Building FYI, Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics and advising 120+ startups

Show Transcript

Sean: 00:50 All. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney and I am here virtually today with Hiten Shah. Hiten is cofounder of several SaaS companies including FYI, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics. Hiten also has an email newsletter called Product Habits where he and his co-founder Marie teach people how to do customer centric product development. And as many companies as Hiten has started, he is invested in and advised more over 120 and the list is just way too long to rebound. And I cherry pick a few here. Linkedin Recurly, slideshare, clearbit Buffer Gusto amongst others. He and his cohost of Startup Chat a podcast with Steli Efti. Hiten is incredibly prolific on Twitter and very generous with his time and doing things like AMA’s and other stuff to uh, help give information to startup founders on the Internet. And he lives by the Zig Ziglar motto. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. And I could not agree more. [inaudible] welcome to the show.

Hiten: 01:45 That’s intro ever. It was so quick and so on point. So thank you for that. I’m super excited to be here. It’s been a while since you and I have talked and yeah, let’s, let’s do it.

Sean: 01:55 Yeah man. I figured I’ll just give people some context for how we know each other. So I actually first heard your voice way back in the day. It was like 2006 on an interview for venture hacks and I think it was with Nivi & Naval and just like you just rang true and everything you were saying talking about analytics, it led me down the path of getting interested in kissmetrics and event based analytics versus like just standard kind of vanity metrics and really like had a profound effect on my own career, just taking us down that avenue. Um, and so I think I had drinks with you and SF it randomly at one point and I bumped into you at saster and various places. So I’m super stuck that we can now finally have this conversation and I get to ask you a bunch of stuff.

Hiten: 02:33 Awesome.

Sean: 02:35 So, so I figured, uh, where I wanted to start is you guys just put this remote work report out recently. What is that all about?

Hiten: 02:42 Yeah. So we have a bitly link, so it’s bit.ly/remote report and um, it’s, what I like to say about it is it’s about 40,000 pixels a long, uh, when you go to the page. So it takes, you know, longer than I’d like for it to load cause I like things to load fast. Um, but it’s good. And what we learned is that people love remote work. And the reason we did it is because there’s a, a specific style of um, research that we do that comes from product research where we will ask open ended questions, get people that, you know, sometimes respond with like paragraphs of content and then actually analyze it and turn it into more like quantitative data. So we got about 500 responses like that close to 500, and we literally read each and everyone and analyzed them and created kind of this report. Uh, so it’s much different than how you think of most people doing reports where they ask a lot of multiple choice questions and things like that. We actually focus much more on getting real insights from people in their own words and then turn those into really rich like information about like what challenges people have with remote work and things like that.

Sean: 03:53 Yeah, it is really well done. I highly recommend that people check this out. It’s funny, I was scouting around, I always try to stock my guests a little bit before we talk and it just popped up. It was trending on hacker news yesterday and I’m just like, damn, heating is everywhere man. But there’s like 400 points and like bajillion comments and I’m just reading through them today. But yeah, it’s an impressive piece of work. It’s clear that you guys put a lot of effort into that. Um, was there anything, I guess what was your main takeaway after doing that whole project?

Hiten: 04:24 Yeah, the main takeaway is I’m producing a piece of content. Again, I’ll start there and I’ll go back to remote work. But producing a piece of content is like massive team effort. I mean we have a whole tips directory that that’s built into it with 180 tips that we got from people. We curated the tip. So not every tip we got, we actually approved and got in there. So it was a real like uh, production. Uh, I don’t, I, I don’t even understand how people make movies at this point cause like this thing was like, I don’t want to say it was like a movie or anything, but it took a ton of effort. And the reason it did is because we wanted to make sure that we provided the best possible insights about remote work based on what people think right now. And the, the, the crazy stuff that came up was like, despite the challenges of isolation, communication, loneliness and a bunch of those challenges we discovered, which are like some of the top challenges, people still love remote work.

Hiten: 05:20 And it’s like something people really want to do. And this is like over 90% of people said, you know, they, they love it. Over 90% of people said they’d recommend it to a friend. So the, the highlight of the report was everyone loves remote work and it wasn’t like sensationalist or anything. That was our discovery. Uh, and you know, uh, hackernews is always fun. So it’s always fun to read. All the comments are like, ah, you know, that’s what they said or that’s not true. It’s like, well this is what people said. What do you want us to do? You know, it’s like, it’s a report. It’s research. It’s not our, it’s not our bullshit like take on it. There’s, there’s very little opinion in it. And you know, some of the best things are, we got a bunch of people to share their office setups. So we have a whole bunch of pictures of those. We’ve got a bunch of people to share like their pets.

Sean: 06:03 Yeah. The pet photos were like, if nothing more, if you’re listening, go and just look at the pet photos because it’s adorable. There’s people that are like pair programming with their dogs and the dog is like very intent on trying to help. It’s ridiculous.

Hiten: 06:17 Yeah, it was fun. Right. And we did a bunch of tweets to collect these and stuff. So I, you know, there’s lessons in there. I mean one is like okay there’s some surprising stuff about remote work, but I think a bigger point I would make is like if you’re going to produce something, find a way to like just make it interesting and we didn’t know like we were going to get photos in there or anything like that until like literally the last minute. And we were like, hey, we should just tweet this and see if it’s interesting. See if people actually respond with their photos right. And things like that. So it was really cool

Sean: 06:48 that that open-ended methodology just seems really interesting. It seems like it opens up the possibility for unexpected things you wouldn’t have thought to ask in a, you know, a scan tron kind of multi answer survey if you want. Once you do that, you really kind of can go fishing and find new stuff and you know, take it down a different avenue. I think that’s pretty cool.

Hiten: 07:06 Yeah. And it’s tough because most people want to do the scan tron cause the scan-tron super easy to analyze. Like we didn’t, we didn’t tell people, hey pick, pick these out of these five challenges we said just what’s your number one challenge with remote work? So that produces a different result. It’s actually more accurate than a multiple choice because of the multiple choice. It’s whatever they said. And even if you put an other, they’re already biased by looking at all the other options you have. So we also like do this to introduce like zero bias.

Sean: 07:35 So, so to sort of take that output and then turn it into what you guys produced with this, you know, amazing report where you guys like you have to sit down and somehow categorize their answers, I’m guessing. And and like what did you do? Well from the raw output to how you got to do what you have now.

