Product Market Fit​

Product market fit refers to whether your product is good enough; if it is, you can start investing more in paid customer acquisition channels. User retention may be the best measure, after all, actions speak louder than words.

What you need to clarify is: "Is the product effective? Is word-of-mouth and retention growing on its own?" Usually, the answer is no. So make sure you try enough times—focus on the solution rather than the problem or the mission. The solution is the reason people use your product.

Product Channel Fit​

Do you have repeatable and scalable channels? The two most common repeatable and scalable methods for consumers are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and referrals.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Generate unique user-generated content
  • SEO takes time to set up; you won't see benefits right away. It's more like "If this company wants to grow in 5 years, SEO must be done well." Therefore, you shouldn't spend 100% of your time on it. More like 10% of your time setting up the basics ("Set it and forget it").
• Referrals: Provide an incentive mechanism that encourages people to invite their friends for rewards
  • Referrals can start working from day one.

Important Metrics​

In the early stages, the quality of data is more important than quantity (e.g., retention rate). A 50% or 10% long-term retention rate is more important than user growth rate. In some cases, Daily Active Users (DAU) are important. The metric is not "Can this acquire users?" but rather "Can this retain users or convert them to paying customers?" Many companies over-focus on monthly growth rather than whether the product has genuinely improved. At the beginning, data is scarce, and you might convince yourself that it is effective. But if retention is low, growth won't be sustainable.

Control Analysis​

Segment users into control groups so you can analyze how user behavior changes over time and with product changes. You can determine if there is natural churn and whether your changes have unlocked new behaviors.

Lifetime Value (LTV) / Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback Period​

Using just a few months of data to calculate LTV for future predictions is not very instructive. What people want to know is, "How will this product grow over time?" So you should focus on what it will look like as it scales.

Payback Period (PBP) can sometimes be better than LTV/CAC. It means if I spend $1, how long until I can recoup not just revenue but also profit. The importance of the payback period is that unless you have a quick return on investment, it's hard to build rapid growth on paid channels.

What you really need to ask yourself is, "Can I reinvest this money into more growth?" If it takes one or two years to get that money back, then you need to rely on another source of funding to support your growth.

Why Should We Avoid Spending on Customer Acquisition Initially?​

If possible, try to avoid spending on customer acquisition at the beginning. Companies with a long-term mindset and large companies do not spend money to buy customers. Avoiding it will force you to find ways for viral growth. Unless you can prove that spending $1 can yield$5, and you don't have a high churn rate, then you can consider using paid acquisition.

Running a business can be like playing an infinite game in which there is no final score to determine the ultimate winner. So the main goal for each participant is to stay in the game as long as possible. Nowadays, too many people analyze businesses based on their stock prices. It seems that they forget one point: high profits at one time may collapse to zero overnight if the business cannot sustain.

To create businesses that last for generations, we should get back to long-term thinking and focus on making products people want instead of striving for short-term revenue. Simon Sinek, the author of The Infinite Game, introduces how to equip your business with the infinite mindset.

Start with a Just Cause​

As Adam Smith put in the book The Wealth of Nations, the interests of consumers should come before the interests of the company. However, in 1970, Milton Friedman published an article writing that the primary responsibility of any free-market enterprise is to make money for shareholders, which signals a shift from being consumer-centric to being shareholder-centric.

A Just Cause is an inspirational goal that encourages your employees to fight for. If companies strive for longevity in the Infinite Game, their goals need to be consumer-centric. If they do not follow this principle, take the GPS device company Garmin, for example. It claimed to be “the global leader in every market we serve” and mentions nothing about their customers in the vision. Then no wonder why it is only worth one-third of its value in 2007.

Build trusting teams​

A company culture of distrust is fatal to business operations. If employees do not trust the company, poor performance, or even unethical behaviors may take place. And this is due to the simple reason that employees don’t know whether to speak up honestly when something unpleasant happens.

