Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…Well, the story begs the question, what are the levers that worked? Whatever you can share. One of the big things that we wound up focusing on is what we talk about is comprehension, desirability. The fundamental challenge I think for new users or new teams using your product once you get past the kind of tech early adopters is do they comprehend what this thing is for? Do they understand how it works? Then desirability is why should they care? Most people at work are not like," Hey. You know what I want to do today is start using an entirely new tool and convince all my coworkers to get on board. That is not part of your job. Your job has goals and measurements and everything else. Really ... understanding that. How do you push on that in that new user experience? It sounds maybe a little ludicrous, but Slack always has a free product. Obviously, there's a free tier that you can use, but we had never actually figured out a trial strategy where we actually gave you a taste of the paid product. Either we're on the free tier or we get to pay for the paid tier. And that wound up being one of, I think the Ripest veins is figuring out how to give people a taste of the full premium Slack experience so that they would never want to go back and doing that in a variety of different points in the customer journey. Then I'd say the other biggest thing I would call the one out is we really need to figure out a new north star metric for motivating the teams across Slack. At that point in time, we basically had paid customers and then we had creative teams, which is the very, very beginning, very, very end of the journey. We did a lot of quantitative research and data science and wound up coming up with this new metric we call successful teams, which is a little bit ... I feel a lot of companies have this Facebook, I'm lucky number seven or whatever it was. Where what we found was that if you could get five people using Slack, the majority of the work week to just communicate at all, that would be a successful team there were going to be 400% more likely to upgrade over the next six months. That seems like a very low bar, five people to use Slack throughout the work week, not even every day. But it turns out that if you could get that level of critical mass the rest would take care of itself. We wound up motivating not just the team that was focused on self-service but all these other feature teams across the company to drive more new successful teams, knowing that if we can move that which is much earlier in the funnel but not a top of funnel metric, then it would actually drive upgrades and paid customers and thus revenue long-term. That was a huge turning point for how we rally product teams around somebody to actually drive that self-service business. Man, this feels like its own podcast. Just to analyze the things you learned down this journey, and there's so many takeaways here. One is just the importance of an activation metric that is predictive of retention sales. It sounds like you landed on five people in a company like DAU basically for a week, something like that. That's awesome. Then the other interesting takeaway here is I'm actually doing a bunch of interviews with founders of the most successful B2B companies and interestingly, not all, maybe half are like, "I still don't think we have product market fit. They're at a billion dollars valuation growing crazy." They're like, I feel like I have product market fit with the current users but I don't with the people I want next.…

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