Search Results

Lyft is an on-demand ride-sharing startup. Like Uber, if that exists where you live. Drivers onboarding other drivers (+) Early in the process, they micromanaged market launches. A Lyft staff member interviewed all drivers. This was good for the first few markets, but it meant their ability to launch new markets was slow and constrained. Then they launched a ⭐ ‘mentoring’ ⭐ process, which allowed drivers to train newly onboarded drivers, through the Lyft Driver App itself—the trainee’s first ‘ping’ would be the mentor requesting to train them, and they’d go through a ride-esque experience to meet up with them. This allowed them to launch 24 markets in a single day , in one fell swoop, something that would have been unimaginable months earlier. Quality might take a hit, as a tradeoff (-) Like the Ride Share Guy pointed out, " it seems like most mentors are more concerned with rushing through the session than doing a great job", it's hard to scale while keeping quality consistent. That's a tradeoff to account for with this method of piggybacking. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need external sources to piggyback. Sometimes they exist within your company. If you have a marketplace, you can use your own marketplace to piggyback. If it's not a marketplace, you can piggyback on your employees like Gmail did. Piggybacking on marketplaces may not always be defensible, or easy to manage. I appreciate the read. Curious to hear what you think in the comments below or anywhere else you'd feel comfortable sharing. Here's a cute doggo for extra good luck on your day today. Source: Facts come from Lenny's Newsletter . Opinions are my own. I don't do a lot of research since I'm just trying to match patterns about piggybacking as a concept, so I may have drawn incorrect conclusions.

It was a wild ride. I took the altMBA program by Akimbo and Seth Godin in Jan, 2022. 100ish people from all walks of life made up my cohort 100 people are split in four cohorts, 25 each. Every week, they'll shuffle you around with new people in your cohort with whom you will discuss three prompts. The 13 altMBA prompts help develop soft skills and are on topics like: Goal-setting Business modeling Decision making Empathy & worldviews Building culture Intentionality Marketing methods Gaining buy-in Public Speaking Leading through ambiguity Strategy & critical thinking Giving and receiving feedback Having difficult conversations No, Seth Godin doesn't show up for the altMBA Seth Godin founded altMBA. But I don't think he is affiliated with them anymore. For me, this was the biggest bummer. I spoke to a friend who took the program and Seth showed up for their commencement ceremony. But for my batch 'altMBA54', he didn't. And it makes sense. Read what is written on Seth's blog "I’m the founder of Akimbo, home of the altMBA . These are the most effective learning opportunities I know of. Akimbo is now an independent B Corp , owned and run by the team" So, Seth isn't actively involved anymore. Just an FYI in case you speak to someone who graduated before the 54th cohort i.e. Feb, 2022 batch. The real cost of altMBA altMBA pricing: It costs $4,950. They seem to have increased the tuition from $4,450 to $4,950. Tbh, it's is pretty expensive compared to other educational programs I've taken before, ranging from $39/month to $2000/year. Time commitment ⌛ Takes 20 hours/per week. Some folks spent more; others spent far less. Mental commitment 🫠 It did break me down a couple of times because I had to face my fears. Family commitment 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🐕 The old African proverb “If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate village” held true. I brought my family along for the journey, teaching them what I had learned. Oral narration not only helped me better store this in my memory. AltMBA friends commitment 👯‍♀️ At times I had trouble navigating in and out of my newly developed altMBA personality so some of my friends didn't like this new change. Apparently, friends don't like when you become more polite. /s My confession To be honest, I never fully understood what the altMBA would teach me until the first day of school. If you're wondering why I still enrolled, I had two reasons: 1️⃣ I hit an inflection point in my career: People wanted to give me more leadership opportunities, but I was hesitant to take them up. I was hesitant if I could rally people around well enough. So I turned down the opportunity. I had plenty of hard skills but lacked the competency to lead effectively. 