Hiten: 07:53 We might be like, we thought about this cause you know, it’s like, uh, my co founder Maria and I putting the time and then she wrote the whole report. She’s also like, uh, some kind of uh, you know, master’s in English, something, you know, so she’s like literally a Badass writer and um, that’s one reason I work with her cause like that’s awesome. And I definitely am not as good of a writer as her, although I really appreciate writing and I definitely write a bunch. Uh, and so I think the hardest part is analyzing and then forming an opinion cause you’re still forming an opinion and your opinion isn’t about this is what I think your opinion is. Like these are the good quotes. This is what these quotes mean. This is how you categorize each and every one. That stuff is, is also like what if you’re building product.

Hiten: 08:41 Uh, even if you’re doing marketing, this skill is important. It’s important to like look at qualitative information, read things and form an opinion about them. That’s like as accurate as you possibly can get. And a lot of the work goes into categorizing. We also have to categorize the tips cause it’s not like we ask people what’s a category of your tip, right? So we had to take all the efforts. It’s a lot of curation, right? And a lot of analysis. And like we did an estimate and, and, and we think like from a, if we had to do this and charge someone to do it for them, cause we always think like that just out of interesting this we’d probably charge like a quarter of a million dollars. So like it was that level of work. And I don’t really say that about most things, you know, and I’m not trying to give a premium on my time or anything.

Hiten: 09:20 I was just like, wow, there’s a lot of time, a lot of effort. We built a, the tips directory is built in Ruby on rails. So it’s like a bunch of tech that went into that bunch of, you know, like, like at least I would say, I think it was about five to seven days on just the design. Once we nailed the story. Um, that, so that took awhile. Uh, and that’s just the design of the report. Then there’s the design of the tips area, which is, it has some user experience thing. So let’s just a really involved thing. Uh, and then, and then literally I sent two emails to each person, each of those 180 people where the, the emails are, you know, usually like, you know, there’s like a template, there’s a template, but like I’m customizing each one with the person’s tip, a link to the tip and some thoughts, you know, so it’s just a production and it was just a, a process.

Hiten: 10:05 And like we do, we do a lot of postmortems, uh, where we review what we did. Uh, and so w we did a bunch of that work on it to enter just completing the post-mortem. So we take all this stuff really seriously cause like we might do it again. And this time, I think the biggest takeaway on the postmortem was like there was a period of a few days where like both Maria and I were like, we’re done. We don’t really want to do anything. We’re done with remote work. We’re not done with it anymore. But there was definitely some, some level of burnout cause I sent 400 emails and she curated and wrote all that content. Uh, I helped with a bunch of that and then we had to go do all the work on the website itself, which is also not trivial. Right. Whether it’s like, you know, silly things like Meta tags or how the social images need to look and unfurled and like all this like tedious stuff that like truthfully like we just want to make sure it’s right. Make sure it’s really good and that takes a lot of effort.

Sean: 10:59 Yeah. Well, I mean the net output of this is that you guys have created literally the thing that I’m just going to send people to ask me about remote work at this point because that’s like, that’s a weird like, like I said, like you don’t, you don’t,

Hiten: 11:13 yeah, I, you know what I was saying earlier, I don’t think we were recording at the time because we jumped right into it was like you all you can do these days is do the best possible work you can and put it out there and if it’s going to hit, you don’t really need to do much. It will just work like people will find it and do that. I’m not saying you just put it out there, you put the effort in to make sure you seat it and make sure it’s out there. We put it on product hunt. We made sure we did some solid tweets about it. But after that, things just tend to take off or they don’t after you basically see it, you know, and we weren’t deliberate about all that for sure, but we weren’t deliberate about like, Oh let’s go post it on hacker news or let’s go do this and that. If it shows up on there it’s cause it was good enough that someone decided to put it on there and it was good enough that people decided to vote on it. That’s at least been our approach because otherwise like we feel like we’re spending too much time on the sort of uh, pushing it versus building something that people are pulled to. Just like you said, you’re going to send it to people. Great. We went done. Yeah.

Sean: 12:14 Yeah. No, I mean you struck a nerve clearly even just with like the comments on Hacker News, reading through all of those, I mean you definitely struck a nerve. Was there anything, talking about the results of the actual survey, was there anything, you know, unintuitive or unexpected that that came up? I mean, one thing to me and just I can tell you in reading it, I had no idea that that many percentage of people have been working remotely for so long that it struck me that there was, I forget what the stat was, but it’s a fairly high number of people that have been doing it for more than

Hiten: 12:45 yeah, there’s a, it’s a tremendous, um, uh, amount of, uh, sort of, uh, pull love like for remote work. And to me the undercurrent is freedom basically. That, that’s the word that comes to mind, which is like, and that got really crystallized in a lot of the data, um, in the survey. And we only had 60% of the people who work remotely 100% of the time. I also did a tweet to verify that and the tweet is in the report, but I asked you work remotely and the number ended up being 62% of the time. So, you know, I just wanted to make sure, okay. Is this, cause, you know, people always complain like, Oh, is that a representative sample? Blah, blah, blah. It’s like, you know what, I don’t know. This is just the people we survey, right? And here’s what we know about them.

Hiten: 13:36 That’s about all I got. Right? Like I don’t have anything else as a representative. I don’t know, like it’s the people we surveyed. What do you want me to say? Right. I’m 42% of these people have been working remotely for more than five years. So I think that’s the stat that kind of, uh, you were into and it added up to 70%, uh, have worked remotely for three or more years. So yeah, it’s a trend. People have been doing it. Um, and uh, there’s even folks who, who would say that I think 69% of people said that people on their team, uh, work remotely 100% of the time. So I think the biggest thing is like quantifying the trend and trying to figure out whether it’s going to continue and I think it is going to continue. It’s just going to become a thing that is on people’s minds and that they are looking to achieve in their lives, which is more remote work. Even if they’re not fully remote.

