Daniel Mrdjenovich

I was recently chatting to an early stage founder about product-market fit (PMF). This isn't an exact transcript, and is edited for better understanding. Founder: How do we know that we have gotten the PMF? We are tracking retention because we are b2c and expect people to use our app weekly. Me: Yes, that makes sense. Retention is a good metric because it means customers are preferring you over others on a regular basis. I like to add potential monetisation avenues to the PMF discussions as well. In my experience, keeping monetisation in mind while making the initial product choices, makes things easier down the road. Founder: Yes, we haven't thought about monetisation yet. Let me think about it. To understand PMF better, we have benchmarked retention with other similar products. We are at 40% of the best apps in the category in terms of weekly retention (W4) Me: That's a good thing. As long as the retention curve flattens, it's a sign of PMF. Founder: Makes sense. But how do we improve that number? Me: I am sure you have studied Superhuman's blog around how they improved their PMF. They tried to identify what sort of people are loving the product, and then focussed on those. Founder: Yes, we have. We can use that. Me: Yes, but one issue with that approach is - it works well when you have a set of users who pay for your product. When people pay, they are willing to take a longer survey like Superhuman. When it's free, like your b2c product, you might have a sampling bias in survey, where more engaged users take the survey and provide you a different picture than actual. Founder: So how do we tackle that? Would doing interviews be better? Me: Yes, it would be better. But even there, people who have used your product sparingly (dropped without getting value) won't be willing to speak to you. So you have to be careful - make sure that you have all the key personas listed before you start calling the users. That way, you can put more effort in segments where you haven't talked to enough users. Founder: Makes sense! So we identify the segments for whom the product is working, and then target them? Me: Yes, with couple of more things to keep in mind. First, make sure these segments are large enough for you. If not, you might have to work on making additional segments to love your product. Second, make sure you understand why your product is working for them. Use that in your landing pages, ad copy, etc. and you might be able to attract them quite easily. Founder: Sounds good! People say you should start amping up marketing spend after PMF. When do we do that? Me: It's hard to answer this question when you aren't monetising. Get your investors' opinion. If you were monetising, I would have looked at the gross profit. ----- A simple concept can become much more nuanced in application, which we don't talk a lot about. This conversation would have been quite different for a different product - like enterprise or marketplace.

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There's a Grand Canyon-sized gap between what you're promising and what customers actually experience! And you're not alone. This tale of disconnect is as common as startup pitch decks. But because there's a new code to crack, and it involves bridging the gap between Marketing and Customer Experience (CX) teams. Back in the days of Silicon Valley's gold rush (well, around 2016), 86% of CMOs were convinced they'd own the entire customer experience by 2020. But, spoiler alert: that dream hasn't quite booted up yet. However, it's not time to reboot just yet, because there's still time to debug and optimize. Let's start by hacking into a new definition of marketing in today's landscape. It's not just about flashy app interfaces and catchy taglines anymore. Nope, it's about coding experiences so seamless and user-friendly, your customers will be giving you five-star ratings faster than you can say "beta launch." And that's where CX swoops in like a superhero with a killer app. So, what's the secret algorithm for bridging this gap? Well, grab your keyboards, because we're about to upgrade to nine key concepts CULTURE IS THE FOUNDATION: Build a customer-centric culture from the ground up, like writing clean, scalable code. CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING IS THE CORNERSTONE: Get to know your users like you know your favorite IDE. SOCIALIZE AND OPERATIONALIZE INSIGHTS: Don't just collect data – put it into production like a finely-tuned algorithm. PEOPLE BEFORE PRODUCTS: Design products with your users in mind, like crafting elegant UX designs. RETENTION OVER ACQUISITION: Keep your users engaged like a successful app update, instead of just chasing downloads. EXPERIENCES OVER MARKETING: Serve up experiences so delightful, they'll spread like viral memes on social media. BRAND PROMISE DELIVERED: Walk the walk and earn your users' trust like a top-rated app with zero bugs. USERS AS HUMANS: Treat your users like valued beta testers, because at the end of the day, they're the ones debugging your product. CIO PARTNERSHIP: Embrace technology like a savvy developer, to enhance the user experience and unlock the next level of success. By booting up the Marketing and CX teams together, you can craft a seamless journey for your users – one that'll keep them coming back for updates like eager app enthusiasts. 🚀 So, let's power up and start the API conversation to make some groundbreaking code happen! Remember, marketing isn't just about selling software – it's about delivering genuine value for our users. Img: DALL-E

