palette columbia

Alan Gou and George Liu13 interviews done yesterday

48 total InterviewsDay 5

Who we are

Alan Gou

- B.S. in Computer Science- Built distributed systems at Jet- Executive recruiting committee

at HLAB- Instructor at ScriptEd

George Liu

- B.A. in Economics- Launched the HubSpot CRM- Built the growth team for Adobe

Muse from scratch- Partner at Dorm Room Fund

Day 1

Building on personal experience

Day 1

Motivation- Alan is a stickler for processes

and has dived deep into tools such as Trello and Asana

- George has worked in growth roles at 4 different companies and seen consistent pains that can be productized

Solution?- We build software that helps

companies manage their growth strategy

- Sell it to marketers and product managers

- It’ll be a million times better than what they do right now

The Pirate Funnel

Acquisition

Activation

Retention

Revenue

Referral

Get people to where you’re going to sell them stuff

Keep them coming back

Get them to engage with your product

Ask them for money

Ask to promote to friends

Cost Structure

Website hosting

Customer acquisition costs

Revenue Streams

Freemium subscription tiers (unlimited members, upgrade for additional features)

Key Partners

Stripe

Zendesk/Intercom

Heroku/Firebase

Github

Key Activities

Software development

Customer development

Find scalable acquisition channel

Strong feedback loop

Key Resources

Sales + Marketing

Designers

Developers

Intellectual Property

Value Proposition

A simple, centralized workflow to help growth marketing teams run better experiments faster

Customer Relationships

Forum/blog dedicated to marketing methods and best practices

Personalized support at first

Channels

ProductHunt/Others

Strong referral program

Inbound marketing

Evaluation by test runs

Subscriptions

Customer Segments

High-growth SMEs that are managing marketing/growth campaigns

Marketing consultancies that run such campaigns or experiments for large clients

Potential to branch out to product teams in the future

Our HunchesWe lose track of all our experimentsIt’s in a big, messy spreadsheet — we’re only human after all

We can’t prioritize in this chaosTasks and results are scattered everywhere, and these tools don’t even let you assign priorities

We forget about our own findingsThey get stuck in the backlog and we can’t find them or don’t notice

We hate our task management toolsIt’s slow and cumbersome, whereas I’m agile, and three months later I still feel confused using it

Everything is messy and disorganized

What did we find?

We talked to people at…

and more!

And they said...Stuff really is hard to keep track of, especially across teams

When you’re too small, you don’t use any extra tools because you’re just two people with a desk

Some have trouble prioritizing — only scaling up to Jira gives you choices

Day 2

Putting our design thinking caps on and validating our value props

Cost Structure

Highly scalable low-fixed cost business. Main costs:- Website hosting- Human capital - Customer acquisition

Revenue Streams

Team-based freemium subscription tiers - Unlimited members- Upgrade for additional features ($5/user/month)

- API integrations, cosmetics, permissioning

Key Partners

Payments processingStripe

Customer interactionZendeskIntercom

AnalyticsMixpanelGoogle Analytics

TechnicalHerokuFirebaseGithub

Key Activities

Feature developmentAgile engineeringStrong feedback loop

Customer developmentScalable acquisition channel

Key Resources

GrowthSalesMarketing

ProductDesignersDevelopers

Value Proposition

Systemized TeamworkTrack experiments across teamsDiscuss projects and tasks in organized way

Fast and Easy-to-useGood responsive designNo feature overloadBetter workflow fit but still have customizability

Increased ProductivitySummarize key resultsBetter able to prioritize

AggregationSeamless bundling of workflow and chat

Customer Relations

CommunityForum for marketing methods and practices

IndividualSupport page/FAQPersonalized support

Channels

OutboundPH/HN/GHFacebook adsDirect sales

InboundStrong referral programContent marketingViral waitlist

Customer Segments

Marketing TeamsSMEs that want to grow users and run experiments

Product TeamsSMEs that use agile engineering methods

Cross-functional TeamsMultiple teams, such as product and marketing, must coordinate activities

Experiment Process

Someone notices Week 1 retention is extremely low

Acquisition

Activation

Retention

Revenue

ReferralHypothesis: Users will come back with email reminders

Coordinate email emphasis with product team

PMM ProductTeam

Findings: An email retention flow increases

retention

The Test

Key Results: Learnings and next steps forward to

optimize email

Giant Spreadsheet

12

34

Pain and gains we’ll tackle

Coordinating with Teams

Product marketing manager may have to interact with

- Design team- Engineering team- Analytics team- Support team- Sales team

2

Moving Experiment Along

This all needs to happen fast

- Time is money!- Fast you finish,

faster you can tackle other problems

3

Making Sure You Remember Results

Results can get lost- Workflow is a mess- Waste of effort if

you just forget your findings or never act upon them

4

A Hypothetical Graveyard

We thought: Brainstorming is a valuable activity

Teams suffer from backlog of ideas and feature requests, not a dearth of them

We thought: Someone has a great workflow we can consult

Even tech giants and superstar companies don’t have their act together

We thought: This is also useful for enterprise, let’s target them

The cost of a sales force and the nature of tooling doesn’t justify it

Day 3

Refining our customer segments

Cost Structure


Revenue Streams



Key Partners





Other B2B SaaS Lead exchanges

Key Activities



Key Resources



Value Proposition

Systemized TeamworkTrack experiments across teamsDiscuss projects and tasks in organized way

Fun!Fast, simple, easyConsumerization of ITBetter workflow fit but still have customizability

Increased ProductivityFiltering for better prioritization

AggregationSeamless bundling of workflow and chat

Customer Relations



Channels

OutboundPH/HN/GHFacebook adsLinkedIn adsDirect sales


Customer Segments

Growth marketerAt a high-growth post-series A startup

Marketing managerAt a medium-sized tech company

Product managerOptimizing and testing product features

Who is involved in the process?