Sean: 14:28 Yeah. I just don’t see this regressing. I mean we’re Pagely isn’t a hundred percent remote company as I think, you know. Um, and I couldn’t imagine at this point going back to an office job. It would be very difficult. I mean it would have to be like, I guess some freaking dream job that I can’t imagine right now. But I, I, it would be very difficult for me to imagine going back to an office. Um, I want to shift gears little bit and you have come in contact with just an inordinate number of startups like [inaudible] between the ones that you’ve started and all the companies that you advise and you’re just so out there and you know, constantly helping startup founders. So I think you more so than anyone have seen just so many different scenarios. When you sit down with a new startup to work with a new company that you’re advising, what’s your process like? What do you think about, how do you, where do you start with them?

Hiten: 15:18 Yeah, I think the, the thing in the back of my head, which is sort of mostly subconscious, is that, you know, this common thing, it’s a common thing that people say, which is like, um, you know, trying to understand what they don’t know that they don’t know. And that I think is one of the best perspectives an advisor can give. And that perspective you can give without experience. So it’s not necessarily my experience that helps me tell them what they don’t know, that they don’t know. It’s more so just thinking through the things that are saying, hearing what words they use, um, how they describe what they’re doing and really like trying to figure out what their beliefs are. Cause some of those beliefs are gonna hurt them. And so I’m looking for those kinds of beliefs and the kind of understanding that they might not have or realize that can hurt them.

Hiten: 16:11 And I think there’s tons of examples of this. You know, one of the classic ones is folks who raise money not realizing that they’re on a journey and it’s a path and there’s a roadmap to it. And the roadmap is basically like create your milestone so that by the time you hit month and nine after you raise the first round, you’re already raising more money, which means by the time you hit month nine figure out what milestone you need to have, figure out what you need to show. You have three quarters because basically every 12 months within a 12 month window you’re raising more money. So it’s a race and people who raise money don’t quite understand. That’s the race and a lot of them are like, oh, I’ll wait longer. I don’t know. And it’s like, well this is the rat race. In that world. That’s the game you’re playing because when you get past that number, people are wondering why you haven’t raised already. People are wondering what’s wrong. It’s just because of how old your company becomes and it doesn’t mean you can’t raise money. It just means your odds of getting money are much lower, especially if you don’t have enough growth.

Sean: 17:17 What what percentage would you say of the people that you work with are raising money? Are there any that bootstraps,

Hiten: 17:23 I work with folks who are self funded and I work with folks who are venture backed. I don’t really, it doesn’t really matter to me and some folks who are some weird sort of hybrid or something like that, you know, where they raised a little bit of money and don’t want anymore, which is fine. Um, so yeah, I don’t know if there’s a percentage there. I think like, generally in the market, we’re definitely seeing lots of trends, uh, around, uh, more self funding or less funding. Maybe we need to have like a statement around, well, this is less funding, this is the less funding company, you know, funded a little bit, not planning on taking more, but that’s the way they’re gonna roll. Um, and I also like, uh, things like tiny seed, uh, and different, uh, venues like that or, uh, folks who are giving a little bit of money, giving a bunch of mentorship. Uh, and, and I’m, and I’m a mentor to a few of those things too, which, uh, just gives me a little more perspective on how folks are thinking about sort of more self-funded style with a little bit of money or a little bit of help.

Sean: 18:21 Are there certain themes that you see in terms of the mistakes that are commonly made with all the people that you deal with? What w w I mean, you have this incredible perspective of having dealt with so many people. So I’m just curious if you’ve noticed that

Hiten: 18:33 people don’t think about the business enough, they don’t think about the spreadsheet, they don’t think about the milestones from, and what are business milestones, they think too much about the product milestones, which are great, but how do those product milestones lead to business results? I think, I think we’re in a world where like either you’re a business person or you shouldn’t be running these startups, which basically means you turn yourself into a business person at some point. I mean, think about the company you work at, right? You, your, your boss, he, I believe he’s co-founder, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. So they had to turn into business people at some point. They weren’t when they started, neither was I then that happens, right? That happens over time. And I think there’s a pressure when you’re self funded for that to happen faster because you have to make [inaudible].

Sean: 19:25 Ken, is that something, so you made that transition and not everyone does is this, I mean this is kind of a nature versus nurture question, but like can anyone learn to become a business person or do you think this is cut out for only [inaudible]

Hiten: 19:38 I think anyone can. If their desire is to build a business, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t put that off the table for anyone. I think that’s like unreasonable, you know, like, like we’re in a world where for most people, not most for enough people on the planet and this is in the billions, like, you know, the fundamental like means in life and living and all that is generally, you know, good, right? Compared to like a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, et cetera. So there’s definitely, like, we’re not a lot of people on the planet. They’re not looking for a roof over their head every day. There are people who are so definitely not trying to say I don’t have compassion for that or anything, but there’s so many people in the billions that are in are in the place where they could do this if they wanted to. Probably gonna see more of it. You know, when we look at the trends of like remote work or freelancing or side gigs, things like that. Like there’s more people that are gonna work for themselves in the future than today. And it’s because there’s just more opportunity out there and more stability around basically the average sort of a lifestyle

Sean: 20:45 is there for those people. So the navigating new territory that they’re not familiar with, do you steer them to a book or a course or is there any like starting point where you like to point people to when they’re just beginning to venture down this practice?

Hiten: 20:58 Tina jump in and do it. And like the Internet is full of content and there’s people like me sharing and people like you sharing it, podcasts like this. So I’ve never found one place where I can point someone and be like, Hey, just start, read this and start. The reason is like people all have different styles and they gravitate to different things. Like some, some people still like, you know, don’t believe in the principles of lean startup. And I’m not saying they’re wrong or right, I’m just saying that like I believe in them but at the same time like things take time. So I think there’s a misunderstanding of a lot of principles that are out there like lean startup, uh, or you know, um, uh, what raising money means and things like that. And so people should, I think, explore more of the content out there and figure out what they gravitate towards.

Hiten: 21:50 Cause everyone’s got a different point of view or a, you know, there’s like five or 10 set of perspectives and depending on what your perspective is, you’re going to grow, you know, gravitate towards what you believe based on all the different theories out there. Like if you don’t believe in lean startup, cool. Like what do you believe in? You’re going to build a bunch of stuff and then launch it. Great. Like go do that. Right? Let’s see what happens. Um, I think there are fundamentals. I wouldn’t say there aren’t. And to me the fundamentals are more like make sure that whatever problem you’re solving is worth your time. And there’s a lot of different ways to figure that out. You can build something really fast, put it out in the market, get, get people using it and see if they care about it. Or you can do a bunch of research and learn what people, what people’s problems are before you build anything.

