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This week, we're diving into the how, what, when, and why of going from single product focus to multi-product strategy, a common stumbling block for startups.
How do you go from a pie-in-the-sky idea to a fully-fledged product? Some founders start building right away, spinning up a (slightly shoddy) MVP for folks to react to, then iterating from there. Others take a deep-diving approach to research, setting up dozens (or even hundreds) of calls with folks to validate the idea before writing a line of code.
As a user research expert, you might expect Jeanette Mellinger to be in favor of the latter approach — but you’d be wrong.
Sure, she’s a big proponent of user research interviews as a form of validating your idea. But this slapdash mentality of trying to speak to as many folks as possible is where she finds that many well-meaning founders go astray.
In addition to her role as BetterUp’s Head of UXR, Mellinger also works closely with early-stage startup founders as First Round’s User Research Expert in Residence. To these folks, she preaches the mentality that less is more. You can glean more qualitative data points and patterns from five deep conversations than from 50 unfocused ones.
“We get nervous when we hear, ‘Oh gosh, I only spoke with five people.’ But that’s my user research magic number. If you bring that focus into it, you can get something that’s much deeper than you’d ever expect,” she says.
On the Review, we unpack her ultra-approachable three-step guide to bring more structure to early customer discovery and idea validation. Along the way, she shares plenty of low-lift tactics to ensure your approach is rigorous, but not onerous.
Step 1: Make a Plan. “It’s so tempting to want to ask about 10 things at once, but that’s only going to yield shallow, inch-deep responses. This is your opportunity to go deep. What are the one or two things you must learn now?”
Step 2: Learn without letting bias creep in. “Let’s say you start to hear something that sounds really good. That’s your alarm right there. The moment you hear, ‘Oh yeah, this product is great,’ that’s a sign to ask the counter. What is something you can push on here?”
Step 3: Find the right patterns. “So often teams will want to jump right into solutioning and action mode. But the more you ground yourself in the data, the more conviction you’ll have in your idea.”
We’ve covered lots of different founder paths here on the Review. But none may be as curious and meandering as Eddy Lu’s.
Today, he’s the co-founder and CEO of GOAT, a global platform for sneakers and luxury apparel that boasts over 350 brands, a million sellers, and 50 million members across 170 countries — valued at over $4B.
But page the calendar back, and you’ll find a decade’s worth of entrepreneurial endeavors with very little in common. After teaming up with his co-founder, Daishin Sugano, the two tried their hand at owning a cream puffs franchise, hopping aboard the early iPhone app train, and even had a YC stint trying to build a community platform for social dining.
Then, a twist of fate (coming in the form of a pair of fraudulent sneakers) sent the pair down an entirely new rabbit hole.
In the latest installment of our Paths to Product-Market Fit series, Lu shares the inside story of all the unexpected twists and turns in GOAT’s founding story — and it certainly wasn’t smooth sailing once the founders landed on their winning idea. Black Friday deals gone awry, website crashes and unpopular features are just a few of the obstacles that would come to pass.
Along the way, Lu shares his biggest pieces of PMF advice for others to lean on — and how to stay gritty and hungry amidst mounting pressure.
Subject:Why you shouldn’t focus on building the best product — and what to do instead
This week, we're diving into the how, what, when, and why of going from single product focus to multi-product strategy, a common stumbling block for startups.
🎧 Prefer to listen? Check out the audio version of today's interview here.
For Tara Seshan, this is the lead-off question for her teams when she’s running product reviews, and it always makes her think of Enterprise — the car rental company.
“I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal or a real story, but I still like to tell it. Enterprise was competing with the likes of Hertz and Avis. Those guys had the airport real estate. They also had Audis and BMWs. Enterprise Rent-A-Car really had nothing. And so there was absolutely no way to compete building ‘the best service’ or ‘best product.’ What they did instead was focus on a different user — people who get into car accidents,” she says. So instead of focusing on providing fancy vehicles, Enterprise offered a unique crash pickup service.
Over time, they were able to expand. But it started by making a very, very opinionated bet on who their target user was and it allowed them to compete on dimensions that other services and tools just didn’t find relevant. It is the most important question to ask, full stop. If you cannot clearly outline to me who your target user is and, therefore, why the features follow are uniquely suited to that user, it’s dead in the water. It's got to be specific.”
In Seshan’s view, folks tend to overestimate the impact of launching specific features and building the best product, instead of focusing on building the right product for their target user. Sounds simple in theory, but tough to consistently pull off in practice, particularly as a scaling startup takes bold swings at building out its product lineup.
But she’s got an excellent track record here. Before her most recent role as Head of Product at Watershed, Seshan spent a nearly seven-year stretch at Stripe. She joined the company at the sub-200-person mark back in 2015. She was the PM on Radar, Stripe's first monetized product outside of core payments, and she helped scale Billing and Treasury from 0 to 1 as a product lead and GM.
Today on The Review, Seshan shares 9 specific lessons on going multi-product and building for your target users, drawing on examples from both Stripe and Watershed. She dives into:
Advice on how to get the timing right and different ways to approach the problem of what to build
The 12 questions she runs her teams through at every product review
How to structure lean, self-sufficient teams that can navigate the uncertainties of new product development
Tips for hiring great product thinkers and “diamonds in the rough,” including traits to look for and specific interview questions.
What she learned from Patrick Collison and Shreyas Doshi at Stripe.