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Nearly every single new product will need to pivot before finding product/market fit. And yet, most teams are terrible at pivoting... Here's what I've learned about the fine art of pivoting well: First, you need to identify which of your product/market fit hypotheses is not working: 1️⃣ Problem to solve - Do customers not care enough about the problem you're solving? 2️⃣ Target audience - Is the product not resonating with your target audience? 3️⃣ Value proposition - Is your solution not addressing the customer's problem? 4️⃣ Competitive advantage - Is your product failing to differentiate relative to alternatives? 5️⃣ Growth strategy - Are you failing to attract adequate customers to the product? 6️⃣ Business model - Are customers unwilling to pay for the product? Once you've identified the specific hypothesis that is not working, you then need to generate alternative hypotheses for what might fix it. The task then becomes coming up with small tests you can run to validate whether your alternative hypotheses will indeed fix what's not working. You might conduct customer interviews, run growth tests, launch a new product feature, etc, all in service of testing your new hypothesis. Once you have some conviction on this new hypothesis, it's time to roll it out across your product. The final critical step is ensuring you then revisit each of your other hypotheses and make sure they are now in alignment with what you've changed. People often forget this step. For example, if you decided to move up market to enterprise, your existing growth strategy is unlikely to be effective for attracting enterprise customers, so that hypothesis now also needs to be updated to be brought into alignment. 👆 This is a preview of content we'll be covering in my Finding Product/Market Fit course. Join us for the May cohort to learn a modern approach to new product innovation: https://lnkd.in/gwKZDtX3

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Was chatting with a product leader from a Y Combinator company last week. 🚀 He'd reached out because they needed greater control and flexibility around pricing & packaging, specifically bundling & unbundling features. 🔄💡 He explained it like this: "The issue we're running into is that it's actually really difficult for us to attach features to plans and quickly move features between plans. Any changes we want to make require dev cycles to support. The goal is to be able to move feature A to plan B or feature B to Plan A rapidly & without code changes, so that we can be a lot more agile with testing optimal packaging." 🔗🛠️ #pricing #packaging #featuremanagement

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Do you even need a product manager? The future of product managers is under the spotlight, with companies like Dovetail and Airbnb removing this role. This change makes people wonder if product managers are really needed. ☑ Company Culture and Structure ↳ Startups typically don't need a dedicated PM as the founder or co-founder often plays that role. ↳ Whether a company needs product managers depends on its culture and structure. ☑ Shared Responsibilities ↳ Dovetail redistributed PM tasks among team members, leveraging their experienced product designers. ↳ At 37signals, product designers take on many traditional PM responsibilities...and coding. ↳ Without PMs more time will be spent on admin tasks less on craft. ☑ Context-Specific Needs ↳ Some companies can do well without PMs, but many still rely on them for strategic alignment and customer-focused development. ↳ Industries with complex product lifecycles benefit from dedicated PM roles. We’ll have to wait and see how this trend evolves! 👉 Adaptability > Struture. 👉 Cluture influences roles. 👉 PMs aren’t disappearing; they’re transforming.

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I've returned to writing and sharing my insights, now on Substack! 📚✨ If you're interested in product development and compelling startup stories, be sure to check out my new Substack. The upside? It's going to be very opinionated and inspiring. The downside? It might push your thinking. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dZnUgJj5 Stay tuned and feel free to subscribe. #Tech #ProductDevelopment #TechTrends #StartupStories #Substack

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Perhaps the simplest but most important reframe for thinking about finding product-market fit, that I wish someone had told me 10 years ago: Smart people tend to think top-down, at scale, in abstractions: Personas, market segments, value propositions, product categories, etc. This is helpful in many ways. However, you actually find product-market fit bottom-up, in 1-on-1 conversations with prospective & actual customers. In fact, top-down thinking often *prevents* us from finding product-market fit. Because we're so committed to our theories, we have a hard time recognizing the real patterns of demand in our customer conversations. And we try to force our top-down theories on the market, which is neither fun nor effective. It was only through onboarding our first 300 customers 1-on-1 that I noticed a pattern that led to the *real* product opportunity, for example. Would I have noticed this if I hadn't done that hands-on work? Would I have noticed it if I'd been committed to some top-down thesis developed before working with 300 customers 1-on-1? Of course not. Everything in startupland talks at scale, in theory, in abstractions. Which makes sense in the classroom, in newsletters, and on social media. The only place it doesn't make sense is in practice.