Such is the case of Ford Motor Company before the year 2006. The CEO at that time had a habit of blaming and even firing those who brought bad news to him. And then, gradually, employees only reported good news on meetings. The culture of distrust was turned around only after Alan Mulally became the new CEO, who took actions to encourage everyone to bring up bad news.

Be flexible and learn from worthy rivals​

Whether in the sports field or the business world, a good opponent forces you to improve yourself and learn new techniques. When Allan Mulally became the CEO of Ford Motor Company, Ford had lost 25 percent market share over the past 15 years. Instead of adopting promotion strategies, Allan turned to study rivals like Toyota and Lexus, trying to figure out why consumers preferred those cars over Ford.

It is the same case with Steve Jobs. He changed Apple’s plans instantly when seeing Xerox working on the GUI technology and decided to implement this new technology on Apple’s new computers. Now you can see how successful that move is. And this cannot happen if Jobs cannot embrace new technologies with his flexibility and fast execution.

Running a business can be an infinite game, with no final score to determine who wins or loses. The ultimate goal of a company is to stay in this game for as long as possible. Too many people today are accustomed to using stock prices to judge a company's performance, but they overlook one crucial point: if the business is not sustainable, a temporary stock price can vanish overnight. To create a sustainable enterprise, we need to refocus on how to innovate and create products that people need, rather than just generating more wealth for shareholders. Simon Sinek, in The Infinite Game, proposes that companies should establish a just mission, build teams based on mutual trust, embrace change, and learn from worthy competitors to gain an advantage in the game.

Establish Long-Term Goals​

Adam Smith advocated in The Wealth of Nations that businesses should prioritize consumer interests. However, by 1970, Milton Friedman argued that a company's primary responsibility is to generate profits for its shareholders. This marked a shift in business goals from being consumer-centric to focusing on short-term profits and growth.

A lofty goal should be inspiring and motivate people to strive towards it. If businesses want to operate for the long term, their goals should revolve around consumer needs rather than merely pursuing profit. GPS device manufacturer Garmin once claimed its goal was to be the leader in every market it participated in, without mentioning customers at all. It’s no surprise that its current market value is only one-third of what it was in 2007.

Build Teams Based on Mutual Trust​

A culture of distrust within a company can be fatal to its operations. If employees do not trust the company, their performance will decline, and they may resort to unethical business practices. The root cause of this often lies in employees not knowing whether they should be honest when faced with uncertain situations.

This was precisely the case at Ford Motor Company before 2006. The then-CEO had a habit of reprimanding or even firing those who brought him bad news. Naturally, employees would only share good news in meetings. It wasn’t until Alan Mulally took over and encouraged everyone to report bad news that the culture of distrust began to change.

Embrace Change and Learn from Worthy Competitors​

Whether in sports or business, a good competitor can push you to improve your skills and learn new ones. Learning from competitors can help a business go further. When Alan Mulally first became CEO of Ford, the company had lost 25% of its market share over the past fifteen years. However, Mulally did not rush to launch promotions or cut costs; instead, he began studying competitors, including Toyota and Lexus, to understand why consumers preferred those vehicles.

Similarly, when Steve Jobs discovered the GUI technology being developed by Xerox, he immediately changed Apple’s original plans and decided to implement this technology in the new computers. Today, the widespread use of GUI validates Jobs' successful decision. If Jobs had not embraced new technology with the right mindset and execution, these transformations would not have occurred.

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?​

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software allows you to manage sales leads, convert them into customers, and track data and sales performance. To establish a CRM for your startup, you first need to determine the following:

• The process your customers go through from sales leads to active customers
• How to differentiate among potential customers
• The CRM software you will use

The following article assumes that your startup has a product to sell and sufficient customer activity to track and manage. If you do not yet have a product or customers, please bookmark this article for future reference when you are ready to use CRM software.