2️⃣ I also chase sunsets and have ridiculously high ambitions I asked someone who won the Forbes 30 under 30 award what did she do to win it. Her advice for me was to find people I want to emulate and trace back their path. Have enough sample size, and map my plan. "Find 50+ LinkedIn profiles of Head of Growth and analyze what was their path: roles, skills, courses, awards, public activities, etc". So I did just that. I set up an Airtable. And AltMBA came up way too often. Those two reasons were enough for me to say yes. A thorny altMBA review Every rose has its thorns. The altMBA is not flawless but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 🌹 I'll share three things with you: 🙂The good stuff 😖 The stuff they could definitely improve on 🤔 Dated experience once I'm past the honeymoon phase. I'll share how I feel about the altMBA 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from today. My altMBA review: 6 awesome things 👋🏽 Community driven With the altMBA, I had the chance to spend 20+ hours with each of the 15-20 in my learning groups. These were people at the top of their game, with decades of work experience. 💬 Learned thoughtful and intentional messaging I've realized that sometimes hitting backspace is more important than hitting the keys. Nowadays, I try to think more deeply before I hit send, and I find that things like 'curiosity' and 'empathy' really make a difference. I feel like I've gotten better at giving feedback and framing my sentences in a way that people resonate with. Wondering what should I do with my typing speed 🥲 🙋🏽‍♀️ Learned how to ask better questions After the altMBA, I've become more empathetic when I'm talking to people. It's become easier to motivate people when you're asking the right questions. I used to think I had to draft instructions to get things done, but now I've found that asking questions and helping them come up with their own solutions is way more effective. 👩‍🏫 altMBA comes with on-demand coaches You'll have two coaches dedicated to your cohort. You'll get one piece of feedback from on your prompts. On top of that, you can schedule a personalized call with any of them. I used my call to talk more about figuring out my leadership style. I'd strongly recommend making use of these calls. 🙇‍♀️ I got so much better at receiving feedback. Receiving feedback is a life-skill. Even better when you have to actively seek out feedback. Small mindset change, but is really helpful for my career. The book "Thanks for the feedback", a part of the reading list at altMBA, was pretty good. 🎁 The altMBA will send a welcome package your way. This was really special. I could post a picture but don't want to ruin any surprises. Is the altMBA worth it? Here are a few things I think they could improve upon: 1. altMBA is too self-serve I had submitted 13 prompts and received only one feedback per prompt from coaches, with the remaining four feedbacks coming from fellow students. It was as if we were all left to our own devices. While the approach of students discussing prompts, writing answers, and giving feedback to each other has its merits, I would have appreciated more guidance from the team. It would have been helpful to have a coach walk me through the feedback I gave others, offer suggestions for improvement, and show me how to better receive feedback. 2. altMBA gives no lifetime access A few weeks after graduation, the program material will no longer accessible to us, which was somewhat disappointing. Additionally, our Slack channel would be deleted within a week. Perhaps there could have been more emphasis placed on maintaining access to these resources beyond graduation. Rather than having each student spend several hours exporting stuff from the platform, which to me is a waste of man hours. 3. altMBA has poor networking after the cohort ends. After deleting Slack, we are all asked to join a Facebook group with the broader altMBA network. I don't use Facebook, and many Gen Z and millennials have switched over to Tiktok and Instagram for their. It seems like the wrong place to build a business community. If I want to find out who's working for Canva in Europe, for example, it's not a particularly efficient process. It should've either been Slack or at least LinkedIn if they couldn't code their own platform. And the numbers speak. People aren't joining this FB group. The AltMBA alumni FB group has 2.6k members whereas their website says there are 5,000 alumni. On the other hand, Reforge handles this so much better - it allows me to search for anyone based on their job title, industry, name, company, or business model and get results in just a few seconds. Plus, with the ability to DM them right in our Slack group in just one click, it feels much more streamlined and efficient. ShiftNudge, which is a cohort based design course, also handles it much better. Even though it's a one-person team. You have one Slack channel for your cohort, and the others are for prompts. All ShiftNudge students stay in one Slack workspace and you can hop in and out of channels that are relevant to you. 4. altMBA's calendar sharing system was quite outdated I had to add the entire calendar manually. And it didn't book my calendar, which means I could get double booked. To avoid this, I had to duplicate events one by one or use Zapier. Moreover, some events weren't even added to the calendar, causing a few friends to miss out on all of them. I recommended some third-party tools that makes adding to calendars as easy as a single click and hopefully, the altMBA team incorporates this feedback. 