Hiten: 22:33 Right. Those are the two, two different approaches. I wouldn’t say either of them is wrong. I think there’s different criteria for success in both of them. So success in the, in the method of just building something is you can build something really fast, that that would be the requirement and fast relative to what you’re building. So if you’re building a hardware company and you don’t want to go do your research on more problems, people have, cool, how fast can you prototype that hardware and get it in people’s hands? That’s what’s going to determine your ability to succeed. If you take that approach, if you’re in this sort of problem camp and want to find the problems first and that’s what you gravitate towards, you’re not going to build anything until you’re sure about the problem. That’s where it’s solving. And then you’ll think through what do we build? And then hopefully you still go fast, you know, um, cause that’s still important, but you haven’t decided that I’m going to build first. And so I think there’s generally a build first versus research first mentality. They ended up getting bridged over time, but most people start one or the other way.

Sean: 23:33 Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean that’s really refreshing because usually people are kind of, uh, you know, dogma all in on one way or the other. But it sounds like you’re advocating more like whatever your strong suit is, go do that.

Hiten: 23:44 There’s a project right now that

Sean: 23:46 we built it first and we built it. We didn’t put in anyone’s hands and we, um, already iterated it without anyone seeing it twice and now we’re like, okay, this makes sense. It’s because we have a general idea of what we want to get to and what we want to get to is more shock and awe of like, oh, when people see other gonna be like, Oh wow, this is really useful to me. And the problems it solves are kind of obvious. But the thing we wanted to build has not been researched in terms of the solves the number one problem people have. And that was on purpose. So I think it’s nice to hear what you’re saying. There is a lot of dogma. I agree with you. I don’t, I don’t prefer the dogma if I’m like really looking to give advice like on a venue like this, that’s not, it’s not like I’m talking to someone about their business, then it’s not even dogma.

Sean: 24:41 Then it’s contextual and it’s like, oh this is what I think you might want to do. You know, cause I’ve heard how they think about it. They might be engineers and they can build really fast. I’m like, okay great, you should go that approach. Or maybe they’re engineers, they build really fast. They failed before by doing that and they want to learn how to discover problems first. Right. So for me, like even in projects I do, I I, it’s like, it’s like you know what? These are tools in your tool belt as a business person. Pick the one that makes sense for what you’re doing. And, and I think there’s different other strategies I think about about markets and things like that. Like sometimes you want to build a product and you want to converge, which means you want to copy what’s out there first.

Sean: 25:19 Sometimes you want a diverge which is you want to be very different from what’s out there. Research helps you determine that, but also building things fast helps you determine which one you need to be for that market. So there’s many different ways to get there and I think these two are the two different classes of what I would recommend to people more. More importantly, it’s also like no dye self know your team, know what you’re good at, know what your, what your strengths are and then really determine whether you do want to learn a new skill or not. If that’s what you’re going after. Because people who build really fast tend to need to learn a new skill about doing research, then they have to want to do that. And people who do research tend to have to learn a new skill about like building and shipping without it being perfect or, or not even perfect but without it being right. Like not worrying about it being right. Right. Well, I mean it sounds also like this is a loop at the end of the day, right? Like you put it out there and then you, you test and you see what people say and then you iterate and you go back and make changes. So it almost sounds like you’re, where you start in that loop is kind of more a function of what type of person you are, but at the end of the day, you’re ultimately gonna end up circling through that loop.

Hiten: 26:27 Yeah, exactly.

Sean: 26:30 Cool for, okay. So the, our listeners may not have heard of terms like product market fit. Um, can you like distill that down to something and you don’t need to like teach obviously in any depth, but just a way to convey market fit to someone who’s just not familiar with [inaudible].

Hiten: 26:45 Yeah, it’s a common thing in tech and ideas that product bark park at market fit basically means that you found that a product that, uh, fits into a market so much that people love your product and there’s lots of signs for that. One sign is this survey where you ask people the survey by Sean Ellis, another shown, um, and he asked people how disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed? And the very disappointed, somewhat disappointed or not disappointed at all. And his Harris stick, uh, is, is a benchmark, is that com, uh, companies have product market fit. If 40% of the people say they’d be very disappointed in the product, no longer existed. So that’s a very qualitative, uh, method. It’s like a survey. Um, so that’s one method to assess product market fit. Another method, which is kind of a, uh, a more quantitative method is if the product has high retention, uh, and people are retained.

Hiten: 27:41 So usually what you’re looking for is 30 plus percent of the people who signed up on any given day are still with you like a year later and 90 days later, whatever your, uh, how far you’re looking out. So to me, product market fit is just that you have a product people love and there’s ways to measure that and they love it so much they keep coming back to it would be kind of, I think the stronger, uh, the strongest thing to determine thing is though, like retention is sort of what, what many folks would call like a lagging indicator. There are,

Sean: 28:11 yeah, exactly. If you have a year, I was listening to a podcast with you this morning on a run and I think you were saying someone measured it by, if you’re still around a year later then you’re considered as having product market fit. But like it’s going to take you a year to get that data by definition. [inaudible] cool. So one theme, and I don’t know how to weight into this, but it just seems like this growth hacking term has just gotten bastardized and everyone’s like throwing that label on themselves. And it Kinda reminds me of like the way cloud got tossed around and now it Kinda doesn’t mean anything in a lot of contexts, but it seems like people are endlessly chasing different gambits for how to grow. And I like that you’re very much focused on just fundamentals. Like what do you say to the people that are, have that shiny object syndrome looking for the next trick to, to get more users? Uh, what’s your advice to those folks?

Hiten: 29:08 I think I would study the fundamentals. I mean, don’t know, it’s only advice I have because every shiny object, it’s like usually a fading concept, right? Or something that gets consumed into something else. Like today, like if you ask me what is growth, I’d be like, well, I think growth is as simple as thinking about, well, how do I grow my business and what’s it going to take to grow the business? And, uh, you know, the idea that there are people in your company that are just focused on doing that or you know, there are people who, um, the, the whole company is focused on that, right? Like, it’s just simple. It’s like, I think we, we get caught up in things like growth hacking or even building out a growth team and things like that. When it’s really like more fundamentally everyone wants to grow their business generally speaking.