Identify Decision Points in Customer Conversion​

Before purchasing any CRM software, you must first create a framework for your customer conversion process. This framework should outline the decision points in the customer lifecycle, from initial contact to lead to deal to active customer, as well as all the smaller decision points in between. To understand how your customers convert, you need to talk to existing customers and identify the different decision points they encountered in deciding to use your product. At this stage, it's best to do this with pen and paper, although software like TechValidate may be helpful.

Customer Conversion Framework​

Most frameworks will include the following elements: Leads, Prospects, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), and Opportunities.

Leads​

Leads are known potential customers with whom you may or may not have established a relationship. The collection of leads is sometimes referred to as an outbound database or a prospecting database, typically stored in a CRM or integrated with one.

Prospects​

Prospects are another commonly used term, although in some sales funnels, prospects are defined as being one step closer to becoming customers. When companies distinguish between leads and prospects, they often note that prospects have communicated with sales representatives or responded to them (for example, they may have replied to an inquiry call and scheduled a follow-up conversation).

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)​

While leads may not have interacted with your company or product, "Marketing Qualified Leads" refer to leads that have taken certain actions indicating interest in your product. You need to define this behavior; some common examples include long or frequent website visits, filling out online information forms, attending events, downloading or requesting whitepapers, or clicking on ads. Not everyone you engage with is a Marketing Qualified Lead; you need to define what these parameters are based on your product. For example, if you only offer products in the U.S., but someone with an international IP address downloads your whitepaper, this action indicates intent but does not meet the qualification criteria.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)​

Sales Qualified Leads are those leads that show a high intent to purchase. They express their willingness to buy your product by requesting live demonstrations, quotes, or conversations with sales representatives.

Opportunities​

Once purchase qualification and intent have been confirmed in the sales process, Sales Qualified Leads become "Opportunities." This is the final stage before becoming an active customer.

Build Your Funnel​

Not every sales cycle or product will follow this exact formula and funnel. While each process has its unique steps, most software, hardware, and services will follow a similar path. When building your CRM, it is your responsibility to map out these decision points and potential outcomes—primarily focusing on what causes a lead not to continue in the process at each step.

Differentiate Among Customers​

A company rarely has a single type of customer. B2C companies target customers based on age, wealth, geography, technological maturity, mobile operating systems, online activities, and countless other attributes. Similarly, B2B companies target customers across size, tenure, geography, industry, technology maturity, online activities, and legal entity types, among others.

Therefore, treating every customer equally in the sales/CRM process is often a mistake. If your product supports self-registration, you may find that some customers prefer to register themselves, while others want support or sales assistance. This is a common form of segmentation among customers. Another common differentiation point is that some customers are transitioning from similar products, while others have never used any competitor's services.

Regardless of the specifics, taking the time to identify relevant differences among your potential customer base before establishing a CRM is crucial to your sales approach.

Choosing CRM Software​

There are many excellent SaaS options available today, particularly for startups. A good approach is to look at the software you are already using or software that someone on your team has used before.

Zendesk and Hubspot​

Typically, startups often use Zendesk for customer service or Hubspot for marketing categorization and campaign management. If your startup falls into this category, both software suites include CRM (Zendesk acquired Base CRM in September 2018). You might consider using these existing software solutions for your CRM as they are convenient and cost-effective. Using them may be free or require only a small monthly user fee.

Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Copper​

If no one on your team has a CRM preference, or if you have not used an embedded CRM software platform, or if you want to purchase a standalone CRM from existing software, popular options include Pipedrive, Salesforce Essentials, and Copper (formerly Prosperworks).

All three are good choices. Some users prefer the "native" integration between Copper and G-Suite (they share similar design principles, such as allowing you to use Copper without leaving Gmail), while others appreciate Pipedrive's simplicity and cost-effectiveness. It is worth noting that a common complaint about Pipedrive is that it may feel more suited for small to medium-sized businesses rather than startups, and its email integration only allows you to associate one email address with a deal. Complaints about Copper include its lack of customization in reporting and its high cost.