5. You won't meeting everyone in the altMBA You'll meet 12-16 people during your time at the altMBA. You don't interact with everyone. altMBA reddit and other reviews Take my opinion with a grain of salt. Here's feedback from around the internet: CJHoss when asked if altMBA worth it: "For education on topics taught in business school, mostly yes. To help you land a new job, make a career pivot, build your professional network, that’s a big no." John Rau : For me, Seth Godin’s altMBA was worth it. However not all my classmates felt the same. Some considered it too “culty,” others found it an unrealistic time commitment, some thought it was too expensive, and others said they didn’t learn anything. David Richards : The primary reason I feel it was not worth it for me, was because I am addicted to Seth Godin. So a number of the workshops in the course were covering things I had already done. So I feel I wasn’t exposed to much I hadn’t already been exposed to. Also, lots of people in my batch loved the altMBA and wanted to bring it to their entire team. So, there's definitely an upside. If you're still on the fence, just get on a call with their team to understand what it would really entail. altMBA books and reading list AltMBA will send you a bunch of books which you can find here and they also share plenty of articles to read. I'm still trying to find the article that has links to each of these resources. If you find it, please let me know so I can link it. altMBA Scholarship The altMBA has an incredible scholarship program. If you're unhappy with the scholarship offer you've received, request to through a second interview and explain your situation. altMBA Free Download Downloading the altMBA isn't really fun. The real magic is in the community and the discussions you have with your learning groups. You're constantly receiving feedback, and are giving feedback. Downloading a set of 13 prompts will be futile. altMBA has a fair use policy which I doubt anyone would disrespect. altMBA Alternatives Read a lot of philosophy books. They'll teach you a lot of what altMBA seeks to teach without the human interaction. It should still work because I shared altMBA learnings with my brother who said he already learned all of this from his philosophy books. Build your own learning groups, where you journal together. I don't think it's the same as an MBA since it teaches soft skills and no hard skills. An altMBA won't pass off as an MBA. It's sort of a condensed mix of self-help books put into a simulator. The End I was able to recoup my investment, so it ended up being a great decision. Awesome to know that you're reading this review and being wise with your choices.

Duolingo's onboarding with a fun twist. I work as a growth lead, and my work is a venn diagram between design, growth, and marketing. This leaves me in a very unique position to balance acquisition needs, design decisions, and retention tradeoffs. 🥵 App Install Page Splash Screen Delayed Sign Up Screen Onboarding: What's your goal? Onboarding: Loading Screen Onboarding: Attribution Question Onboarding: Why do you have a goal? Onboarding: Summarize benefits Onboarding: Setup habit loop Onboarding: Allow Notifications Onboarding: Segment power users Onboarding: Social proof Onboarding: Launch product Onboarding: Ask for email Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi Lunkad Resources used to create this: Pageflows (screenshots), Growth.design (comic style), Neurofied (biases)

Netflix Onboarding with a fun twist I work as a growth marketing and growth product lead, and my work is a Venn diagram between design, growth, and marketing. This leaves me in a very unique position to balance acquisition needs, design decisions, and retention tradeoffs. Two things Netflix does right Adds filler pages. Auto-upgrades people to a reverse trial if they choose a cheaper plan. Thanks for reading! I plan to write more cases and would love a favor. Can you DM me or leave a comment below (no sign up needed) with what you liked / didn't like? I'm just trying to improve. Thank you! Best, Khushi Lunkad Resources used to create this: Pageflows (screenshots), Growth.design (comic style), Neurofied (biases)