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Building Products in Startups: Lesson #2 As entrepreneurs, we often gravitate towards what we naturally excel at or enjoy. Not everyone is a born salesperson, but until you've heard "NO" enough times, you haven't really tested your product and your own resiliency. Resiliency is especially important when you are prospecting for potential clients. In short: EMBRACE THE "NO" TO FIND THE "YES" — AND NEVER STOP SELLING YOUR PRODUCT. Building a startup also means pushing boundaries. As founders, many of us aren’t trained sales professionals, but here's the truth: selling is a muscle you need to exercise regularly. Each "no" is an opportunity to understand your market better, refine your pitch, and find your path to "yes." Here are some additional observations to date: Learn to Love Objections. The tough questions from potential clients are golden opportunities. They force you to think critically and refine your product's value proposition. If you only hear praise, it's time to dig deeper.  Praise makes me nervous! Stay in Sales Mode. No matter who joins your team, founders should remain close to customers and drive top-line sales. Relying solely on others to sell your product can be risky. Keep Iterating on Your Sales Pitch. Don’t settle for a pitch that works once. Iterate, adapt, and evolve.  Don’t Delegate. You may be tempted to delegate sales to a 3rd party who has “access” and “special sauce” - do it yourself at first. Refine Your Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Persona. Do this until you hit on a conversion rate within the accepted range for your industry segment. By the way, even if you dream of a product that sells itself (and that should be the goal), the reality is, few products do. 🤷‍♂️ Whether you're a natural salesperson or not, selling is a fundamental skill in the startup world. What sales challenges and lessons can you share? Happy Selling! 🚀 #StartupLife #StartupLessons #Sales #CoffeeIsForClosers 

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In the last episode of the Skip Podcast (https://lnkd.in/gM5QJk2j), I coach a product manager who is mid-career, looking for advice on applying to late-stage tech companies. I shared that joining a leadership role in big tech is very different than getting a more junior position. But most people use the same process and have similar expectations - find the biggest role with the most exciting project you can identify. Push hard and succeed, and then you’ll have a lot to show for your efforts. For leaders, I think this is the wrong approach which could get you fired. Roles with very high expectations require you to be productive and comfortable almost on day one. Sure, in your past when you had a small team or project, it was possible to quickly get your bearings and show impact. But the more senior the position, the broader the scope. And each project, team, and challenge requires time to understand before even considering suggesting taking action. You see the issue? The company has an opening on a hot project, you’re flattered to get the offer, you bet on yourself and take it. But you immediately need to have the answers, don’t have the context and six months later you’ve failed to meet expectations. Now you’re stuck and worst of all, might give up on a late-stage career. No wonder most companies stick to their tenured staff when selecting leaders, and why so few outside hires in leadership roles succeed. So how do you navigate this? Think of any leadership position in two phases: the starter role and the prime role. Select a role where you can exceed expectations. It might not be the most glamorous work the company is doing with the best peers and most glamorous manager. But it gives you time to really get your bearings, identify the right vocabulary to leverage your strengths, build the relationships you need to navigate challenges, and get back into a flow where your thinking aligns with how the company needs you to think.  Maybe that's 12-18 months. You might not get promoted but you'll start to get noticed. Then make an internal transition to that prime role. With a bit of tenure you’ll have access to roles not open to outsiders. You’ll start that role with far more context and relationships. Then you can really accelerate impact. The downside is it takes longer, a long term play requiring 3-5 years at the company to make this double jump. But I don’t think you should look for a quick hit if joining a large, complex company with thousands of people. You need time to learn the right lessons, and I think this advice could shift how you approach roles at companies you're considering.

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I've seen so many PRDs in my time, but what makes a good one? Most PRDs contain these sections: - Problem Statement - Customer Segments - Goals & Success Metrics - User Story - Mock-ups - Requirements But if you really want to elevate your PRD, consider adding more depth: - Why is this the right time? - Add key trade-offs or decisions you made. - Add deeper insights that led you to the target segments. - Add any risks and mitigation plans that you have considered. - Add the launch plan and GTM. - Add a feature roadmap for 6 months post launch. Add features that are out-of-scope. Many PMs think of the PRD simply as a set of requirements, with everything else being space fillers. ⛔ 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲. Here are some more tips to consider while writing your PRD: 1️⃣ Use the pyramid principle to write with clarity and use data to back-up your arguments. 2️⃣ Write at an 8th-grade level so it's easy for anyone to understand. Use Grammarly or the Hemingway app to check your writing level. 3️⃣ Spend as much time explaining the trade-offs and risks as you do explaining the solution. This will help readers understand your thinking and reasoning. 4️⃣ Focus on understanding the purpose of each section and how it can help you reach your goals. 5️⃣ The PRD is often a live document. Don't focus too much on perfecting it and handing it over to your tech team. The process of writing and collaborating on the document is more valuable than the final outcome itself. __________ 🥷 Get this and 5 other product templates FREE 👇 Link in the first comment — filter by “most recent” to see it.

