As a product manager, your job is to identify problems to solve, do some prioritization, and ensure that you solve them as fully as possible, given the resources and constraints of your organization. (To be super explicit: the best solutions aren't necessarily delivered as new features.) In enterprise product management, you often have multiple constituencies that you need to solve for. Attention…
Traditionally, when people think about the role of a product manager, people generally talk about working with a cross functional team (usually engineering, design, and data science) to deliver value. I've come to believe that is necessary but not sufficient. As a product manager, your day-to-day work is some combination of gathering information, synthesizing it, sharing it, and helping others…
There's a lot of advice around standard metrics: don't have more than 2-3% monthly churn, convert at least 2% of your free users to paid under a premium model, response rates should be 200 milliseconds or less, and so on and so forth. There's a little less out there of *how* to get and measure these core metrics. I wanted to share exactly what we track and how for Nylas Mail , the freemium…
Introducing Braid One of the hard things about doing a startup is finding problem/founder fit. Since successful startups take forever, it’s really important for founders to go after a problem that they want to keep solving. If you’re going to end up working on something for a decade or more, you better know the problem really well and be highly motivated to solve it. Some people are lucky — they…
(This post originally appeared on my Svbtle site: http://sachinag.com/please-shut-up-about-growth-hacking ) All of a sudden, growth hacking is the new Carly Rae . I’m so completely bored with this boomlet because growth hacking isn’t anything special. Point one: growth hacking isn’t new. Let’s posit that growth hacking is finding channels (sometimes new) that work, then jamming everything you can…
Amazon announced today that they have PCI compliance certification for the entire AWS stack : EC2, S3, EBS, and VPC. This is huge. Almost every startup these days uses some cloud hosting provider, and until now, it's been literally impossible to be PCI compliant in the cloud. To be PCI compliant, the website owner needs to be able to provide physical access to the servers in the event of a credit…
Blueleaf is building the world’s first truly personal financial planning platform. It’s a complex product with a lot of features to meet all the different problems that our customer discovery has shown that people want. Here are ten concrete things we’re doing to get 10,000 sign ups before we even launch our product. 1. Making Potential Users Ask Publicly To Get In There are two ways to get into…
One of the great things about services like AdWords, Wufoo, Mailchimp, Flowtown, Performable, and so on is that they allow the marketing side of a startup to work independently of the engineering side of the startup. Whip out your credit card and you can have a source of traffic, lead generation forms, e-mail marketing campaigns, social media insights, A/B testing of your landing page, and all…
You're struggling with user acquisition. No one's coming back. Your product is robust and full-featured and you're adding new features every week. You're only building the features that your users want, so you're not wasting any time on "wouldn't it be cool if" problems. But no matter how hard you work, your graphs just aren't up and to the right. What to do? One of the most valuable resources…
Online payments are a bitch. Just over a decade ago, you had to hook up your online commerce system to an actual terminal that would send bleeps and bloops to the gateways, but even today, it's not much better. There are still a plethora of players who have to touch your information to process a simple credit card transaction, and each and every one of them gets to take a little bit of your money…
Today is my last day as Operations Lead at oneforty . In the fall, I'll be headed to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan to pursue my MBA. Because I've been asked a bunch of questions about this, I figured it might be fun for others to see (and critique!) my thinking. Why business school? Amongst startup folks, MBAs get a bad rap . Some smart people don't even want to…
In just the last week, two different people have come to me to get feedback on their pricing. One was a startup selling a very sophisticated product to corporate enterprises. The other was selling consulting services to individuals, small businesses, and trade associations. In both cases, however, the questions were the same: how should I price this on a per-head basis? When should I charge a flat…
Here's my presentation from BarCamp Boston 5 on Sunday, April 18, 2010. It doesn't work as well without me jumping around, questioning the audience, berating their answers, and generally acting like a, well, douche. http://www.slideshare.net/sachinag/game-mechanics-best-practices-bar-camp-boston-5 Because most of the deck is very text-light, here's an overview of the general structure of the…
There are two things I know more about than you: marketplace dynamics(1a,1b) and game mechanics(2). I was planning on doing the marketplace one first, but there's a little blogging bubble about the pros and cons of game mechanics , so I might as well strike while the iron's hot. Let's start off with some background reading. Wikipedia's entry on game mechanics is as good as any, and in particular…
Back when I did my very first customer development interviews, way back in 2007 for an aborted Slacker-player-over-cellular-networks company, they were called "requirements gathering". Go out, get a big list of requirements, write a product spec, release, and bask in your glory. Pretty simple. Needless to say, my approach and techniques since those halycon days has changed a lot. Now I believe…
