So here it is.
6 lessons from Arctas. Learned from running into walls and my mentors.
To save time, I’ll dive right in.
(1) are you testing a hypothesis?
In the early days it’s easy to jump right in. Ask a prospect some questions and start building.
A great frame for me has been to create a hypothesis around whatever you’re actually building.
A prospect says X and you build Y.
Always ask yourself “but why?”
Hypothesis: [user archetype] has [problem] we will build [solution] to [result]
You can modify the variables as you test and know if something actually works.
Once I started doing this, the clarity of my product decisions increased and attachment to features decreased.
(2) solve for revenue creation of your customers as opposed to time savings
Everyone wants to make more money.
Most software simply saves people time.
Try to help your users make more money instead of save them time.
Think of the “result” in your hypothesis, revenue creation is always a great result.
(3) 5 whys
Customer discovery is tough.
I’ve found letting the user talk 80% of the time and simply asking “Why” gets to the heart of their problems.
This is the easiest way to know if you’re building a vitamin or a pain killer product.
Is the user looking for something that saves them 10 minutes or unclogs a bottleneck that can at $1m in new revenue?
Ask them why 5 times and you’ll know.
(4) $100 problem or $100,000 problem
Another way to build off the 5 whys is the dollar-value frame.
When a prospect is talking about a problem they have, ask them “is this a $100 problem or a $100,000 problem”
Avoid $100 problems in B2B.
(5) the one thing that matters
Once you’ve got your first few users you’ll likely need to ship more.
Shiny object syndrome is real when people are using your product.
But it’s early and wasted time means wasted money.
You spend too much and you’re dead.
Zoom out and ask yourself 2 things:
What do we want to optimize for?
What drives this?
In my case we wanted to optimize for more users. Arctas is a marketplace, we need supply and demand to be alive.
Next question, what drives this?
We had many features to choose from: Search/discovery, profile building, data pipelines, and company teaming - all have many sub-features.
It was easy to spend days or weeks optimizing any one of these.
But, when looking at the data from posthog, we realized something.
A certain kind of user post lead to 10 new users.
I dropped everything to focus on getting more of these posts.
Often calling users and manually entering it for them.
Mission accomplished.
[this is an interesting case study and will be a conversation for another day]
(5) over intellectualization
This is simple.
Are you thinking about what your users might want or asking them?
Intellectualizing things is super fun, but highly ineffective when you actually want to accomplish something
I wasted days planning things with the team instead of actually shipping and iterating.
Ask good questions, ship, and iterate.
(6) negative buzzwords exist
Every vertical has their lingo and buzzwords.
In early sales conversations I noticed there were words I’d use that would change the demeanor of a prospect negatively.
It’s equally important to note positive buzzwords (for copy and sales) as it is to note negative buzzwords.
Save these words and share them with your team.
Speaking in the language of your customers will lead to faster learning.
Stay tuned for the next note with 9 more lessons.