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Casey Winters sharing how he helped Pinterest and Grubhub increase retention and revenue by optimizing their onboarding experience: Contrary to popular belief, onboarding isn’t a marketing or sales problem. “So who should work on this problem? What does an onboarding team look like? This is a CROSS-FUNCTIONAL team: Product designers… Engineers… Product managers… In B2B a lot of times sales will be involved… Sometimes marketing… User research… All of these people have to be working together to figure out how to build the right experience so that people are going to get the value of your product and keep using it.” This begs the next question: "Where does onboarding end and the core product begin? Your onboarding team should be in charge of the entire product experience until people reach the habit moment” Onboarding might just be the most underrated drivers of growth. Don't make the mistake of underinvesting in it. If you're looking to improve your product onboarding - give the full video watch, it's full of powerful and practical advice. Source: Casey Winters’ talk at Slush 2018: Why Customer Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy

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🙋 Questions About Iterative? Ask in the Comments I often hear from founders that they haven’t applied to Iterative because they're unsure about how our program works, what we look for when investing, if they’re too early or too late, whether we invest in X, etc. Whether you apply to Iterative or not, it’s important to me that you have the necessary information to make your decision. So, ask me anything! Drop your questions in the comments and I’ll personally respond to them. If you have a question that you’d rather share privately, write “DM” in the comments and I’ll DM you. No question is too small or trivial if it helps you make a decision on whether to apply. If enough people ask questions, I’ll share my top 5 places to eat in Penang, Malaysia (my hometown).

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I’ve been playing with a few product onboarding flows since getting users to a “magical” moment has been a focus for Inari (YC S23) and logging small touches I liked the most! My takeaways: 1. Define up to 3 actions that “activate” the user then push them through it. 2. Make accomplishing those actions as close to a 1-click experience as possible. 3. Never overload users with multiple competing CTAs. 4. Get users to experience the product ASAP for better buy-in. 5. Ask for teammate invites, contact connections, and social follows. Arc Browser’s onboarding was quick, simple, and fun✨ Each screen has one action, minimal copy, and flows quickly. I imported my top browser tabs and existing bookmarks in a few clicks without navigating to a settings page which was awesome. They also let you customize the theme and get immediate visual feedback was a surprisingly amazing touch. Their onboarding ends on an activation checklist with a huge video walkthrough when first opening the browser that illustrates how to use each net-new browser action. Slack’s PLG onboarding flow was solid but overloaded me at the end 😆 Slack’s final screen after completing onboarding felt overwhelming: there were 5 prominent CTAs jumping at me which made hesitant on where to start (upgrade to pro, invite coworkers, see this pinned update message, try out canvas, enable notifications). Felt like a big company issue with many competing teams fighting for real estate. Duolingo and Linear gets you to experience the product quickly💡 After a few onboarding questions, Duolingo pushes you into selecting a language and mastery level to try out the product. Super quick “time-to-value” of experiencing Duolingo which is really clever. Along the way, they use gamification levers like showing points earned, multi-day streaks starting, and haptic feedback to make you feel rewarded and more committed. After finishing a lesson and feeling reaffirmed, Duolingo finally starts asking for the uncomfortable mobile app tasks like upgrading to paid, enabling notifications, and allowing tracking activity. Pretty clever since the user has to be bought-in to have gotten that far so I’d imagine conversion rates on those tasks are higher. Linear had a similarly fast onboarding where you’re quickly taken to active issues after sign-up. There's a pre-drafted set of issues with onboarding instructions that feels super clean and teaches you how to use Linear in a way that's naturally baked into the product. Unsurprisingly, every onboarding flow asks for invites 💌 Every app I onboarded through had a standard invite teammates or connect contacts flow - I’m guessing Slack popularized this in SaaS while Facebook set this standard for mobile. Linear was the only one that asked for follows on Twitter which I thought was smart since they have an incredible brand presence there. I’m on the hunt for more stellar onboarding experiences and tips - please share what apps are best in class!