Hiten: 29:55 Um, and if everyone wants to grow their business, then there, there’s a responsibility we have as business people or people who work in an organization to figure out what their contribution can be to growing the business and to growth to me is like one of those things that’s like turned into a word that like doesn’t mean anything to people because it turned into having a lot of different meanings from having like a very basic one, which is growing a business and making sure that quite frankly, everyone knows how their work contributes to growth in the business. And that’s like, I think the ultimate truth about growth in my mind.

Sean: 30:36 Yeah. Well, I mean if, if your remote work report is any indication, I mean, you’re just focused, like make good stuff is the ultimate advice. Just make your stuff good and then you don’t have to push it. It kind of propels itself, uh, through word of mouth. Yep. Um, I loved there was a talk that you instantly were doing and it did. This line just jumped out at me. It’s like you’re talking about jacking up email rates or open rates and it’s, uh, it’s like the most effective email subject you can write is I have your parents in my basement with a gun to their head. Yeah. It’s like, okay, great. You’ll get the email open, but what a freaking terrible way to start a relationship. Right? They’re not going to listen to you anything after that. Right. So it’s just, I don’t know, like the, the trend, it just seems like we’re constantly chasing email, open rates and whatnot, and it’s refreshing to hear your perspective about just like, no, go back to basics. Fundamentals.

Hiten: 31:28 It’s always valued. It’s always value first. If you’re not providing value to people, they’re not going to care about you. Yeah. Right. And so if you’re anti value with like a subject like that, they’re not going to care. You’re going to burn those people. They’re going to be pissed off. And like, if that’s what you want, great. They’re not going to open your emails after that. You’re done. Yeah.

Sean: 31:49 Well, and depending on how self referential the market is, you may have just, I mean, bad news travels faster than good news, so you might also burn your other opportunities in that [inaudible]

Hiten: 31:58 the market. Yup.

Sean: 32:01 Cool. Well, I want to switch gears and talk about like metrics, KPIs, dashboards, how you think about that stuff. Like what is your approach to analytics or what are you guys tracking like it FYI, right now, what do you, what do you

Hiten: 32:13 we care about? Yeah. Um, we care, like right now we have, uh, uh, all we care about is actually adding our team’s features. Uh, uh, so we’re building what we call FYI for teams and want to make a product that teams love to use. And that’s taking some effort considering we plug into, uh, we connect a bunch of different services. It’s a product that basically the promise is find your documents in three clicks or less. And so there’s just a ton of engineering work to build out, sort of what we believe are the simplest features for teams. And what we really look look at is retention. And when we get into the team’s product, its adoption and retention. So its adoption in terms of like, um, getting people on the team to use it and what’s it going to take to get people more and more people on a team to use our product. And then it’s retention, which is like, you know, what we talked about earlier, which is like are people retain, do they keep coming back to it

Sean: 33:13 and what was the impetus to pursue that product? But what,

Hiten: 33:17 yeah, we did a ton of research. My Co founder Maria and I am by asking people what their number one challenges with uh, documents. And when we kept hearing over and over again, which was the [inaudible], which is the number one challenge, is finding their documents across, uh, all the different tools they use. And then we learned a lot about like all the different ways that they try to do that. Uh, such as like asking, asking a coworker or going into the going into like five tools cause they don’t remember which tool it’s in. They don’t remember where that document is. Most people don’t remember where that document is. Most people don’t even remember what the name of the document is. Some people don’t even remember what words were in the document. Right. But they do remember certain things, but like it’s like a whole process.

Sean: 33:57 Yeah. The only way that I get back to things at this point, uh, is through searches and like trigger words and remembering, oh, what was, you know, some unique word that I can search for that will get me back there. Yup. So I’m really, I just installed it and I’m thrilled to now be trying this thing out. Um, it reminds me back in the day there was a, Google had put out a product, it was like Google desktop search. It was like a localized, I thought of it like a helmet cam. Almost like everything I read like was that in a tweet or in a blog post or in a hacker news or whatever. And it kind of removed that thinking. You could just search Google desktop search and it would pull up whatever that item was regardless of the medium. Um, this is almost like a, a services based way where it’s, it’s, it’s not recording on your local computer. It sounds like you guys have integrated with each of those, you know, slack and Evernote and Google drive and all that stuff. Um, so this is really cool. It’s, it seems very useful.

Hiten: 34:48 Yeah. Even with your desktop, um, if you install the desktop app, you can find, uh, files on your computer in your browser. Oh, nice. Yeah. Alongside everything. [inaudible]

Sean: 35:00 very cool. Yeah. And that, that website for the people listening use fyi.com. Yep. It’s so, and what’s the revenue model of this?

Hiten: 35:10 Uh, yeah. When we get to teams, we’re going to charge a per, per, per team member that’s using it. And right now we do have an upgrade if you’re kind of an individual because all we have is an individual plans right now. So it’s just a free to paid. So a, you can use it for free. A and the limits are more oriented around how far back. We’ll look at your documents in the searches and in the feed and things like that. Awesome.

Sean: 35:34 Cool. Well, so what else, I mean, you, you, you have your hands in so many different things. What about the, the, can you talk about like the product tradeoffs thing that you did that series?

Hiten: 35:43 Yeah, so a friend of mine, Patrick, uh, Campbell who runs ProfitWell, uh, which used to be called price intelligently and ProfitWell is kind of their product and they rebranded it. Um, and I, uh, did a video show where what we do is we do that sort of, uh, survey methodology I mentioned that Sean Ellis created and we, we did it on a number of different products. And then we basically talk about the tradeoffs that a product team might make considering the data that we learned from the surveys. And so the surveys basically told us whether these products have product market fit, such as Netflix, Evernote, uh, and other products like that. We also included a net promoter score in there. So we got the net promoter score of some of these products and the site is product trade-offs dot com. The first video is on Netflix, the second video is on Evernote.

Hiten: 36:36 And then we’ve done a whole bunch of other ones that are coming out there. They’re released every two weeks and it’s just him and I talking through the results and that talking about tradeoffs, uh, and we wanted to do it because we think that product people tend to have a lot of opinions and we wanted to sort of give a, uh, show, provide a show for product people to kind of feel like the same kind of debates that they might have, um, internally inside the company around what, what should the company do next, what, what features should they add or what should they improve, what should they change and things like that.

