The Exchanges

Q Okay. So I think the most important thing we should start with is Why should a founder focus on their product?

A There's two sides here. What I'm not going to say is it's not about build it and they will come. Like you need to go out there and market and sell your products, like regardless. So it's not like just amazing product like it helps. But when you first start building whatever it is you're building, you have to get product market fit. And so the market size is really important, but the product part is just as important as well. Now, if you understand how products work, if you understand how to build products, if you understand how to build products, To go and solve problems, those correct problems, you're going to get more uptake, you're going to get customers staying longer, you're going to get more activation, and you're going to build a business faster. So ultimately, the more, the more that users use your product, even if you haven't sorted out your pricing, if you haven't sorted out about other things, they will stay with you longer, and talk about you longer, and start to build your funnel, and help you go and solve the next problem. So if you, if you build great products, the chances of your success are increased multiple fold.

AI assessment note: “you're going to get more uptake, you're going to get customers staying longer”

Q there's simpler ways to do it. And so I, for one of the feature sets I went through, I spent a day and I redesigned it multiple times in order to make it as simple as possible. Why don't you speak to how people can think about how to make what they're building as simple as possible in order to save time for development and to make it more user-friendly?

A A nice framework for this is to think about any product you build in kind of three levels. So you're gonna have necessity. What does this feature have to do? Like, what is the problem? With us, if it, again, being a video platform, one issue would be not creating a new video. That's the number one thing we're trying to do. The function has to do that. Whatever we design has to have, have that in there. You then have next stage, which is kind of like, this is the expanded feature set. So you have the kind of crucial part. Next part is, is this would be great if it had this. So yeah, we'll help people create a video. We'll also help them brand that video. The last part is the delight factor that goes on top of this. Now, when you first build features and test features, forget the delight factor, because this is like the icing on the cake. When you know it works, and it's going to go ahead, come back and do that as well. How do you make creating a new video the most delightful process, and how do you add little things in when people are like, that was enjoyable, you know, it makes them feel good about doing it. So whenever you build a new feature, it has to do the thing you're trying to do. That's actually your goal. And if you just do that, that's okay, because you can work out very quickly if that was right in the first place.

AI assessment note: “A nice framework for this is to think about any product you build in kind of three levels.”

Q something like me or you, you're responsible for maybe the product and the project management and the design and the wireframing and the prototyping and the functional specifications and all that. At what point should you think about hiring a product team? Is there a specific order of people or positions that you would be looking to hire for? Kind of what's, what would a good strategy be for that?

A So I'll walk you through how we've done it. This does come down to your early founding team as well. So as a product guy, we always had the product position filled in the early days. Now, like being a founder and running products as you grow is not a good idea. Because one side of the business is going to suffer. You're either going to get not as much time on products or not as much time on, like, you know, stakeholder management and everything else that comes in. But this is, this is the life of startup, yeah? Like, you'll always be struggling to fill things in in the early days. If you don't have a product person, you can, you can get, get by to start with your CTO, so someone who's probably more technical, who ends up sitting across products. And, you know, if you're the sales founder, then you're going and doing the sales and the fundraising and everything else. And that's fine. We built engineering first. We had a CTO. We hired a couple of engineers. Then we took on design, but again, we had design skills like in myself. We hired someone who had some product management like chops as well, and generally the earlier team you hire, you're hiring generalists rather than specialists. So we hired a designer who could also do tickets and managements. So they did more of that. Now, as we've grown, that person at his capacity, and so we then hired a second designer and a product ma…

AI assessment note: “We built engineering first... Then we took on design... then hired a second designer and a product manager”

Q you, you mentally go through these three stages and let's say you mock up all three of these stages. Are you only going to push out the first stage for your test? And if people like it, then you move on to stage two and then the stage three, or do you leave stage two and three for like a year later? Or like, how do you prepare for that?

A Depends on the stage of the product, the stage of the company and what it is you're trying to do. So if you're trying to do like quite a small feature, you can probably do all three of these. You know, if you're trying to Fix a small problem, and the whole thing, even at the delight scale, it's like, it's a day's work. Get it in here. Like, like, you know, if it's an extra 20% time to do the delight, but that 20% is a couple of hours, do it, and that's a good thing. If this is a product you're trying to build, like, a new product you're releasing, or your first product, and that delight is next 20% time, but the first thing's gonna take you three months, do you want to spend the extra, whatever it is, you know, four weeks time building this, or would you be better off utilizing that time to go and build Something else, which is also crucial because we don't have just one product in our historicals and we're not building one thing. We have stuff backed up. And so this is part of the role of getting good at product management is being kind of ruthless around this. If you're building one thing in isolation, maybe you're going to do all three, but that's never the case. I mean, if I look at our kind of like upcoming feature list, like it's, it's insanely big. And so you look at it and I'm like, I'm like, I could spend another four weeks on this, or I could go and build this other t…

AI assessment note: “Depends on the stage of the product, the stage of the company and what it is”

Q You said there's a feature you have around branding. So would you show the user on the page where they're doing branding or customization, whatever, and go, Hey, if you upgrade, then you can unlock this branding feature, or do you hide that and just show them on the pricing page or the comparison page of like, Oh, you'll get a branding thing. So how do you entice them?

A Yeah. Never hide stuff. So this comes down to free trials as well. So if you have a property trial, you're doing 14 days. Or 21 days, or seven days, or whatever it is that you think is going to make sense. You let them use the paid features. You let them taste it. You might want to limit that, but you let them utilize it, so that you get hooked on those features. I'll talk to the majority, and I'll talk to, like, B to B plays here. Again, things like Dropbox, where it's, like, mostly free, like, yeah, like, Ophelia models will leave aside for now. But you let them try those, and at the end of 14 days, you're like, guess what? You can't use those anymore. So you take them away again. People are like, oh, I want that back again. You might just lock their account and be like, we can't use the product anymore. Walking customers through plans is really important. Yeah. So if, especially, so if you do tiered pricing, then the reason we have tiers is because you want customers over time to move on to higher and higher price plans that come with more features. The first time we launched, we had a single pricing plan and that was it for all users because it was simple. And we were trying to ask, do we have a product and a business here? That's a great way to launch products. As you start to build more features and build a platform out, you then start to bring a second tier and then a th…

AI assessment note: “Never hide stuff. So this comes down to free trials as well.”

Q there's enough competitors in the market that we really need to have people just use it and see what they think. Before we feel comfortable to start charging for it. It's probably 10 months to a year out. Based on watching how people use the product, how can we determine what is something we should charge for, and what is something that everyone should be able to use for free?

A I will challenge your thinking there. Personally, I think you should charge as soon as possible. I've never seen a founder charge too much of a product or charge too early. I think, like, as founders, this is always a surprising lesson to learn. We have only ever put prices up over time. We've always seen Payments on plans very early on. We had a free, we had a free option and a paid to play option. So we didn't take away the fact that we had free and testing, but we actually put a price tag on it and people paid and we were surprised. We were like, oh, that's, that's interesting. And that starts to give you confidence as well. So it's not, it's not necessarily about the revenue. It's about the confidence that you have around the product. So what the other stage is at the base is unless you're doing a large super scale B to C play, if you're in B to B especially, I think you should have a payment metric quite early on, and you can have a free metric too if you are worried about turning people off, but just put it there with something on it, and you just never know, because it's also a data point and a learning point. It's also a positioning piece for your company. Back to the question around what you charge for and where you charge. Again, this is a research piece. You need to understand from your users where the value is in the product. So where's the real value? Most B to B p…

AI assessment note: “You need to understand from your users where the value is in the product.”