00:08:19 · Hannah Lee, S0, S1, S3
Ad[00:08:19] S4: Do you use Calendly to book calls, Todoist to manage tasks, Trello to keep track of projects? What if I told you that you could do all these with one tool, but then it also integrates with all of the tools that I just mentioned? Hi, everyone. I'm Hannah from the EO team, and I'm here to introduce the game changing productivity tool, Akiflow. It's basically a smart combination of all the essential productivity features I need on the daily. First is the beautiful marriage of task management and time blocking. Akiflow has this interface where you can create a to do list just as you would in any task management tools, but you can also drag these certain tasks right into your calendar to the exact time of day. Ad[00:09:00] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:09:01] S1: you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. Ad[00:09:11] S3: It boosts your job post Ad[00:09:12] S1: to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
00:09:12 · S1, Hannah Lee
Ad[00:09:12] S1: to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:09:29] S4: I find this particular visualization of to dos and schedules side by side very helpful in prioritizing my work, carving out chunks of focus time needed for video editing. Blocking time here syncs with all of my other connected apps such as Slack, Calendly, and more. Secondly, it's the magical command bar, the go to shortcut for all features within Akiflow. Instead of navigating the app manually, I simply click on the command bar to command what I wish to perform. For example, let's just say that we confirmed an interview filming and I want to put that in my calendar. I could just set that up manually on a Google Calendar or I could simply go ahead and type, Akiflow founder interview filming on October 28 from 12PM to 3PM, and there's my schedule. We've been using it to keep track of our hectic filming and traveling schedules every day.
00:10:23 · Amir Movafaghi
[00:10:23] S2: Okay. At one point, Mixpanel, we were churning almost half of our customers every year. And it was this place where as a company that's growing fast, you know, in some ways that can... That metric can be overlooked. You're like, hey. We're still we're still growing. Things are still great. And, you know, you would show up and and look at these numbers, and you wouldn't even blink. You're like, yeah. We just had, like, half of our customers, like, walk out the door, but it's not a big deal because we're getting so much more and we're still growing. But in many ways, it was a time where we really came together and said, look, churning half the customers is a major, major problem in that we are clearly not driving and delivering the value as a company that we need to. And even though, you know, we... We're still growing, we have to go back and address churn as a way of making sure we have sustainable growth over time, and that product needs to kinda get to this level of maturity over time. And, you know, the problem was actually... This one was quite difficult because we were initially just trying to find, like, easy answers. You know, maybe this is a segment problem. Like SMB has higher churn. Maybe we just need to go to enterprise, and that'll be the fix to all of our problems. But the reality was much more complicated and nuanced. And what it required was a very, very diligent way of, again, segmenting and understanding the behavior from different customers in different segments, and then being able to really narrow in on the reasons, it it so happened that there wasn't one answer. You know, it wasn't one thing. It was a set of a bunch of different things that we needed to do, and the list was quite overwhelming. The way that we came at it was instead of putting some crazy insane kind of goal for where we wanted to be in a in a in a year time, we acknowledged that retention was a lagging indicator, that it would take time for us to really move instead, we said, is the single kind of proxy leading indicator we can grab that would inspire the team, get them excited about making the right set of improvements, in moving retention in the right direction? And then we shifted our focus to NPS, user NPS. We said, look. If we are able to improve user sentiment, that's a much faster in product signal we're gonna get from our users.
00:12:40 · Amir Movafaghi, S0, S1, S3
That starts going up, then we know we can kinda move the dial on on retention over time. And so that's where our journey began. And we literally made a, you know, a series of categories of different priorities. We had a series of things that we're gonna go out and and tackle, And everyone in the company from go to market to EPD sort of had this core mission to go out and get this done. And the result was really incredible. We were in single digits NPS at the time, and we were able to move that 10 points every single year. And by the time we did our series c, we were at 50. And this past spring, we almost touched 60, which is really, like, now kinda consumer grade category. And then retention went from, you know, 50 to close to 90% as a result, which I think, again, speaks to this ability to establish real feedback loops that allow Ad[00:13:30] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:13:31] S1: you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. Ad[00:13:41] S3: It boosts your job post to Ad[00:13:42] S1: help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
00:13:59 · Amir Movafaghi
[00:13:59] S2: You don't understand whether you're... You... The things you're doing are moving the needle and then having this kind of combination of leading lagging indicators so that you have things to inspire... Get inspired along the way in your journey of execution rather than having to wait, you know, a year to find out if something was working. Companies go through very, very different stages and challenges as they're going from no revenue to the initial, signals that there's demand and there's a need for their product to get 10,000,000 milestone. They get to 50,000,000 milestone, and there's huge drop offs from each of these stages. Learning and experience that at least we've taken here at Mixpanel is the ability to really have a very rich signal coming in from the pool of customers that you don't have. Right? Because so much of your signal and constant feedback loop is around the core market that you're addressing and your core set of customers that are paying you today. A lot of your signals are coming from existing customers. And so along the way, as company's maturing, you wanna make sure you always have... In the initial phase, you you you just... You wanna get as small as possible. Solve the problem for the smallest audience that is, able to get value and pay you for for your product. But as you're scaling and getting to 50, 100,000,000 plus, then you're really trying to also make sure you have a lens toward the set out the part of the market that you don't own, that you don't have, and make sure that you understand what opportunities you have to grow and continue to expand your offering and and creating more value for a bigger part of the market. I think beyond product and and signal from customers, the other dimension that's really critical as you're scaling is way that teams operate internally. How... And the the way that your executive team and you as a CEO need to operate is gonna change completely. Right? As a 10 person start up, you're in a very different capacity. Everybody's everybody's doing everything. And then your your need to then go create leverage, really create autonomy and ownership, modularity within the organization is gonna be key, in driving kind of growth and success you need past a certain scale. I think product led growth is is really important, and I think sometimes we oversimplify what it means.
00:16:19 · Amir Movafaghi
Even Mixpanel, we've we've had quite a bit of a journey in terms of understanding the nuances of, you know, what it entails, what works within product led growth, and what you need to augment and layer on. The the fact of the matter is what's really awesome about product led growth and what's so good about so many of the startups and different, you know, growth companies really leaning into to this. At its heart, the principles that we have, we need to have a really amazing product that's self servable, that can... People can get value out of right away, that sort of speaks for itself. You barely need to sell, you know, that's kind of like the the the end all sort of, goal of product led. And that's awesome. But there is so much more to being able to leveraging product led growth and actually creating sustainable growth over time. And a big part of that is this element of, you know, market education. Everyone is gonna come in to your product with a very different set of maturity. Right? They may be at a different part of the company, different understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve as a company. Being very intellectually honest about truly segmenting and understanding where you have an opportunity to actually go drive product led growth, where you can deliver a self serve, for the most part, a self serve experience. That's really key. Acknowledging that there's a space and there's absolutely an opportunity to be very sales led in a way that you drive, augmenting that product led growth, knowing that you can always rely and fall back on the fact that you have an incredible product. That once you get to a right level of market education, when you get to the right level of getting a customer to the same spot, then your product will take care of the rest. It's just this kind of core appreciation that initially product led growth is really awesome because of its unit economics. It's like the fastest, the most affordable, the best way you can possibly grow, but it's kind of core at its core. It requires a really deep segmentation focus for it to work. First one is about being open and being open to feedback.