Sean: 37:11 Yeah. And I am not a product guy by heart, but I think it’s fascinating. I watched the Netflix one and just hearing your guys’s analysis after you talked through the survey data and then what would you do if you were Netflix? You know, that’s just super interesting to me. Yeah. Like how do you, what do you do? Anyone can run surveys, but like the art here is in then what do you, how do you interpret that and what would you do with it? That’s right. Very cool. Awesome. Well, are you willing to talk about any of the mistakes you’ve made? Like whether it’s kissmetrics or crazy egg or any of the companies that you’ve run previously? Um, are you comfortable talking about

Hiten: 37:48 if you want to, yeah, I’m super comfortable. If you want to talk about any specific one I’m happy to. But yeah, it’s talking about my mistakes all the time. I’m happy to own those.

Sean: 37:56 Okay. Well, I mean I don’t actually have a specific one in mind, but like what comes to mind? W W where have things gone off the rails or where have you lost product market fit? Like what are the kind of the big potholes that you see in those company histories?

Hiten: 38:10 Yeah. What ends up happening is product market fit usually happens because you have a lot of intimate knowledge about customer needs. Uh, you’ve either, like I said, built something and then started learning from the market, the customers that use it or you started doing research in the beginning. So the number one reason I see people lose product market fit is they’re just not paying attention to the customer anymore. They’re not thinking about how, what’s the next problem we can solve for them? Because what ends up is someone else comes and builds basically better, faster, cheaper mousetrap, right? Compared to your mouse trap. And as a result of that, you can lose product market fit. So companies tend to lose product market fit when like retention rates go down, turn, turn rates go up and they just don’t notice it or they don’t know what to do about it because they haven’t basically been using that muscle that they use in the early stages to really discover what’s up with the customer.

Hiten: 39:01 And how did they create the best possible experience for the customer. Cause that’s really what it boils down to is like asking yourself how do we create the best thing in the market constantly, right? And not like just basically sitting on your ass so to speak and, and being like, oh, everything’s good. Like we have a product, we’ll just go do a bunch of marketing and we’ll do a bunch of growth work and that’ll be fine. And then you still have to go back and think about the customer, think about their needs and realize that once you solve one problem for them and you have product market fit, your job is to figure out what the next worthy problem is to solve for them. And if you think like that, you’ll be fine. If you don’t think like that, what will end up happening is, you know, the, the, the, and it’s happened to me before, like, uh, a number of times, I can give some examples, but like the, the rug gets pulled from underneath you and you fall down, right?

Hiten: 39:48 Like your product doesn’t have product market fit anymore. So at kissmetrics we invented a bunch of stuff that was right for the market. We invented a way to track data that ties the information to actual users once they sign up for your site. We invented a way to do a realtime debugging of the analytics data that you have. And we built a much simpler API, a for analytics and all the analytics tools that have come after us have had to implement those specific things because it was just right for the market. And so that’s one way to know that you got it right. Um, another thing that’s a little bit deeper than that is like after that we lost it cause we, we, we stopped paying attention to the thing that made us great. The thing that made us great is our ability to figure those things out. But I just talked about and the thing and then we lost it. We just didn’t continue to do that. And there’s a bunch of reasons why I wrote a whole blog post on it, but ultimately my fault.

Sean: 40:42 Okay, well we can link to that blog post for the people that want to get like an in depth on that. Um, yeah. I mean, kissmetrics was my first experience with event based analytics, even though maybe it existed somewhere like esoterically in Google analytics, like kissmetrics was the thing that helped me finally understand it and make sense of it and put it in use. So I mean Kudos for that. Um, thanks. Yeah, it was groundbreaking product and uh, yeah. So, uh, we’ll link to that in the show notes. What was the golden motion process? I saw that mentioned somewhere? I’d, I’ve never heard that term.

Hiten: 41:19 Yeah, it was just a process. We don’t use it anymore in my companies, but as a process we created to sort of an gave, I give as an example of a product development process where you literally figure out what you need to focus on and then you basically set up your team so that they can sort of focus on it. And there’s a bunch of steps to it. So to me it’s, it’s probably now been changed up, uh, so that we, we, we simply designed the team so that we can have certain folks focus on the problem, uh, and really identifying the problem and then come back and work with other folks on the team to determine what the solutions are or potential solutions are an experiments we can run to solve the problem. So it’s really about dividing up the efforts so that there’s a problem side of the house and a solution side of the house and we focus on finding the problems before we go try to solve, solve them or have too much depth around that. Cause if you’re trying to do both at the same time, you’re gonna fail. It’s not the same mindset like you because basically what happens is then you’re trying to get creative as you hear the problems and you’re trying to solve them, which I think is just really difficult to accomplish. Yeah.

Sean: 42:34 Uh, to say nothing of, if you bring some notion of a solution into that, you just taint your vision of the problem from there on, it’s impossible to see it.

Hiten: 42:43 You know, uh, currently, clearly at that point,

Sean: 42:50 can you talk about, okay, so crazy egg is something that we actually do still use and that’s an amazing product that’s still relevant. And, uh, again, groundbreaking. I don’t think heat maps on the web existed at the point where you guys put that out. Um, any lessons there from, from building that one? I mean, I’m sure you have a ton, but what comes to mind in terms of any missteps or any, any things that you learned,

Hiten: 43:12 uh, after the fact? Yeah, I would say that like we really nailed finding like nailed creating the right solution for the market. Um, and that the biggest lesson is like, it’s this very like, deliberate process of figuring out in that case like what are the problems that people have in the market and how can you solve them better than anyone else? And you can’t solve those problems better than anyone else without understanding what they are. And so I think one of the biggest lessons about that is, is basically, um, we looked at Google analytics and really went deep to figure out what was, what were people dissatisfied about. One of the biggest things we learned is there’s a bunch of inaccurate tracking when it comes to Google analytics. Being able to track every click on a page. And this was back in like 2005, 2006 and once we realized that we’re like, oh, this is going to be great.