Hey there, I'm Khushi, and I lead growth and marketing at Streamline . We're a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that serves designers. I joined Streamline two years ago as the first marketing and growth hire, and now we're used by most Fortune 500 companies, and we even won the Best Graphic Resource Award in 2022! Core Values At Streamline, our core values are centered around getting marketing right with designers, who are some of the most joyful, friendly, and empathetic people I know. They love life and their craft, so it's important that our marketing communication matches their fun-loving nature. Tips for Marketing to Designers Here are some tips that might help if you're marketing to designers: Keep your communication kind and joyful. Avoid being too direct or tactical. Share inspiration of what other people have created with your product. Designers' Characteristics Designers have high design expectations, so improving your website or app design is essential. But they're not demanding, at least not in my experience. When they make product suggestions, they do it kindly and offer feedback constructively. They're smart and can tell when someone's trying to trick them. They're generous and willing to give credit where it's due. They have an on-and-off need for products if they're freelancers. So make sure your churn flow accounts for natural churn. Conclusion I plan on building on this article over time, so if you're interested, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter below.

Starbucks ran a BOGO deal disguised as referral campaign Instead of the usual buy 1 get one offer, they encouraged people to bring a friend along. I want to discuss the untapped potential of Starbucks' disguised referral program. Getting a friend means bringing anyone — your boss, parents or even your ex. This gives people more possibilities to invite people. Instead of running a traditional, boring BOGO scheme, Starbucks turned it into a referral marketing campaign at scale. There were a few advantages New user activation Resurrection of a churned user Building habit loops for existing users and driving up loyalty Maximizing reach through influencer partnerships And Starbucks promoted the offer via influencer marketing, because distribution is everything. Did Starbucks Miss Out on Retaining New Customers? But I wasn't sure if they'd retain these newly acquired users. It wasn't clear from their campaign. So I went to Starbucks on the 7th of May to figure out what they'd do to retain new customers and drive up repeat purchases. Surprisingly, they were doing nothing. 🤔 We went in. Paid cash. Had the coffee. And we left. First impressions matter: Starbucks' overcrowding problem It was so crowded and people had to queue up outside the store in order to be let in. This was clearly not the kind of experience what Starbucks stands for — and why people pay for. So, it'd be harder to retain first-time visitors who have a sub-optimal experience. Missed opportunities to close the referral loop On the surface, I couldn't find any initiatives that were meant to close the referral loop. So I went to look more closely and I found some. 1. There were coupons printed out There was a pamphlet that could be used as a discount code. There was a time limit to redeem to get people into the habit. It looks like bi-monthly is the natural frequency that Starbucks is aiming to nurture users into. But it wasn't placed in a way where customers could see it. It was next to the cashier but was facing the baristas. The baristas didn't even give it to me when I placed the order, nor when I collected my order. The reason why this coupon is important is so that they'd nurture habit building and bring users the second time in the store. 2. Starbucks Card Starbucks also has a card system that requires you to load ₹ 200 before making your first purchase. In our case, it was possible to get our ₹ 400 order for ₹ 190 if we had loaded the card beforehand. However, we were rushed through the queue and didn't notice this option, nor did the baristas mention it. If we had used the card, Starbucks would have had our email or phone number to try and win us back if they noticed we were not returning. Additionally, we would have had ₹ 10 left in our account to spend. Oh and unfortunately, one of the offers on the page was no longer valid, so it was wasting our attention without providing anything in return, adding to our cognitive load. Conclusion In my opinion, Starbucks did a great job. One key takeaway for companies running buy 1 get 1 offers is to consider running them as give 1 get 1 offers. Additionally, it's important to actively promote good offers rather than relying on users to discover them on their own. Starbucks relied on influencer marketing to do so. Yes, they missed some opportunities to keep me engaged, like promoting the 25% discount more prominently or incentivizing new users to invite more friends. They could also streamline the Starbucks card creation process to prevent baristas from discouraging customers. Despite these issues, I'm certain Starbucks will consider this a successful campaign and will continue to refine it to generate even more revenue in the future. Thanks for reading my take! I write them to add to my swipe file and to remember it when the time comes.

