Lessons in Product Management.
If you’re even slightly inclined towards Product Management, there’s very little probability that you may not have heard of “Product Hunt”. It is the place to learn about cool tech products that people are creating and testing. If you haven’t had a chance to go and check it out, you really should. But I am not here to talk about Product Hunt today (it deserves an entire blog post!), instead I want to share what I learned from this *Awesome* podcast featuring the founder of Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover and one of the partners at YCombinator i.e Dalton Caldwell. This podcast has so many pearls of wisdom wrapped in between their casual conversation that not writing about what I learned would be an injustice.
The podcast is linked here:
Let’s dive into ideas that I really resonated with:
“When pivoting, people should go more towards what they are deep experts about.” — Dalton Caldwell
- Importance of pivoting: The best segment of this podcast for me where the example of Meerkat was talked about. There is a big difference between making changes in your product features and pivoting. Pivot is a more substantial and significant change. There is more rationale/ insight for a pivot whereas a change could be more iterative. There have been cases of pivots gone wrong, but if one truly understands what the “Product Opportunity Gap” is, some pivots have proved to be very successful. Examples:
a) Hard Pivot Example: Brecks: A company which pivoted from manufacturing VR headsets to a being a successful credit card company today.
b) Soft Pivot Example: Meerkat (now House Party): They wanted to tap on the audience which liked going “live”. However, their product wasn’t retentive. When it did not do well initially, they knew exactly what the users wanted out of their product offering and swiftly shifted to offering that rather than being very fixated on their original idea.
“When you strike the lightning in a bottle, it doesn’t happen very often” — Ryan Hoover
2. Importance of choosing what you want your service to offer: Ryan talks about how many directions Product Hunt could’ve taken and how he strategized about the way forward and what should be its core focus. These were challenges like deciding between a vertical or horizontal expansion i.e going really deep versus going really wide. How should one choose? One thing that really helped Product Hunt was having an initial kernel — having that traction going early on is what helped them understand the core value that they were able to provide to their users. The importance of customer feedback is often understated and it has been reiterated time and again that there is no way to make your product better than understanding the user needs.
“There are so many people that want to start a startup and whether or not they want to quit their jobs, they never begin.” — Dalton Caldwell
3. Importance of committing to your passion: I loved it when Dalton mentioned that so many people have that far fetched idea of a startup or that they have an ambition but there is so little fueling their drive to work towards that idea/ dream. It is important to take that first step — be it creating a rough prototype or engaging with your friends/ family and gathering some feedback around your idea — make that first move.
“When you feel like you have a lot of money and have an infinite runway, you should treat it like you don’t.” — Ryan Hoover
4. Importance of not taking funding while you can: It was mentioned that funding backed companies tend to not have that sense of urgency as compared to the ones that don’t. In today’s age, where the name of a startup is followed by the rounds of funding it has got, it has become a rather common perception that if your startup has been funded, it is on its way to success. I may not have personally experienced this in life but there have been so many examples where startups that had the moolah early on couldn't’ accomplish much after that. Be wise about the financial decisions that you make and invest every penny into increasing value for the user or save it for the rainy days.
“The difference between someone who’s serious and someone who’s not serious is all the difference in the world.” — Dalton Caldwell
5. Importance of starting as a side project rather than waiting for a full-blown startup idea: It is important to not wait for the “perfect day”, “enough funds” and “surety about the value proposition of your idea” and start taking baby steps towards that one idea that you feel can add value to your target user group. I am myself a huge proponent of this idea and strongly feel that taking that first step can bring a lot more clarity and motivation rather than waiting for that perfect and not-so-probable eureka moment.
“There are these micro decisions that make the difference between Facebook being Facebook and Myspace being Myspace.” — Dalton Caldwell
6. Importance of understanding that an initial successful takeoff may not necessarily translate into a successful future: The example of “Coinbase” was talked about, wherein the company did pretty well when it launched initially but also struggled with being able to raise funding since the market wasn’t ready for the cryptocurrency movement. Coinbase was able to sustain until the market became excited about cryptocurrencies and is really successful today. Hence it is important to understand that every product/ technology goes through a hype cycle and the success of a product at a certain point in time may not necessarily be predictive of future trends. The timing of introducing your product in the market can be a big predictor of whether your product is going to make the cut or not — be sure to understand which stage of the hype cycle is that technology in.
I hope this was helpful and this post gives you that extra bit of motivation that this podcast gave me. I want to end this blog post with one statement that Ryan made which really struck a chord with me:
“A lot of amazing products/ companies can be built on the weekends if you can afford that kind of time. There are no excuses for a lot of people to not be working on the weekends and making some progress” — Ryan Hoover
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