astha
April 9, 2020, 6:50pm
21
Hi @Claire ,
Thank you so much for joining us for this AMA and for answering each question with such care and depth.
There’s some brilliant tactical advice in there, but also so much more than that. Your life experiences as an entrepreneur and your passion for building something that truly makes the world a better place shines through and through!
Akash and I were just talking about how each one of your answers is many blog posts condensed and distilled into one. So glad, we had a chance to access some of these incredible lessons and insights.
I’m sure your answers will be super helpful for everyone. Thank you again. And hope to host you soon, again.
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astha
April 9, 2020, 6:54pm
22
Also, thank you @Logesh , @aditi1002 , @Vengat , @raviramani , @jay , and @Meghana for joining in and asking some amazing questions.
Hope to have you join us for the upcoming AMAs as well. Stay tuned!
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Anushree
April 10, 2020, 2:58pm
23
Hi Claire,
Thanks for doing this AMA
As an early stage startup founder, would love to learn more on these things:
How was your journey of achieving product-market fit? If you were to do it all over again, what were your top 3 mistakes you wouldn’t repeat today?
How do you price your product optimally enough(say for your first customer) so that you don’t lose the customer and yet (s)he values your product?
Thanks,
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rajaraman
April 13, 2020, 5:27pm
24
Claire:
Hey Rajaraman – thanks for these kind words.
My thinking around constraints and impact have been definitely evolved over time – and also in some ways, haven’t changed much
Constraints have become something that I’ve changed my reception of, I think, slowly over time. Previously, I think I’d always been searching for the “judo solution” amidst constraints. That is, how can you get the maximum outcome by doing the least? And while that’s a useful frame for some problems, I think other times, in the face of certain constraints, it’s frustrating. For example, when you’re faced with certain constraints in your business (e.g., capital, people, time), yes, you can totally seek out the minimum thing to do that gets you the maximum effort. But also, I think if you want to create something special or meaningful, sometimes you have to accept that the constraint just means something will take more time – and that’s okay.
I think as entrepreneurs, when we’re faced with constraints, self-imposed or not, we can be hungry for the “hack” or elevator that zooms us up to the top. But when we don’t find that, it haunts or burdens us. Instead, I think realizing that amidst constraints, something will just take longer, is an important truth to accept. A perfect example of this I think is the writing we do on our blog . I could’ve looked for the judo solution for creating organic traffic (e.g., hire content writers + editors) – but I had a specific vision for what I wanted the content to be. And I knew that we had the constraint of cash. As a result, I’ve chosen over the past 6 years to write every single one of our 100s of blog posts myself (with maybe ~4 exceptions). And we’ve gotten incredible traffic because of it + built a loyal audience. But it also took 6 years. And I wrote everything. There was no “judo solution” because of the constraint, and I chose to be okay with that because of the vision I had in mind.
Regarding impact, I’ll say this is likely something that view hasn’t changed on. For me, personally, it’s what’s driven me to focus on this single problem (helping managers become better) for, as you noted, almost 10 years now! And for me, it’s simply because, contributing to solving a problem that is meaningful to myself and others is, well, what helps me feel alive
‘Judo solutions,’ that’s one gem of a phrase. I’m going to steal that.
Rajaraman
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Krish
April 20, 2020, 5:22am
25
Claire:
As you mentioned, the original pricing model of Know Your Team (back when it used to be called Know Your Company) was that we charged $100 per person one-time – and that’s it. So if you had 25 people, KYC would cost $2,500 for your team. The reason we’d set up this pricing was because we wanted to encourage people to think of KYC as a program – an investment you made in getting feedback + encouraging your team to be open and honest. We felt with a typical monthly subscription model, it’d be too easy to say “you know what, it’s $10/mo, and it’s just this app I turn on and then do nothing with…” Rather, we wanted leaders who purchased KYC to think, "I invested $2,500 in this, so now I want to take real actions to encourage honest feedback at our company. For us, it was about aligning behavior with the price.
We decided to change this pricing model when we turned Know Your Company into Know Your Team, because the audience and the behavior we wanted to promote changed. Know Your Team is for managers – and if the product were to cost thousands of dollars, that would make it inaccessible to them. Additionally, it’s the manager herself (or himself) who is benefitting from KYT – and so we decided to charge per manager instead of per user. So today, KYT costs $30/mo per manager. Again, it was about aligning audience + behavior with the price.
Thanks, Claire!
I’ve long believed that pricing is a filter for the kind of people we end up serving. And, thus, it’s important to constantly revisit our operating assumptions around it. This revisiting usually leads to iterative improvements, and on rare occasions, fundamental ones (like with KYT). The latter are always way more daunting. So thanks for sharing a bit into how you went about making it happen and how you’ve thought through some of the immediate implications!
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What it does, is articulate so well, our simplistic (sometimes blinding) drive for efficiency. And reaffirms the nuance that with certain projects, the road to impact isn’t a straight one at all.