Index Good landing pages examples My test with Framer Framer CMS tutorial (text-based) Framer CMS tutorial (video-based) SEO landing pages are better than blogs Veed has these landing pages that drive more traffic than all of its blog posts combined. See the traffic on SEMRush. 168k monthly visitors just from a handful of pages. SmallPDF also has similar landing pages. And each of these pages bring in millions of visits each month. Look at /edit-pdf driving 1.8M monthly visits! These landing pages are fairly simple to create compared compared to blog posts. I was able to create 20 of these in a few hours. Veed has a simple CTA that directs people to the main product. Veed also uses deeplinks to improve the UX and ranking. SmallPDF has an embed right within the landing page that people can interact with. My successful test with Framer I launched a quick and dirty test and let it simmer. It was something I did without a developer or a designer. Even with hardly any effort or any real optimization, you can see that it's growing in the right direction. It's also bringing paid conversions. A Framer tutorial for marketers Framer is a real competitive advantage so I created a little tutorial guide below if you wanted to check it out. I re-created Veed's landing page in Framer but you'd just have to copy/paste your Figma components in Framer. It's easier than you think. Then, create a simple landing page. It's a drag and drop editor, just like Figma. You can duplicate and create as many as landing pages as you want. I recommend creating 20 variations to test with and understand which performs. After you know what's working, you can convert a single landing page into a CMS template. A Framer CMS template lets you edit the content but the structure remains the same. Traditional CMS platforms make it easier to write blogs but to create landing pages, you need to go to a dev. Framer changes this status quo. You can duplicate pages in Framer's CMS just as easily. Framer CMS Pricing: On their basic tier ($15), you can create one CMS template, and on their premium tier ($25), you can create ten. In my opinion, Framer should have allowed everyone to use CMS for free, even if they prompted an upgrade pop-up when publishing the site. Restricting people from using the feature makes it harder to discover. However, I do not have enough knowledge about their product to comment. It could also be that the CMS is still underdeveloped and leads to churn if people see it. 🤷‍♀️ Scaling it up even further If you wish to scale it up to hundreds of posts, you can upload a CSV file to Framer, and it will auto-populate the data. You can use either ChatGPT (instruct it to output as a table) or Google Spreadsheet's OpenAI integration. Video tutorial for Framer landing pages and CMS Learn to create SEO landing pages with Framer in 5 minutes. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso The status quo for SaaS products is onboarding. But most onboarding funnels add more friction than they seek to remove. And if activation is your goal, there's only so many steps or friction that you can remove. At Streamline, we provide icons and illustrations. People can browse, customize, and export as many assets as they want. And it's not just the web app that is ungated. Our Figma and Lucid plugins as well as our desktop app is ungated or has open funnels. There's literally no barrier to using the product. Humble beginnings.. A indie-maker created a zip file with some icons. It went viral. People asked for more. And the indie maker turned into a full-blown company. After I joined, Streamline moved from a transactional based business model to a subscription based model. People had to sign up to use the free product back then. Streamline's current onboarding.. Check out our onboarding: 1. You land on the icons homepage with all free sets at the top 2. You click into a set 3. You customize colors and size before exporting in the format you want. 4. And that's it. No watermarks. No low-resolution images. No signup needed. No account. No credit card. No questionnaire. Note: We do ask users to attribute to us if they use for free. The free tier is generous enough for most users and acts us our growth loop to generate high quality backlinks. The good stuff of open funnels.. People experience the product without friction and are delighted because it delivers on what they were hoping to get. One big benefit for us is via programmatic SEO. The more time people spend on the page, Google rewards us and ranks us higher. Activation explodes because there are no onboarding steps that lead to drop offs. Everyone skipped the line. More product data, perhaps 10x more than what'd you'd see with a traditional gated experience. This helps us understand which searches have no relevant results and if some