maybe requiring every change made in the product to be an experiment or over focusing on optimizing, adding friction, removing friction raising prices, reducing prices versus ma…”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 36:28 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Tooltip pop-ups fail because users cannot process that much information quickly
“You know, you sign up for something and you see eight or 10 or maybe even 20 different pop-ups that define terms for you and ask you to learn a bunch of things, and the reality is that nobody's actually learning that many things that quickly.”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 13:28 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Isford: Consumer growth expertise does not translate directly to B2B SaaS
“One mistake I've seen is assuming that best growth practices and experience in consumer will translate to SaaS and the other way around. That risk was taken on me when I started at Airtable. I actually came from Meta, and so I was jumping from consumer to SaaS…”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 39:07 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
SaaS growth requires bold product changes, not consumer-style micro-optimizations
“I find that in consumer growth, there tends to be an over-focus on very small detail changes. Whereas in SaaS, it's more important to make bigger or bolder changes that really react to the user's intent so that their behavior will change.”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 41:15 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
PLG and sales-assisted growth motions inevitably compete for enterprise revenue
“At some point, the two motions will compete. So a dollar earned through a freemium or self-serve motion from PLG may be a trade-off against two or five dollars earned through closing a contract in a sales assisted motion. And it's very important to be explicit…”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 56:59 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Isford: Most tech companies build products with an unconscious Western bias
“I find that especially in technology, many businesses build with a Western bias and it's important to Really understand if you're serving all customer needs, especially when you have a big international customer base.”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 6:32 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.