Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Zenter (later Google Slides) launched without a save button to test demand
“I remember Robbie Walker during one of our one of one of our Tuesday dinners said that they had, they didn't even implement the save button for, like, their online PowerPoint because they knew that none of their users would ever ask, like, hey, can I save this…”
Disclosure
Mixpanel operated without a forgot password feature for 18 months
“For like, I don't know, maybe like, 18 months of Mixpanel, like, we didn't even have forgot about password, because we were just so ruthlessly trying to prioritize, like, things that really, would really matter to customers. And it turned out we didn't get ver…”
Opinion
Doshi: Monthly active users has become a deceptive vanity metric
“I now think that monthly active users has become, like, the new BS metric that's, like, very similar to, like, just, like, number of registered users.”
Insight
Doshi: Thousand-person companies regularly overcomplicate metric tracking
“Even thousand-person companies get the basics wrong. In fact, you'll find that if you don't get the, even these thousand-person companies that get it wrong, they tend to overcomplicate the number of things that they should actually measure and track.”
Insight
Doshi: Tracking three to five North Star metrics beats complex dashboards
“And so, what I find is that just picking Like three to five things on North Star and really simplifying it will do more good for you.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Doshi: Pricing page links are the second or third most clicked in B2B
“One thing that I discovered was that people, a lot of your users will click on a pricing page link at the top. It's like second or third, like most clicked on link if you're a B to B company, I think, generally speaking.”
Insight
Doshi: B2B startups struggle to run A/B tests compared to consumer apps
“If you're in consumer the benefit of being in consumer is that you generally have you usually will have like hundreds or thousands of users such that you could actually go do an A-B test, whereas in B to B it's a lot harder to achieve that.”
Insight
Doshi: Early startups should not optimize onboarding against fraud or spam
“You don't have lots of fraud problems. You don't have, you probably don't have a lot of people spamming your service. You probably don't have a lot of, like, fake actors in the system trying to sign up. So if you don't have those problems, don't optimize for t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Doshi: Email and text verifications lose 60% to 70% of onboarding users
“Generally email and text confirmations have an enormous drop-off. Like, I'm talking, like, you get, of the hundred percent of the people that come, like, only 30% will, like, basically go on and, like, click on those email confirmations, or 40%.”
Insight
Doshi: Products should allow user access before demanding sign-up
“To the extent that you can just let users into the product it's always better to do that.”
Insight
Doshi: Reactivation campaigns generally do not work
“If you talk to people that have ever done, like, a reactivation campaign, reactivation campaigns generally don't go very well.”
Assertion Supported
Doshi: LivingSocial pivoted to daily deals due to poor retention
“LivingSocial literally had to pivot the entire company to basically competing with Groupon because the app wasn't very retentive in those days.”
Insight
Doshi: Talking to users yields far more insight than analyzing data graphs
“So, I don't think there's any way that you can kind of skirt by talking to customers, but here's the benefit of talking to customers, even though it feel, maybe it's more tedious than looking at a graph you're going to get way more information and depth from t…”
Insight
Doshi: Startups should commit to one North Star metric in six-month blocks
“Pick one North Star metric, and I think, and a North Star metric I would choose in this case is like, what is a number that you're willing to bet the company on? Right? Like, if that number goes south, you deserve to die, and if that number goes up, you will, …”
Insight
Doshi: Founders often fail by getting distracted instead of focusing for years
“I think it's really hard for the average founder to actually just be focused on something boring. We tend to have, like, ADD or something, and, like, we just decide, decide to get very easily distracted and I think it's hard to do something, do the same thing …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mixpanel nears $100M ARR with 7,000 paying customers
“10 years later, the company has about 300 employees. We've raised a bunch of money and we have about 7000 paying customers, and we're starting to close in on around a hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue.”
Insight
Doshi: Startups lose most visitors because the back button is the enemy
“And I also wanted to mention that having a really bad landing page there's this really awesome quote that PG used to have in our batch that I thought I would impart on you, which is that, like, people basically just have their mouse, like, hovering on the back…”
Assertion Supported
Mixpanel differentiated from Google Analytics by measuring actions over page views
“Was that, ah, we transformed from metrics that'll make you drool to actions speak louder than page views. And you'll notice it's, like, extremely prominent. The reason why was because the number one question that people, that we would get as a company was, tha…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Doshi: Having ~1.4 DAUs per account reduced Mixpanel's dollar churn below 10%
“We actually found that there was, like, a really, really strong correlation with daily use,
And rate of churn, like, rate of, like, people, like, stop not no longer paying for the product, and it didn't take very many users.
I think it was, like, one point, …”
Assertion Supported
A 7% monthly churn rate compounds to a 58% annual revenue loss
“If you have revenue churn, and your revenue churn is, say, seven percent per month, right, you might think, awesome, I'm keeping 93% of these dollars every single month.
This is awesome.
I'm doing really, really, really well.
The problem is, is it's seven p…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mixpanel and Slack both converted 4-5% of landing page visits to signups
“Going from like a visit to a signup, like I think like a four to five percent conversion rate is pretty good. I think I like swap notes with Stuart at Slack cause we kind of had similar landing pages. I think I asked him, you know, what was your conversion rat…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Doshi: Mixpanel struggled for 18 months before users understood the product
“And Mixpell had a really hard time with that in its first 18 months. We had to change a lot of things and most people do.”