Finally, if you are looking for a lightweight, open-source, personal CRM that protects your privacy, I recommend Guanxi.io. Why is there a personal CRM like this? This article explains it.

Management consulting firm ghSMART studied 17,000 senior executives over 10 years and identified three types of "career launchpads" that help "accelerators" become CEOs faster:

1. Retreat to Advance. The most common approach is to move to a smaller department or organization, or to start your own business, taking on greater responsibilities, even building a business from scratch to maturity. Your position will rise along with the growth of the business.
2. Leap Forward. More than one-third of individuals said "yes" to opportunities that far exceeded their own expectations and abilities. Of course, becoming a CEO at a young age means they can succeed without relevant work experience.
3. Take on a Hot Potato. This may seem counterintuitive, but solving problems that others cannot is the most direct way to prove your value. This hot potato could be an underperforming business unit, a failed product, bankruptcy, etc. A chaotic situation means challenges and opportunities to get things right. Over 30% of accelerators rose to positions this way.

The path to becoming a CEO varies, and effectively utilizing these three career launchpads is especially important for professionals facing obstacles, such as women. Generally speaking, women take 30% longer than men to become CEOs.

How to define, design, and sell a product that people like to use? How to manage self and a team to deliver results effectively? Here are the answers from industry leaders and renowned professors.

Join us on Telegram or WeChat(id: onetptp) to discuss and upgrade your PM skills.