Hiten: 44:14 Like we’re, we’re gonna basically be able to take that learning and build something better. Cause at this point we were, the technology existed where you could, uh, track every click on a page accurately in Google analytics was not doing another thing about Google analytics that enabled us to create a heat map, which showed you visually where people are clicking on the page. Our tagline used to be, see where people click, uh, on your website. Uh, might bring that back cause it still makes sense. Um, and uh, we’d show you the heat map, but like it was the idea that in all the other analytics tools, there’s a lot of graphs in conversion rates and numbers. And in our tool at the time it was very focused on that heat map first and foremost upfront. And that was the big dramatic shift that we made in the market. And we knew it was the right one because these were the problems people had. They couldn’t understand all the, all the data in Google analytics probably still cam. Yeah.

Sean: 45:11 And just that subtle shift and making it visual and overlaying it. And now I can see exactly where people are clicking and just what an incredible thing to introduce so that you know, it did not exist. And I know Google has since followed suit. It seems like they have now have like an overlay thing where you can, you can see the stats that way overlaid in the browser,

Hiten: 45:30 but very cool. Nope.

Sean: 45:34 So you, here’s just a question. When you’re constantly iterating and going back to your customers and trying to make sure that you do still have product market fit. And see where things are going and what needs to be built.

Hiten: 45:46 Yeah.

Sean: 45:46 How do you avoid falling into the trap of like, what if you just happened to get like let’s say grocery stores as your initial clients? I don’t know why I’m thinking of that, but if suddenly for some reason you, you have a disproportionate number of grocery store owners using crazy egg and now you’re listening to them to guide product development.

Hiten: 46:04 Okay.

Sean: 46:04 That’s not going to be representative of the total market that’s out there for that product. So how do you avoid having, you know, advice from that, that narrow segment inform what you guys do in that scenario?

Hiten: 46:16 Yeah, I think the simple things you make sure you know who’s actually, uh, who you’re talking to and are they representative of the customer base you want, what’s it? Yeah. It’s just consciousness about the WHO. A lot of companies run around not knowing who their customer actually is. Uh, early stage. You might not even think of it like that. Uh, you don’t know who your customer is. You don’t know, um, exactly who it should be. So then you get a bunch of customers, but then you need to figure out who, who do we have, who do we like, uh, what do we do with, um, what do we, what do we do with those people, uh, that are giving us feedback? Uh, do we, do we go get different people because they’re not the right people that we should have for our product? Uh, are there small pockets, uh, of people and types of people that are actually really highly engaged, uh, that we want more of? So it is always in all this research, all this work you do on product, understanding who you’re actually talking to and what they’re saying. So a lot of times people just focused on what my customers are saying. I think who is saying what is really important.

Sean: 47:24 So for FYI, like who are you guys? You, you, you clearly have some idea of you want for that platform. Like who is that?

Hiten: 47:33 For us, it’s companies, it’s teams. That’s why we’re, that’s, that’s the only thing that the company’s focused on right now, which is building a product that teams love. And we’re building those features right now. They’re not ready yet. Got It.

Sean: 47:47 Cool. Um, all right, well I guess, Eh, we’ll, we’ll start to wind down here. I got two more questions here, but generosity and time management, like you are everywhere. I don’t know how you have the time, like if you just making content, I would still say, how does this guy have the time in the day to produce such amount, amazing content, but you’re also running a company at the same time. Like how, I guess, how are you so prolific and able to still to run a company?

Hiten: 48:16 Yeah. Uh, I think it’s, it’s more about energy nap time. So I do the things I have energy for. I don’t really, um, worry about time like other people do. And because if you have energy for something, my theory is you’re going to make the time to make it happen or do it. So that can be as simple as do I have energy to do this? PODCASTS, you know? Um, and it’s almost like, I don’t believe it’s about like, do I have energy to do this podcast in the future? It’s more like, you know, does this make sense? Do I want to talk to Sean for like an hour or however long it ends up being, um, and talk about things, right? And, uh, the answer’s yes. So then I do it. And if the answer’s no, I don’t do it. So for the longest time, actually I wouldn’t get on a lot of podcasts, even though I was asked.

Hiten: 49:02 Um, I would either ignore the emails or politely say no, you know, maybe in a month or two these days I say yes because I have energy for that, you know, and the reason I have energy for that is like, I’m, I’m seeing the value other people can get. Um, and I, uh, enjoy it and I want to spread the word about some of the things that we talked about today. And there’s a bunch of stuff I’m working on that I think more people can get value from. So by going on these podcasts and talking to people like you, um, I get to share that and that’s something I want to do right now and I have energy for it. I might decide I don’t in six months cause I’m doing something else that’s taking up energy that would, that this kind of a, that replaces this. Right. So like it, it’s, it’s a, it’s an ebb and flow to me and, and, and not necessarily time management. It’s more about like where do I want to put my efforts? Where do I want to put my energy? And just going and doing that instead of making it more complicated than that. Awesome.

Sean: 49:59 Well, I’m glad I caught you on a, on a, uh, or on a flow state because, and this is an interview I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so I’m really stoked. Awesome, man. So there’s just a last little, uh, rapid fire round of questions that I ask all my guests. What is one, what’s one book that has profoundly affected you?

Hiten: 50:19 Yeah, there’s a book that recently that I’ve read twice now, which is called the courage to be disliked. And I w I hope more people read it. Uh, I’m a person that wants to be liked and uh, it talks about this, uh, you know, we, we’ve heard of Carl Young, we’ve heard of a Freud of course. Uh, this is a sort of another person in that same category, uh, called Alfred Adler. And the whole book is a conversation between sort of a, an older gentleman who, um, basically learned, uh, Adler’s philosophies and studied them talking to sort of a, a young, young man about the theory because a young man is asking a lot of questions and looking to poke holes in it. Uh, which is great. And so it’s like a whole like conversation and discussion. One of the things that really stood out to me in it is this concept of tasks and really thinking through when you try to help other people.

Hiten: 51:22 Is it your task that you’re doing for them or I’m sorry, is it your task that you’re doing that benefits you? Are you doing a task for them that benefits them? Because if you’re doing a task for them that benefits them, you probably shouldn’t be doing. Yeah. And uh, we all tend to have our own philosophies, our own thinking, whether we’re conscious of them or not. My thinking is like generally in the past, especially with the Zig Ziglar quote, I would do tasks that weren’t mine to do, I would do to ask for other people. So these days, even when I’m giving advice to people or advising a company or even investing in a company and they asked me for things, I’m really encouraging them more than I’m giving them advice. Yeah. And that’s a whole different mindset for me because when I would give advice, there’s a lot of tasks, like some certain types of critical thinking and other things that I might just end up doing for them instead of them doing it for themselves. And you know how it is like if people come to conclusions themselves or do things for themselves, they tend to be more fulfilled and they tend to be happier.

