Mixpanel operated without a forgot password feature for 18 months
Suhail Doshi · Suhail Doshi - How to Measure Your Product · Y Combinator · Sep 12, 2018 · at 16:58
Mixpanel co-founder Suhail Doshi is lecturing at YC Startup School on ruthless prioritization in early-stage startups.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 very many requests anyway.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”