• Product Management
  • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products? - Habits make you do things like no brainers. Businesses that know how to cultivate customer habits have a significant competitive advantage over others. The Hook Model teaches us how to form a user habit in four steps: trigger, action, variable reward and investment.
  • Telemetry Product Management Framework - A key role of product management is to make sure product development efforts are focused. The telemetry spreadsheet helps you visualize the roadmap, balance resource allocation, and hence keeps the project on track.
  • The Hierarchy of Engagement - To maximize the chances of building an enduring non-transactional customer company, we should build enduring engagement in three levels - growing engaged users, retaining users, and self-perpetuating.
  • Elements of Value - When customers evaluate a product or a service, they weigh the perceived value against the asking price. Products and services deliver fundamental elements of value that address four kinds of needs: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact.
  • MMRs, neutralizers, differentiators - There are three types of product features: MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. Customers often provide feedback on MMRs and neutralizers. The product management team must take responsibility for reinforcing the startup’s differentiator.
  • The 9x Effect - Companies often overweight their new product by a factor of 3 while consumers overweight the old product’s benefits by a factor of 3. So you have to be 9x better than the existing alternatives to win their market, which is called The 9x Effect.
  • 4 Guidelines for Website User Experience - To deliver a better website user experience, we concluded four guidelines from the book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: start with simple navigation; make an impressive home page; use visual hierarchies to present information; improve mobile loading speed.
  • Change Aversion - People hate new changes in a product they are already familiar with. To avoid change aversion, you can let users understand in advance and afterward, allow them to switch, ask them to give feedback, and finally remember to follow-through.
• Strategy and Decision Making
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy 1 - A good strategy is often surprising but reasonable. A bad strategy is a formalism. Here are four hallmarks to detect bad strategies: fluff; failure to face the challenge; mistaking goals for strategy; bad strategic objectives.
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy 2 - Bad strategies are easier to be made in terms of three facts: it’s painful to make a choice; people like to follow templates without thinking; people tend to misbelieve that a positive attitude and a strong desire can earn them everything they want.
  • The Second Curve - When you know where you should go, it is too late to go there; if you always keep your original path, you will miss the road to the future.
  • Case Study: Amazon acquiring Whole Foods - Driven by the goal to take a cut of all economic activity, Amazon decides to develop grocery services. However, its grocery business has no first-and-best customer due to cost disadvantage. By acquiring Whole Foods, Amazon is buying more than a retailer - it’s buying a customer.
• Marketing
  • What is a Market? - If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way they could reference each other, they are not part of the same market.
  • Diffusion of innovation - How does your product gain popularity? Answers from the model, the chasm, and the math.
  • TAL and the Chasm
  • Why take niche-and-next approach? - If the goal is to take over the mainstream market, why should we focus on the niche market in the beginning? First, You have to satisfy your customers so that they can be reference-able to others. Second, pragmatists favor market leaders. So be a big fish in a small pond.
  • Growth Phase 1: PMF - According to Ryan Holiday, to begin with PMF, we need to start with MVP and evolve with feedback, use data and information to back PMF, understand the needs of customers as early as possible and develop answers with the Socrates method.
  • Growth Phase 2: growth hack - How to find your growth hack? Ryan Holiday has some advice for you. Target a few hundred or a thousand key people, not millions. Do not target all people - target the right people. Focus on new user sign-ups instead of awareness. Use growth techniques.
  • Growth Team - A growth team is a team with the responsibility to measure and improve the flow of users. There are three mandatory skills of a growth leader: building growth models, developing experimentation models and creating customer acquisition channels.
  • AARRR Model - AARRR is a startup metrics developed by Dave McClure: Acquisition - how do users find you? Activation - do users have a great first experience? Retention - do users come back? Referral - do users tell others? Revenue - how do you make money?
  • Buyer Persona - To better sell products, you need to know your customers better. A generic buyer profile doesn’t help in knowing his buying decision. The most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have weighed their options but finally made the decision you expect.
  • CAC / LTV / PBP - Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost to convert a customer to buy a product/service. Lifetime Value is the estimated net profit we can make from a customer. Payback Period refers to the period of time required to recoup the funds expended in an investment.
  • Lean Analytics: Simplified - Data and metrics play a vital role in business. The book Lean Analytics suggests some metrics for start-up founders to assess their success. By choosing the metrics more effectively, the entrepreneur can navigate through the unknown more effectively.