icon sets convert better than the others. More users to run experiments. Instead of relying simply on homepage A/B testing, we now have more users in the product. The not-so-good stuff of frictionless onboarding.. Tracking is extremely hard. You have to stitch pre-login and post-login data together. If your audience is tech-savvy, you have to invest in server-side tracking to bypass adblockers that block client-side. Around 40-60% of devs, designers and tech-savvy people have ad blockers turned on. Users once lost are lost forever. If you fail to activate a user, you can't hope to win them back via onboarding emails. Lifecycle campaigns won't cover up for an average product experience. You're setting up users to fail. Some users require more hand-holding or your product has complex features that you can't just let people explore on their own. No sunk costs to keep users invested. It's easy to quit and make another search on google. Conversion rates will be lower because more people explore the product. In a traditional setup, these people would've dropped off already in an onboarding. No segmentation data. Onboarding usually helps to get information around industry, company size, role, traffic source, etc. And without one, your cohort analysis capabilities are limited. No user data means harder to qualify users or pipe them into sales funnels. You can't even customize the emails based on what their role / jbtd is about. You can customize only based on what you've seen them use. To get people to sign up, you'd have give away even more value. We layered on a free trial to get people to sign up. At the end of the day, you have good friction and bad friction. You have to choose whether to keep both or remove both. Thanks for reading :) Khushi Lunkad

Hi, I'm Khushi, and I lead the growth and marketing efforts at Streamline. Streamline is an icon and illustration library with a generous free tier. In fact, our free tier is even more generous than the paid tiers of some of our competitors! The story of Streamline Streamline's founder released an open-source UI icon set consisting of over a thousand icons. This set achieved tremendous success and eventually led him to achieve financial independence. Lots of backlinks According to SEMRush, Streamline has nearly 100k backlinks, and Ahrefs rates our domain with a score of 76. Open-source products typically ask users to provide a backlink when they use the product. Open-source strategy For any successful business, two key elements are necessary: an audience and a revenue strategy. By creating a (good!) open-source product, you can effectively address the first part of the equation. It's important to note that "free" and "open-source" are different concepts. Freemium models offer some free features but place restrictions, while open-source provides everything possible and more. Solving revenue Generating revenue becomes more challenging when users' needs are already met with a free product. Moreover, Streamline is not the only open-source product available in the market. Companies like Google and IBM are also competing for the same market share. The history and the future We observe an increasing number of companies developing a defensible strategy based on open-source. If the paid product focuses on managed services while the free product is self-hosted, an open-source offering effectively discourages newcomers from entering the market. Examples : Red Hat: For a long time, Red Hat sold services for open-source software and scaled it with human resources. Hadoop: The paid tier had more intellectual property than the open-source product, but scalability was challenging due to imperfect user experience. between the two products. Streamline: Streamline represents a third-generation open-source software. It builds differentiated intellectual property around the open-source core and offers differentiated open-core software as a service. (I use "open-core" because that's the most commonly used term to refer to Streamline). People pay for more than just support, as they gain access to the Figma plugin, Lucid plugin, a desktop app, and ten times more icons than the free tier provides. Distribution-first, not product-first Although this viewpoint may be controversial, I believe more founders should consider a distribution-first strategy rather than a product-first strategy. At the very least, this approach ensures that your company won't fizzle out in the early stages. Take Netflix as an example—its biggest growth driver is the fact that it comes pre-installed in set-top boxes. By solving the distribution aspect, you can buy time and gather more user feedback, which is essential for success! Thank you for reading! Disclaimer: Opinions, insights and everything is pretty much mine. So, take it with a grain of salt!

