@preppednsaved 1 - After we started competing in an existing category (digital adoption) it was hard to get people to pay attention to us relative to bigger companies like WalkMe and Pendo and even smaller ones like Appcues. What we did:
- Insist everywhere possible that we were fundamentally different than what else exists in the market. We don't consider ourselves an "incrementally better" product - we are a different take on the problem space (not untargeted popups, focus on responding to user intent). I think this is the biggest mistake people make when doing this pivot into an existing category. They basically overcorrect the message from "we're something totally new" to "we're something barely new".
- Ask our initial customers of the new product to do reference calls for prospects - we are pretty shameless about this, but it really works. DAP is a pretty established category so we had to do a lot to get companies to trust us instead of incumbents.
- Other than that, just normal marketing stuff to generate awareness - content, etc.
2 - We've had three phases.
- Pre-PMF = during YC, first building our thing. I think we found PMF ~1 year later around when we publicly launched. The idea was pretty much the same throughout this period; we didn't do much pivoting. I think in hindsight we just moved too slow -- too slow to public launch, too meek with intro requests for initial customers, way too quiet on the marketing front.
- PMF* - When we were doing the "category creation" thing we had some serious advocates who were really excited about our product. And they weren't just small potatoes companies - companies like Gusto and Hashicorp. We were able to translate that into real $ and great usage. Honestly, I think a lot of this was just PMF and not tactics. Most customers found us through word-of-mouth, and we didn't have trouble signing $50k+ deals without much negotiation. Growth was good and it powered us to our Series A. The problem as best I can summarize is, was that we felt kind of helpless in sales cycles. Either the prospect "got it" or they didn't, and most sales tactics (case studies, etc) didn't move the needle much on conversion. This wasn't hamstringing growth at this stage but just felt off. Meanwhile, we would get requests from customers to add more functionality to our product that was in line with the digital adoption space. Initially we resisted it because we felt like it was the "old way". But in digging into these features we started to feel like there were some (a) fairly obvious improvements to be made and (b) the primitives we'd built to support our original product (e.g. user segmentation, deploying code to a customer's frontend so that it doesn't slow down their app, etc) would translate really well to a broader product that competed in DAP.
- PMF - The lightbulb went off when we connected these two observations. The feature requests to do DAP stuff were a sign that our customers thought of us as being sort of within the DAP space. And so we figured maybe we could solve our sales challenges by just giving in. It honestly was really hard intellectually to build things we had previously sneered at (for me personally, and also to communicate to the team). It felt like a weird time to pivot when things were going fine, we had a ton of $ in the bank. And per above it took a few quarters to really clearly work (to the point where most of our customers are using us a platform and not just the original product).
I know you asked for authenticity and there isn't much abject failure in the above. I think we were lucky to land on a product that had initial fans with budget. I guess the repeatable lessons here are something like:
- Don't be satisfied with initial PMF
- Feature requests aren't just feature requests --> they are insight into how your customers mentally categorize you
- Most customers like familiar more than totally 100% brand new
thank you!