Marketing/Growth LeadOptimizes entire funnel

Analytics TeamTells you what the data means

Product ManagersManages product development

Engineering LeadsBuilds product, keep it running

1

4

2

2

2 4

3

4

Who works with who, and at what stage?

1

Someone notices Week 1 retention is extremely low

1

Coordinate email emphasis

2

The test

3

Systemize learnings in giant spreadsheet

4

The ones we’ll focus on (initially)

Growth Marketers

Relies on the funnel for, well, their entire job

Marketing Manager

Coordinating with everyone can be a pain

Product Manager

Has to listen to and consider everyone

The ones who we won’t

Engineering Lead

Cares more about other issues (tickets)

Analytics

Product might not add much value

What else did we find?

Death by a million backlog items

Stuff piles up, and it becomes hard to sift through and organize

- Unassigned tasks- Forgotten results- Stagnant tickets- Someone had 1000

tickets sitting in their backlog!

Some like their tools, some don’t

Trello is loved by many — but all use Jira after certain size

- Trello can’t scale- Free form is also a curse- Jira is customizable,

good for large orgs

People care about speed

The faster you can experiment and iterate, the better

- Snowball effect- Faster you iterate, more

problems you can solve

Day 4

Figuring out how to sell this and make money

Cost Structure


Revenue Streams



Key Partners






Key Activities



Key Resources



Value Proposition

1. Better teamworkTrack experiments across teams

2. Fun!Fast, simple, easyConsumerization of IT

3. Productivity gainsBetter prioritization via filtering and visualization

4. ConvenientSeamless bundling of workflow, data, learnings, and chat

5. Scales to needsGood defaults ease into powerful customization

Customer Relations



Channels

OutboundPH/HN/GHFacebook adsLinkedIn adsDirect sales


Customer Segments

Growth marketerAt a high-growth post-series A startupValue Prop: 1, 2, 4

Marketing managerAt a medium-sized tech companyValue Prop: 1, 3, 4

Senior PMAt a medium-sized tech companyValue Prop: 1, 3, 5

Getting People to Come

Tech evangelists PMs/PMMs

Tech savvy

Our website

AcquisitionTech EvangelistsThey roam ProductHunt, HackerNews, and reddit

Product Managers and MarketersWe’ll use content marketing to make them come to us just to read our thoughts

EveryoneUse targeted ads to get them on our website

Referral ProgramRequire company email to sign upStart viral loop focus on invitiing teammates

Activation — Getting them to use our product

Playground

Come and test it on our front page

Onboarding

Tailor our intro to your use case

Migration

Migrate from your previous tool to ours

Tasks

Team

AvgUser

PowerUser

Making Money

Early Adopters

PMMs we know Referrals

Content

Early AdoptersPMMs we know

Rest of the teams at their

companies

Press

Content

Early AdoptersPMMs we knowInitial companies

Product teamsOther companies

Referrals

Larger teams adopt

Mostly free tierAll free tier

Beware the cost cliff

$0/user/month- Basic features- Teams of up to

5 people

$5/user/month- All features- For teams

greater than 5

$5/user/month- For every

additional user past 5

$0/month $30/month $5/month

?!?

?

Maybe a solution

Day 5

Just getting started

Cost Structure


Revenue Streams

Team-based freemium subscription tiers - 5 members free — avoid cost cliff- Upgrade for additional features ($5/user/month)


Key Partners






Key Activities



Key Resources

GrowthMarketing


Value Proposition

1. Better teamworkTrack experiments across teams

2. Fun!Fast, simple, easyConsumerization of IT

3. Productivity gainsBetter prioritization via filtering and visualization

4. ConvenientSeamless bundling of workflow, data, learnings, and chat

5. Scales to needsGood defaults ease into powerful customization

Customer Relations



Channels

OutboundPH/HN/GHFacebook adsLinkedIn ads


Customer Segments

Growth marketerAt a high-growth post-series A startupValue Prop: 1, 2, 4

Marketing managerAt a medium-sized tech companyValue Prop: 1, 3, 4

Senior PMAt a medium-sized tech companyValue Prop: 1, 3, 5

Our most important confirmed hypotheses

People use the funnel a lot

Small companies, medium companies, large companies

- Acquiring user growth- Retaining customers- Generating revenue- Hands-free virality- The shoe fits

1

People always want to move faster

Always thinking about- How can we improve

this process?- How can we track things

better?- How can we prioritize

more effectively?- How do we improve

without screwing up what we have?

2

There are a lot of pain points in marketing

No one has a perfect workflow (it’s true)

- Disparate applications to look at related things

- Copy-and-pasting- Big, clunky spreadsheet- Stuff gets lost and

forgotten in the cracks

3

How we can can succeed

Experiment faster, centralize results

1

Make it easy for them to switch to us

2

Scale with their organizational needs

3

Tasks

Team

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