In my last post about startup cash management , smart people like Chris Dixon, Manu Kumar , George Grellas , and the Hacker News cabal all disagreed with my advice to put off incorporation until you absolutely have to. Every single benefit of incorporation cited by these people is correct. However, I still caution against jumping right into incorporating from day one. This is because when you…
While there are often investments that should be made upfront , oftentimes new founders and new startups will waste money and time on things that they shouldn't. I sure know I did during my first go-round . Don't make my mistakes. Here are three things you should put off as long as possible: Don't incorporate until you're playing with Other People's Money. There are two kinds of other people's…
One of the things that I didn't think about before I started my first startup were all the parts of the infrastructure that weren't product. They've also consistently been the things that other entrepreneurs forget about when they come to me with their "ohmygodIhavethisidea" ideas. They're also vitally important because they allow the founding team to actually execute the pivots you'll need to…
For a startup to be successful, the founders (or whoever owns product) need to have strong opinions about both the market problem and the product solution. Sometimes - maybe even often - this means ignoring your users. That doesn't mean that you don't listen to your users - even companies as insular as Apple and Nintendo do some work reaching out to others. Apple designs for others ; they just…
Let's face it - you love your family, but that's today, before you see them. By Boxing Day, you're going to want to curl up in the fetal position as your uncle yammers on about the Cleveland Browns. As long as you're hiding out in the basement, or drinking alone at the depressing corner bar, you might as well do something productive. Here's a special "must read" list of books, blogs, and…
Customer development is all about testing your hypotheses. This is the Lean Startup diagram by Eric Ries that you (should have) seen before: Let's start at the beginning and focus on the Customer Development Process, and in particular, the Customer Discovery loop at the very beginning: Steve Blank has defined the Customer Discovery loop as four parts: Author creates Hypotheses; Author Tests…
Commodity national news is dead. Newspapers are dying. The AP wire on Yahoo News (or Google's more heterogenous and more cluttered version ) and CNN.com are "good enough" that all other services providing "just the facts, ma'am" provide no incremental value. Most observers recognize that this leaves a void in the local space, and predictably you see newspapers retrenching into their neighborhoods,…
In my time watching and working with startups as an investment banker, VC, entrepreneur, and consultant to startup teams, the notion of product/market fit has gone from a new insight to conventional wisdom. However, product/market fit never seemed like the right notion to me. After doing some thinking and working very closely with a handful of startup teams in the last year or so, I realized that…
So, Chicago's lacking in tech leadership , says a columnist in the Chicago Tribune. No, it's not, respond the heads of various tech organizations in Chicago and the State . As someone who's founded a startup here in Chicago, I'm certainly more inclined to agree with the Trib columnist than with the panel. However, I'm also a policy wonk - so I decided to take a look at the data to see who's right.…
The goings-on on various econoblogs regarding Rattner supposedly threatening the creditors who didn't go along with the Chrysler debt cramdown is one of the more generally well-written "you people are missing the pot" things I've read in a long while. Chrysler, of course, filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization after all the creditors could not come to an agreement. The Obama…
One of the best things about Silicon Valley is that almost anyone will meet with you for a cup of coffee provided that you're reasonably intelligent and not an axe murderer. My intelligence aside, I'm not an axe murderer, so Yokum Taku, partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, was kind enough to meet with me on Friday. As people who read Hacker News know, I consider Yokum's Startup Company…
This past week, a group of "young Internet entrepreneurs" were invited to meet with Obama's economic team to discuss innovative ways that the government could help entrepreneurs grow in this economy. Despite my (1) avatar pledging my support of the Obama campaign and administration, (2) Illinois birth and residence, and (3) decidedly loyal Democratic activity, I was not invited despite being (a)…
It's very clear to me that these documents were substantially informed by the YC docs' terms but that they were adapted from standard VC documents, and aren't just mere re-wordings of the YC documents. Again, these documents and the YC docs are for the round *after* TS/YC funding. Lastly, I'm just comparing the Term Sheets here (although I've browsed through the legal documents). For my analysis…
Just posted a lengthy blog post on the corporate blog: http://blog.dawdle.com/2009/01/you-have-no-godgiven-right-to-your-business-model.html
I had my op/ed " Gaming Needs A Real Sundance " published in GameDaily, the trade publication for the gaming industry. I take the events and small publishers to task for not encouraging developers to submit complete games in competition to attract publishing in the same way the independent filmmakers take complete films to Sundance to sell to the studios. (Well, their independent arms like Fox…