We're excited to announce the launch of our newest product, a Chrome extension for Gmail. This post (while partially designed to get y'all to check out the product, rate us in the Chrome store, and share with your networks) is also a quick update on our journey and hopefully will provide some nice lessons learned. Also, a special happy birthday to BIC for turning 2 (my niece is 2 and I got her a princess board game, so, Maria, please let me know if y'all expect a similar gift). Also a special thank you to 1871. Anyone who walks those halls might notice me with furrowed brow, slouched in my chair. But I promise, I'm working hard to get a great product out to users and build a great company, so thanks for providing the space, people and pizza. It's much obliged.
What we've done right:
- Keep at it: regardless of how we've felt, or the inevitable disappointments, setbacks and arguments, we have continued to push forward. Get up every single day, put in a full day, work against a plan, look for solutions, develop hypotheses and test them. We have never enetered that zombie phase of complete inaction where you start to convince yourself that you're still-kind-of-sort-of working on it but you know in your gut you're not. And it ain't easy.
- Manage our cash: we raised funding back in November 2011. We were silly enough to pay ourselves salaries for about 6 weeks before we realized that we were going to work 100% money or no money. We thought our cash might last 6 months. It's lasted double that with still more in the tank. Everything went - the apt, the unnecessary software management tools, the flights, the meals. Everything.
- Talk to users: we've had hundreds of hours of user conversations. I can't tell you how tough it is to get your friends and family to talk for the 3rd or 4th or 5th time about their email habits. How tough it is to realize that during our first 3 rounds of surveys and interviews we were asking all the WRONG questions, and now that we had the right ones, we needed more time. But we have such a rich and deep understanding of user behavior that we couldn't have otherwise had.
- Build social proof: TechCrunch featured our launch yesterday. They also rejected many more emails prior. Two other media outlets told us they don't want to cover our launch. But that's fine - because every mention is grist for the mill and lends credibility to what we're doing. We never hestitate to mention any of our mentions.
- Induce action: we didn't just send one blast to family and friends asking them to try our product. We spent hours curating and segmenting our lists of family friends. Guess what - the laws of conversion rates apply to even the people who have known you your whole life. If you don't think "what do I want this person to do and how likely is he/she to do it" then they won't. Period. We sent out 10 different "launch" emails using MailChimp, each with slightly different copy and slightly different calls to action targeted at the groups we thought were most likely to convert. We go into meetings now with specific asks. We get lots of "no's" but at least it's directional instead of the more vague "sounds great - keep me posted!".
What we've done wrong: (ah where to start...)
- Spent 6 months too long building the wrong product: we're really proud of our first product. We got many thousands of people to use it. Mashable covered it 3 times. AOL released almost an identical product 5 months after we did (us and them). But we still should have realized, from our first set of interviews, that we weren't going to get hundreds of thousands of people to adopt a new email client. Our guts knew it but our brains wouldn't accept it. We were PRODUCT focused instead of USER focused or PROBLEM focused.
- We didn't have beliefs: my favorite line in Lean Start-Up is, "If your goal is to launch and see what happens, then you're guaranteed to succeed...in seeing what happens." The problem is, right or wrong, if you don't have a specific expectation, then you don't know how to adapt your thinking. It's true, you can't predict how many users a TechCrunch mention will bring. But you better say "I believe it's 10,000" or "I believe it's 15". Because when it happens, you can adjust your expectations for the next media outlets, have a truer sense of inherent virality, have a better grasp on how much your true marketing spend will need to be and then take action. This goes for EVERYTHING. Do you have a meeting with someone? What do you expect the outcome to be? What do you want to happen? It's a maddening process, but it's right.
- Absent hard data, we didn't pay enough attention to those who came before us: it's almost frustrating to read Paul Graham posts because he tells you exactly what's going to happen, you assume you're different, then it happens the way he described it, then you feel compelled to write a wise post for the next wave of entrepreneurs who will ignore your advice. Imagine how our parents feel! There is a difference between "you don't know what will happen until you try" and "trust me, if you do it that way, regardless of what your intuition says, IT WON'T WORK." Internalizing Lean Start-Up or Four Steps To The Epiphany or Paul Graham in a non-defensive way will go a long way to mitigating future mistakes (but you'll make 'em anyway).
- Didn't get to "no": a fellow entreprenuer who spent time at IBM sales was taught to get to "no" instead of get to "yes". The start-up community is an incredibly wonderful and supportive community. But it's a double-edged sword in that passionate first time entrepreneurs think willingess to talk and willingness to help is the same as willingness to give you stuff like money or advisory board seats or what not. We took too long to ask for money or whatever we needed. We didn't want to be pushy. There's never a hard and fast rule with this, but at the end of the day it's just business. Here's what I want, will you give it to me? No? Why not? Great, let me get metrics/change story/build traction/etc and then come back to you/apply it to my next ask.
- Didn't understand startup marketing: it's one thing to learn stuff, but it's another to internalize the millions of little things. The splash page. The guest blogging. The relationship building. The story telling. It takes forever and it should start CONCURRENT to the ideation. Building the brand and the blog. Read the SEOMoz story. It can take years. But it's often free and free is good.
Okay, this post is about 8,000 words too long. Nonetheless, everyday is more learning, so thanks again to the Chicago community. Also, if you've gotten this far, notice my first two sentences and "calls to action". I wrote it like that for a reason, so please share :)
Avi Levine is co-founder and CEO of PhilterIt, a Google Chrome extension for Gmail. You can find him on Twitter @alevine0.
