Doshi: Startups lose most visitors because the back button is the enemy
Suhail Doshi · Suhail Doshi - How to Measure Your Product · Y Combinator · Sep 12, 2018 · at 9:53
Mixpanel co-founder Suhail Doshi discusses landing page clarity and visitor drop-off during a Y Combinator Startup School lecture.
0:00 / 0:29exact quote · 29.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 button, and they're just waiting to say, I don't know what this is. This is confusing. Back. And that's immediately how most companies are just, like, losing most of their users from moving on. And so just remember that your enemy is the back button.”
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 Suhail Doshi
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”