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On the time Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston tore me a new one and changed the future org structure of Ramp: At YC, we attended weekly office hours where every startup shared 1/ their weekly growth %, 2/ their biggest problem, and 3/ what they were doing to solve it. That week in summer 2015 our startup Paribus had grown 20% w/w, our biggest problem was that we were getting too many customer support tickets, and our proposed solution was to hire a customer support person (as the third hire at a then two-person startup). Jessica pointed out that if our solution was to hire someone to deal with customer issues, then next week when we grew more we’d have to hire another person, then another, and so on. Her point was that the real solution isn’t solving tickets, it’s listening to customers and building a better product so customers never need to write in the first place. She told us how Brian Chesky of Airbnb, an icon even then, would still walk around wearing a Jawbone headset so he could personally take support calls, hear customer feedback and deal with problems immediately. She (kindly and graciously) schooled us in front of the group, and it was one of the best learning moments I’ve had as a founder. In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team. Support is not a cost to minimize, it’s a key function every company should take seriously. When you listen to customers and make your product intuitive, you get output graphs like the below – where the rate of active user growth far exceeds the rate of support tickets. To this day, almost a decade later, support reports into product at Ramp

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With one simple tactic during onboarding, Attio delivers value faster than any other product I've seen. What did they do?👇 1️⃣ 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭: Attio is the CRM for the builders and GTM teams who love products like Notion and Figma. They're also the only CRM (imo) that can take on Salesforce. 2️⃣ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲: They sync your work email and calendar, and automatically map out every interaction you've had with deeply enriched contact info. 3️⃣ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞: Within <1m, without needing to fill out a single field, you're looking at a view of all your relationships (ever) over email. And when more people from your company join, 𝘈𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘦s 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, creating an instant pool of collective team context. 4️⃣ 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬: Zero effort leads to instant/large upfront value. New users don't have to poke around to make Attio work for them...it just works, and proves it, super fast. And that speed to value is increasingly important these days when you have one shot to grab people's attention. One session to show you deliver, or you risk losing them. This tactic is just the tip of their PLG motion. In my latest post, I sat down with co-founder/CEO Nicolas Sharp to get into the weeds of how Attio is growing. We cover lessons on launching a B2B product, pricing, B-17 bombers, The Chef Flywheel, mastering PLG, and lots more. Tons of fun, lots of learnings. You can read it here: 👇https://lnkd.in/ey_sHxHF 𝘱.𝘴 shoutout to Alice Chen and Ilan C. for your insights, and helping make this happen!

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When most folks think about achieving product-market fit, they usually focus just on the product they’re building. One of my favorite insights from our essay on PMF is explaining that there are actually four key levers to get there. 1. The persona: Who would benefit most from your insight? Do you have a person in a specific type of role or function who faces a set of challenges in mind? In this context, the persona can be the buyer (CTO or CRO), the company type (e.g. Fortune 10,000 financial services) or both. As you look to make adjustments here, consider whether it’s too narrow, too broad — or needs to be abandoned altogether.  Example from Plaid: Consumers didn’t need another budgeting app, but fintech apps needed the integrations the team had built on the back-end. 2. The problem: Is this an urgent and important problem that your target persona has? It’s the classic painkiller versus vitamin question. You’re looking to solve a problem that is urgent and, if solved, will provide huge relief to your potential customers. If not, you may need to explore adjacent problems for your persona, or rethink your persona and problem entirely. Example from Lattice: Stayed focused on people leaders, but went from building a solution for OKRs to solving performance management. 3. The promise: Are those customers interested in what you’ll do to address that need — your unique value proposition? It’s easy to confuse this for your actual product, but the promise is how you communicate the benefit your product will deliver. In our experience, this is the lever that is most overlooked. Example from Ironclad: Repositioned from an AI legal assistant (that promised to automate lawyers’ tasks) to a Contract Lifecycle Management platform (that promised to help enterprise companies create and manage legal contracts end-to-end) in order to play in an existing category. 4. The product: Will the product that you’re building actually deliver on this promise? Are customers interested in this particular solution to their problem? Would they pay for it? Example from Alma: Pivoted during the pandemic from a community-based physical office concept for therapists, to giving providers a suite of digital tools to build thriving private practices.

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The best user research technique is often to just pick up the phone and call 10 customers. You don’t need a research plan, a research lead, someone to summarize results, etc. Those things just add distance between you and the customer and overhead that slows research down. If you have a direct line to the customer instead, you’ll often find that it only takes five conversations before you gain strong, reliable insights.

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Take it from me, there’s no better way to learn excellent and practical ways to overhaul your experimentation efficacy! Erin makes critical thinking fun and highly accessible in this workshop, June 11:

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