I'm Hiten Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of FYI. AMA =)

AMAs
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23

Hi Hiten, you mentioned about how in these times, it’s soo important to stay close to the team - understand their concerns and not pressurize them like normal times.

I intend to take this approach, although pertaining to the WFH culture in India, which is somewhat a paid holiday. Shouldn’t pressure & strict KPI’s be used to hit goals.

Asking for an early-stage startup with a small team size of around 10 people.

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24

  1. It’s totally possible. Depends on the market you go after and what will be required for you to be successful in it to reach $1 million in revenue. The choices you make for getting to that revenue don’t need to be harmful to your future prospects. That’s a myth. The key is being able to be deliberate about the choices you make with your end goal in mind.

  2. The question about channels requires understanding your audience and meeting them where they are at. Here’s a presentation I have done on the topic.

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25

Great question!

  • We do these efforts of “building in public” with the idea that it helps us be that much more accountable to the outcomes we want. That mindset has made it much easier to align our efforts with the business and get the motivation to do it consistently. Thanks for noticing!
  • For me, I just need to take a breath and think deeply about something with a blank mind for even just 2 minutes and I can get meaningful insights. Some folks might call it a meditation of sorts. What I’ve found is that just be taking a breath and clearing my mind (no matter what else is going on) and then picking a topic or problem, I can get to really meaningful ideas / insights very quickly on just about anything.
  • Content builds brand. Brand is being able to carve out space in someone’s mind. Podcasts are literally in-between your ears and basically a direct route to someone’s mind. Ultimately consistency is key. What do you stand for? What is your brand all about? We don’t have goals for our content. We have goals for our brand. That’s the difference for us. We don’t think about what content can do for us and goals it can hit. We start with understanding the brand we need to be for our market and the content is designed to support the brand and the goals we have for our brand. We use this both for personal brand and company brand.
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26

Thanks for sharing the full context, Jonny. That’s really helpful. What would be the worst case scenario if you just launched with your current pricing? Sometimes we need to rethink our basic assumptions especially in a changing environment. Outside of that, I would reconsider this idea that you have to provide all the features in all the tiers. What you really need to do is figure out what different tiers of customers need and differentiate the tiers based on that. Usually this has to do with size of company or volume based on a value metric you determine.

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27

This is very cultural. It really depends on the culture of your company. Do you have a lot of meetings? If so, while remote you’ll probably need to have those meetings still at least until people get comfortable with it. At FYI we’re working on a remote work assessment for employees, teams and entire companies to help identify existing gaps and everyone’s sentiment about working remotely. We always start with understanding people whether it’s customers or employees before we try to solve problems. If we don’t understand the challenges people are facing, any changes we make aren’t likely to be aligned with solving those challenges. Our remote work tips directory might give you some ideas too.

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28

Everything is cultural. The culture in the country you are in as well as the company you are creating. If the pressure and strict KPI’s are required, then you’ll have to do that in order to ensure people continue to work as best as they can. My comment was about how this isn’t a normal work from home scenario. There is a pandemic and many people are going to distracted by it. Normal distractions such as the WFH culture in India have to be accounted for as well, of course.

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29

Hi @Hiten,

Thank you for joining us for an AMA and for answering the questions in such depth! There are so many quotable ideas and insights, I lost count of them. :slight_smile:

Given the uncertainties of the current situation and the challenges it brings, I’m sure your answers will act as a sounding board and help everyone deal with things a little better. So, thank you again!

Hope to have you join us soon again.

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30

That’s great advice, thanks for sharing.

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31

Also, thanks to @Jayashree, @Vengat, @sandeep, @wingman4sales, @aditi1002, @aparna, @jonny, @raviramani, and @Akhilesh for joining in and asking some very timely and interesting questions!

Hope to have you join us for the upcoming AMAs as well. :zap:

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32

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah I’ve asked myself that a few times too.

We ran a pricing survey on our waitlist last week using this model and while with ~100 responses not a statistically significant quantitive survey, both the qual answers and trends across the group suggested most of the buyer profile we’re interested in would expect a lower price. Ultimately we want to also optimise for a lower touch model too and while I don’t doubt there’s a business in our current pricing it would point the ‘lifestyle’ aspect in the wrong direction – more salesy.

Yeah we’ll have different feature sets for the tiers for sure, I just suspect that how we’ll want to cut it for longer term success will leave a few current customers clearly overpaying.

This is a tactical question really – our exposure to downgrades from our currently small base is a higher percentage than we’d like and cashflow is important right now. After we’ve ripped the band-aid off longer term we should be ok.

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