  • Lean Analytics: Slides
  • Mobile Analytics Metrics
  • How to run a tech community? - Why do people need the tech community? What is the value proposition of it? What are the interesting examples we can learn from? Why does it align with your blockchain company?
  • SaaS Sales Performance Metrics - David Schneider, ServiceNow's President of Customer Ops, shares his sales performance metrics for SaaS companies that are aiming for hyper-scale.
  • Persuasive Copywriting - Copywriting is the simplest and most direct way of impressing your customers. Persuasive copywriting = three means of persuasion + copywriting. Three means of persuasion are emotion, logic, and credibility.
  • 6 Elements to Create Sticky Ideas - Why some stories managed to spread quickly, live long and prosper? In Made to Stick, Heath brothers summarize six elements to create sticky ideas -- Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story, SUCCES for short.
• People Management
  • Tips for First-time Managers - Julie Zhuo, the vice president of product design at Facebook, based on her own experiences as a first-time manager, gives some useful advice on how to become a good manager in her book The Making of a Manager.
  • Managerial Leverage - Managerial leverages can maximize the output of an organization. Those leverages are information gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging and being a role model.
  • Task-Relevant Maturity - A manager’s most important responsibility is to elicit top performance from his subordinates. Unfortunately, one management style does not fit all. A fundamental variable to find the best management style is task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates.
  • Managers and Bozos - Steve Jobs coined the phrase “bozo management”. Bozos referred to the professional managers who know how to manage but don’t know how to DO anything. It turns out the best managers are great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manger but decide to be one.
  • Responsibilities with RACI and DACI - When the organization grows too big, it becomes unclear that who should do what and who should decide what to do. RACI and DACI are here to clarify those responsibilities.
  • 3 Skills to Boost Group Performance - It is a common misbelief that the performance of a group hinges on the average capacity of its members. The truth is, the interaction and communication among group members are much more impactful. From the book The Culture Code, we conclude three skills to improve group performance: creating a safe working environment, showing your vulnerabilities, establishing a common purpose.
  • Making progress 30km/day - The Amundsen team successfully reached the South Pole first and won the competition with the Scott team. The success of the Amundsen team lies in their abundant resources and making progress 30km per day no matter what the weather is.
  • Good to Great - Leading a company to leap from good to great is like pushing a giant flywheel to breakthrough. Disciplined people, disciplined thought and disciplined action are indispensable.
  • Bikeshedding - Bikeshedding refers to the fact that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. To overcome the bikeshedding, we should have a clear agenda of the meeting and not mix complex topics with easy ones.
  • Ownership - The authors of the book Extreme Ownership were once task unit leaders of US Navy SEAL in Iraq. They draw on their experiences in the battlefields and conclude five rules for successfully leading a Navy SEAL team, providing useful references for any organization.
  • Building momentum for startup - The acceleration of rockets takes a propeller, and the acceleration of startups take the similar. There are two propellers: 1. Listen to the customer. 2. fast execution. How to achieve these two? Here is the answer from Suhail Doshi.
• UX Research
  • How Dropbox scale its design research - Dropbox's design research team grew from 4 members to 30+ today. How do they scale the efforts healthily, even when the headcount for the team is limited? More researches usually mean more harm if they are done improperly.
• Communication
  • Nonviolent Communication - Judgments and violence are tragic expressions of unmet needs. Nonviolent communication can improve communication quality by valuing everyone’s needs. It is NOT about being nice or making others do what we want.
  • Tailoring the arguments for persuading the decision maker - To improve the chances of success in persuading decision-makers, the way of message delivering should be considered carefully. There are five decision-making categories and they should be treated with different strategies.
  • Bullshit Detector - North Americans bullshit the most. Develop your mental device to detect deception, dishonesty, corruption, fraud, insincerity, hypocrisy and falsity.
  • Small Talking - Initiating a conversation with strangers is the biggest social fear. Actually, people often appreciate it when you make an effort to speak with them. Here we provide some ideas on how to start a small talk, what we should talk about and how to end it in a courteous way.
  • Exactly What to Say: Keywords for Impacts - There are several keywords and templates of sentences that can help you influence people. For example, a sentence like “I’m not sure it’s for you, but” is a non-intrusive recommendation. Saying “are you open-minded to do something” can encourage people to do something.
• Managing Self
  • Time Management: Principles - It is very inspiring to learn time management from system admins (SAs) because we share the same challenges such as endless interruptions, simultaneous projects, and rush requests. SAs’ principles of time management may solve your problem of time management.
