Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 10

Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.

No new snippets this week, as I was knocked out with a bad viral bout for the better part of the week. Here’s revisiting three of my favorite snippets from earlier editions. Back to regular programming next week :)

#1: Krithika Muthukumar (VP of Marketing at OpenAI, ex-Stripe, Retool, Dropbox, Google) on the In Depth Podcast by First Round Capital with Brett Berson. She speaks about how to win the hearts and minds of developers/designers as customers.

Invest in quality, even if it delays launch. Developers and designers have low tolerance for poorly designed products. OTOH, a quirky design can elevate their engagement and experience multifold. For instance, Stripe once pushed back a page launch by six weeks to perfect a design element:

"We delayed the launch of that page by almost a month and a half because our design team wanted to implement the game of life in the background, in the header background of that page. And that sounds crazy. It's like, why would you delay the launch of that by six weeks? But what happened was it went viral. Like the design community took a look at that page because they saw that interesting kind of animation in the background. The developer community took a look at it and saw the craftsmanship and the importance that we placed on the design and the aesthetics of the page of. And I think it speaks a lot to then the craftsmanship that we place on our product."

Strip out the marketing speak and share knowledge freely.

"And so that meant kind of stripping out anything fluffy from our marketing, really thinking through, you know, the right ways to reach them that wouldn't alienate developers. So if we put out content, it wasn't behind a gate wall where you had to put in your email address. If we had a campaign that we were running or like a brand campaign that we were running, we were very intentional about making sure that we were using very clean spoken language that would resonate with developers. It wasn't fluffy or over the top, and a lot of it was just knowledge sharing for the sake of it. Our engineering blog got a lot of traction because we were taking learnings as developers ourselves and then putting that out there."

Get creative with engagement. For instance, Stripe's "capture the flag" tournament for developers was a hit.

"We launched a capture the flag tournament at stripe, and that's typically for, you know, infosec researchers and black hat type of areas of security research. And we did that at the payments domain and we had no expectations of how many developers would participate. But at its peak, we had about 10,000 people go through the entire five different levels of the capture the flag challenge, and many of them, actually many of the victors turned into strike engineers in the future."

#2) Manu Jain, Co-founder, and CEO of VAMA, an astrology and puja app, talks about building a consumertech dhandha on The India Opportunity Podcast with Shristi Sahu. Two deep insights here.

He ensures everyone in the company (not just the founders/L1s) knows the key financial metrics, creating a culture of financial responsibility.

"And if you were to ask anyone in my company today, like, be a content guy, they will also know these metrics - revenue, cost, net profit/loss, and runway. I have imbibed this in the company."

The second is tracking the monetization metrics instead of chasing vanity metrics as DAU/app opens.

"What's our DAU to transaction percentage. That's the metric. I don't drive, repeat. I don't want to get a user who has come for free who will all his life come and open my app every day for free for an incentive. I don't want that. How will I make money out of you? The business that I'm in. When was the last time you walked into a temple and you came out without doing Dakshina? Does anyone walk in a temple without giving Dakshina and come out? Then how are you expected to build a product where you will come open the product every day and you don't pay anything."

#3) Priyanka Salot, co-founder of the Sleep Company, made an incredible remark about talking to customers - they speak to 100+ customers monthly. She was on the Founder Thesis podcast by Akshay Dutt. BTW, Founder Thesis is a 350+ episode old podcast. Simply amazing!

We talk to at least 100 consumers every month through qualitative focus groups. We also conduct many quantification surveys, not just to see how consumers are liking our product, but also to understand what more they want to see from the Sleep Company.

I always tell people, before you go for quantification, do qualitative. What qualitative helps us understand: Let's say I have a business problem, OK? I want to understand, you know, what are... let's say, what are the spaces to play in office chairs? You know, is it long-lasting comfort? Is it... you know, I don't know what are the spaces that I could play in.

What I do first: qualitative deep dive where you're talking to consumers. Don't try to understand only the categories you want to focus on. First, understand your consumer. What does his everyday life look like, you know? What does their day look like? You know, there's another category behaviors, right? And then obviously get into your category.

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Rohit