Sean: 52:25 Yeah, absolutely. Well and they also embed that learning a lot better. You know, if you just, it’s there, it’s not likely. Yep. Very cool. Check that out. I’ve not heard that book so I’m stoked to check that out. What about, what’s one person that you would love to have dinner with?

Hiten: 52:43 that’s a good question. Uh, I’m going to give you an answer that you probably didn’t expect. Um, I’d love to have dinner with myself. Okay. And what I mean by that is I have an opportunity to have dinner with whoever. Um, generally speaking, if I want to, uh, I’m sure I can get dinner with folks that other people might not be able to. Uh, just by asking cause I’m willing to ask probably. Um, and, and, and, and I think like the, the thing I’m missing out on is more like being able to have dinner with myself and not have to think about anybody else. And I, cause I tend to be the type of person that thinks about other people more than I think about myself. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great answer.

Sean: 53:31 Yeah. That’s the first time anyone’s given that answer, but that’s a great answer. What a wonderful, what about, what’s one tool or hack that you use frequently to save time or money or headaches?

Hiten: 53:43 I listen to audible, uh, at two x speed. I listened to youtube videos at two x speed. I will even watch TV shows and movies and I’m doing that at two x speed, which is not what most people do. And it’s not to save time or anything like that. I just, it’s just worked for me that way I don’t have an explanation. They probably don’t even have a real good reason. I do get through more stuff. I do get the comprehension I want, so that’s not out of not being able to comprehend it or anything like that or, or whatever. I just enjoy like that. So that’s what I do. And some people would say it’s so, it could be more productive or get more in. Sure. But to me, I can listen to it and still get the comprehension I want at that level on it. And that lets me get through.

Sean: 54:28 That’s interesting. Is that consistent? I read a book called breakthrough rapid reading by Peter comp. Uh, and it was talking about how our brains are actually under-stimulated. If you ever find yourself reading a book and you can keep going back and saying what, what was that last paragraph about? And you reread it and reread it. It’s because actually when we read like the normal way where you’re sub vocalizing and you’re reading at the speed that you can talk, your brain is just ultimately under-stimulated and it’s, it’s, it can do a lot more. And so it doesn’t surprise me. Like, yes, you can get through more of it, but I bet you your retention is actually even greater than had you listened to it at normal speed because now your brain is engaged and stimulated to the point where it’s taking it in as fast as it wants it. So that’s pretty cool. Cool. Interesting. What is one piece of music or musical artists that speaks to you to, sorry, that speaks to you right now.

Hiten: 55:21 Interesting. I’ve been listening to outkast. Cool. More again, you guys. Yeah.

Sean: 55:28 What? Okay. Here’s a Peter Teal question. What important truth. Do Very few people agree with you on?

Hiten: 55:38 Yeah. Um, do they disagree with me on or do people agree with you on? So I, I agree with. Okay. So yeah, so most people disagree. Um, yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah. Okay. I have one, it’s related to some of the stuff we talked about, but uh, and I’m probably going to talk more about this soon. So it’s great to kind of put it out there. Um, competitors are more important than ever to actually pay attention to them. I think that’s something that most people would disagree with me on.

Sean: 56:09 Why? Why do you feel that way?

Hiten: 56:13 Cause if you don’t look at your competitors, you don’t actually have, you don’t actually have a full understanding of your customers. Got It.

Sean: 56:21 Okay. All right. Last question about what is one piece of advice? If you had a time machine to go back to your former 20 year old Heaton itself and give yourself any bit of advice, what would you say?

Hiten: 56:35 Um, I think, uh, yeah. Oh God, you’re gonna love this one. Um, it was all a dream. Just remember that life. That’s just all a dream. Even like, and I like to talk about this so you know, I don’t think you’ve heard this one yet, but like I, I’ve been talking about a little bit more, but it’s this idea that um, even the experience we just had, you have your perspective on it. I have mine, although we have the same experience in theory, so must have been a dream. Your dream, my dream didn’t exist. It’s gone. It’s done. We’re not gonna go back there. Right. It is recorded. So there’s a recording, but everyone’s perception of, even when they listened to it is different. So that’s where I’ll just dreaming there is no real like foundation of commonality, but we just fake it by trying to understand each other and things like that. And I think like someone said this to me recently and they said that understanding each other is not as important as caring for each other. In fact, under understanding each other is unimportant. We don’t need to understand each other. We just need to care enough for each other. The best you can ask for from another human being as caring, not understanding. And I think a lot of us walk around wanting to be understood.

Sean: 57:47 I think that’s a, an amazing place to end. And I would just say this, even like your, it would be enough if you just dispensed useful information to startup founders, which you do, but I think you have just done it in spades and done it in a way like your Twitter, you’re always weaving in quotes like this and the stuff about the caring and going beyond and actually humanizing everything that we do in startups. And so I would just say, you know, like on behalf of all the startup founders out there, man, thank you so much for the contributions and just for being who you are.

Hiten: 58:23 That means a lot to me. Thank you for recognizing that and saying it. I think the way you said it is really beautiful, which is humanizing things and I definitely enjoy that part, so I appreciate that.

Sean: 58:32 Well, that’s fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day. Again, thank you so much for being on the show. And, uh, yeah. Cheers man.

Hiten: 58:40 You too.

Link(s) Mentioned

• https://usefyi.com/remote-work-report/
• http://theleanstartup.com/
• https://www.slideshare.net/hiten1/measuring-understanding-productmarket-fit-qualitatively/3-Sean_Ellis_productmarket_fit_surveysurveyio
• https://producttradeoffs.com
• https://www.profitwell.com/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter
• https://usefyi.com/
• https://www.kissmetricshq.com/
• https://producthabits.com/my-billion-dollar-mistake/
• https://www.crazyegg.com/

Books

• https://amzn.to/34EnIZ7

Music

• https://open.spotify.com/artist/1G9G7WwrXka3Z1r7aIDjI7?si=K1HFiSRZRb-piqX1wdGQFQ