  • Time Management: Focus - Focus is the best friend of productivity. A fundamental work we can do to stay focused is to de-clutter our brain. Always be aware of stress and sleep level. Remember an un-distracting environment is necessary. Deal with interruptions effectively.
  • Time Management: Routines - Routines are useful tools in time management since they enable us to think once and do many. A routine can be anything in real life that has certain patterns. Try to develop your own routines!
  • Time Management: Cycle System - The key to perfect follow-through is the cycle system. It is called the cycle because it repeats every day and the output of one day is the input to the next. Three tools are used in the process - a to-do list, a calendar and a list of long-term goals.
  • Time Management: Cycle System in Action - The cycle system enables people to follow through. It suggests every day should start with your to-do list, hours needed and plans. The secrets also lie in writing down goals and scheduling things with the calendar, instead of your brain.
  • Work-life balance - Some job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. We should be careful with time frame and approach balance in a balanced way.
  • How to Get Rich? - How to get rich without getting lucky? Naval Ravikant summarized a few tips for you. Seek wealth instead of money or status. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. Ignore people playing status games. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity.
  • Taking truly restful breaks - People will burn out when having too much pressure. A truly restful break can help them to recover willpower and the power of attention. To take truly restful breaks, you need to fully switch off, take short breaks early and often and get out of the office.
  • Loving long with healthy diets - American Journal of Medicine says, disease, not age, is the most significant cause of death among over-100-year-old patients. And diets tend to the primary reason for disease. People often underestimate how food affects their physical and mental health.
  • Productivity Tips from Professionals - MIT surveyed nearly 20,000 professionals from around the world - 50% from North America, 21% from Europe, 19% from Asia, and the rest from Australia, South America, and Africa. Takeaways are ...
• Business Model
  • Stages of Company Building - Initial Product > PMF > GTM Scale & Consistency > Org Building > Enduring Public Company
  • Economic Moat - An economic moat is the ability to maintain advantages over its competitors. It can provide protection for business’ long-term profits and market share. Technology is not an economic moat as it will always be duplicated.
  • Why Startups Have to Innovate? - Why startups have to innovate? Anna Karenina principle answers this question. Each successful company earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem whereas all failed are the same. If a startup does not innovate but copy from the market leader, people will not buy it.
  • Intangible Economy - The intangible economy is rising. It has three characteristics: Intangible assets can expand rapidly. Intangible assets are high-risk and irrecoverable investments. Intangible assets are easy to be duplicated.
  • Infinite Game - Business can operate like an Infinite Game and the ultimate goal of participants is to stay in the game as long as possible. In order to achieve that, businesses should get back to long-term thinking. In the book The Infinite Game, the author suggests companies need to have a Just Cause, build trusting teams, be flexible to changes, and learn from worthy rivals so as to gain advantages in the game.
• Leadership
  • Definition of Technology Leadership - We engineers often boast about leadership without a clear definition of what we are saying. Here are the definitions to distill the clarity from those chaotic ramblings of the mass.
  • Technology Leadership Radar - How to evaluate the performance of a technology leader? Each company or individual has its own answer with engineering rubrics. And those rubrics usually focus on a specific role - IC (Software Engineer, Product Manager, Designer) or Engineering Manager. Is there a grand unified framework to evaluate the potential business impact that a technology leader could make?
  • Start with Why - People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Simon Sinek coined a phrase ‘Golden Circle’ which has three tiers, from core to exterior - why, how, and what. However, average leaders think from what, how, to why.
• Corporate Ladder
  • Sponsor - Successful Caucasian men receive more career guidance than women and multicultural professionals even though more women have mentors than men. The reason is mentors can not help with promotions but sponsors can.
  • 12 Habits that can Boost Women's Promotion - There are 12 habits American women think would be helpful to their promotions. For example, remember to claim your achievements often because others will not notice and reward your contributions unless you say it. Also, you need to be aware that expertise is not the only criteria.
• EP Doc Templates
  • EP Doc Templates - Templates make it easy to think and design clearly and rule out blind spots. (Though it may also introduce blind spots...) Here is a collection of templates that help you build better products.
  • PRFAQ - PRFAQ means press release and fequently asked questions. People at Amazon adopt it to write down requirements and important features of yet to be developed products.
  • ADR - ADR means Architectural Decision Record, a mini-doc to capture significant architectural changes that are not worth a full design doc.
  • OKR - A simple template for OKR with guiding policies.
  • Investment Memo - Template for writing an investment memo to capture the learning process before spending a large amount of money.

• Listen to customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once they become your friends, you can bother them for feedback frequently. To a certain extent, sending chat messages is easier than emails and meetings.
  • Pick customers you serve
    • Exclude customers who are not painful about the problem you are solving
    • Exclude customers who want features that you haven't made yet

• Fast execution

  • Define just the right scope
    • Usually, satisfy the simplest use case and wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Develop an intuition for problem-solving
    • The product is a combination of art and science. Too data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Try to validate ideas without code.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Use persuasiveness and dynamic adjustment to drive progress.

Who Does Xiaomi Learn From​

• Tongrentang: Aiming for a century-old enterprise, Tongrentang is the best example. Its characteristic is high product quality, even though the prices are not cheap.
• Walmart & Costco: Innovation in business models, lowering prices, with most products priced at less than half of similar existing products. A research and development system that hires a small number of the best talents, where one person is worth fifty. Eliminating traditional marketing and channel costs: removing market expenses from marketing, focusing solely on word-of-mouth marketing. Simplifying sales channels, focusing only on direct sales. Although the prices are low, the sales volume is extremely high.
• Haidilao: What is word-of-mouth? Exceeding user expectations.

A business model of high quality, low price, and optimized efficiency can only be executed by those who have made money and are not short on cash. Affordable, high-quality smartphones are merely a means to acquire customers, drawing users into mobile internet platforms and e-commerce platforms (+ smart hardware).

Internet Thinking = Seven-Character Formula (Focus on Extreme Word-of-Mouth Fast) + Sense of Participation (Mass Line)​

• Focus on Extreme: Centering on smartphones, TVs, and routers, doing it oneself, serving as the entry point for the ecosystem, while other companies handle other products within the ecosystem.
• Word-of-Mouth? Exceeding user expectations, even bringing the product into a friendship. This is the core of internet thinking.

De-Management​

Pursuing super flat structures, where leaders understand all the details, enabling quick responses and decisions. Pursuing super flat structures, where leaders understand all the details, enabling quick responses and decisions.

Comments​

Prerequisites

• Platform-level products, making the platform affordable, allowing monetization through applications at the platform level.
• Having top-tier talent and capital during the bootstrap phase.
• Achieving likability in branding.

• Listen to Your Customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once you become friends, you can easily and casually ask for their feedback. At a certain point, sending a short message is easier than emailing or having meetings.
  • Selectively choose your customers
    • Eliminate customers who do not feel the pain of the problems you solve
    • Remove customers who want features that you have not yet developed

• Execute Quickly

  • Define the right scope
    • Generally, meet the most basic use case, and then wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Cultivate a good intuition for problem-solving
    • Product is a blend of art and science. Overly data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Validate ideas without using code as much as possible.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Drive progress through persuasion and dynamic adjustments.

Simply looking at the current trend of MAU cannot predict its future trajectory. For example, in the Growth Accounting Framework — during a certain period, some people start using your product (user acquisition), some leave your product (churn), and some leave and then return (reactivation), resulting in a net MAU value. As time goes on, user acquisition and reactivation become increasingly difficult; the more users there are, the higher the churn rate. The overall MAU curve tends to flatten or decline.

So what are the indicators that can predict future MAU? Andrew believes there are two:

1. Positive feedback from user acquisition
2. Positive feedback from retention and reactivation

Positive Feedback from User Acquisition​

UGC + SEO Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Yelp, Houzz, Wikipedia

1. New users see good content
2. Some new users join in to create new content
3. Google indexes this unique new content
4. Users search for more content

Paid Marketing Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Blue Apron, Casper, Uber

1. New users click on ads
2. Some new users try the product
3. Some become paying users
4. More budget is allocated for advertising

Viral Marketing Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Dropbox, LinkedIn, Instagram

1. New users register
2. New users invite/share content with friends
3. Some friends click on the link
4. Friends respond to the invitation/shared content

The conversion rates and numbers of these four steps can be calculated. For example, 30% of new users may import contacts and send invitation links to 10 people, of which 40% actually send the link, and 50% of those who receive the link will register. Thus, the growth factor is 0.6, meaning that from 1,000 registrations, there will be 600+ new registrations; over time, this could reach 2,500.

How to improve? Break down the steps and tackle them one by one.

Positive Feedback from Retention and Reactivation​

Social Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Instagram, LinkedIn, Gmail

1. Users create content
2. Content is seen by other users
3. Content receives social feedback
4. Notifications are sent to the content creator

Personalized Content Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Zillow, Credit Karma, Netflix

1. Users subscribe or add
2. New content appears
3. Users are notified or receive a push feed
4. Users see and like the content

Non-Scalable Channels​

PR, promotions, holiday features, conferences, content marketing, partnerships, and app store feature updates. These are all drivers that can attract people into these positive feedback loops, but they are not the positive feedback itself. These drivers are either difficult to attribute or hard to sustain over time.