Strongly advocating to set up a feedback collection system is perhaps one of the most impactful things I've recently done. It allows people provide feedback without being bothered by a chain of replies from customer support. Today, we have a very simple form which pre-populates as much information as possible (email, plan, Mixpanel ID, etc). This is how the form looks like for logged in users... For users without an email addresses, we ask them to share it. It's not a mandatory question to have fewer drop offs and more feedback. The Case Against Feedback Historically, our team received feedback via customer support tickets, tweets to our brand account, or replies to our marketing emails. So, it's not like there's zero feedback coming in! What this does is that there's no trigger moment that can push your team to add a feedback tool. Without a trigger moment, motivating someone to take action becomes more challenging. Inherent Culture and Beliefs If your company doesn't have a simple feedback collection system in place, the feedback loops take far longer to cycle through. As someone working in growth, shorter feedback cycles is crucial! It's our bread and butter. If you don't have a feedback tool, it's likely because there's of an inherent culture to not ask for feedback for reasons such as these: So, it's hard to make a case for adding a feedback button and using tools like UserSnap that demand a certain level of development support. But...I absolutely wanted a feedback collection tool I had my own reasons for this... Feedback from multiple channels can be delayed. If it's not easy enough, people will just not do it. Earlier, when people hit an error page, our ask to them was publicly tweet at us. 😅 I'd rather connect our designers to our users so they don't have to take my word for why a certain design decision or a product decision can hurt us. It's a way the entire company becomes more customer-centric and learn together instead of having varying levels of understanding about our customers. I was unofficially proclaimed as the best bug hunter at Streamline. Sometimes I can be a bit nitpicky too so having a large enough audience do that at scale gives me more mental peace. Feedback is a gift and you can never have enough of it! Marketing was being asked to add a feedback collection email in the lifecycle email campaigns, which isn't the ideal place to ask for feedback IMO. So, how did we deploy a feedback collection system? One thing I've learned is that you have to let people make decisions for themselves. Your job is to provide them with information and share the context. Then encourage them to react to trigger moments. And prime them into getting to that decision. It's pretty much like sales. Selling isn’t something we do to people. We do it with them. People buy products; we don't sell. Similarly, I can't make decisions for people with higher authority. I do it with them. The tricky thing about feedback is that stakeholders need to experience it to know its value. And they can't experience it unless they implement a solution. Our Trigger Moment: Streamline was launching a redesign and rebrand! It was a huge change — new logo, new branding, new UX, new monetization plans. A massive amount of team work and months of work! This could have been a significant trigger moment but it was heightened by the fact that we had to ship earlier than planned to meet a certain deadline. So, we had to rely on our users quite a bit to tell us incase we missed out something major. But even still, it was challenging to install a software like UserSnap because it required dev resources at a time where we were constrained. For us, we have tools like Tag Manager that make integrating software too easy. But for product people and devs, they are usually more wary of the integration costs. There's more management, more setup, more time, reliability issues etc. So we ended up embedding tally.so which is an alternative to Google Forms or Typeform. Now Tally isn't great as a feedback tool because it doesn't get us console data or any other data that is needed for better bug reporting but it gets us started on the right track. It was easy to implement and I bet we will graduate us to a more sophisticated tool in the future. Did implementing Tally save us time? Maybe not - it probably took us the same amount of time as it would have to implement UserSnap. Final Thoughts Stakeholders were surprised how often feedback came in. Interestingly, I was surprised that it didn't come in as frequently as I thought it would. So, I guess everyone either under-estimated or over-estimated! 😅 It saved us a lot of time and revenue. For example, we found out that our pricing pages had a mismatch. A simple typo led to lost revenue. We shipped new features that broke people's workflow. And all this feedback came pouring in. Feedback is very costly. People spend time away from your product writing feedback so make sure you don't ask too much of it! Our team was very swift in getting user feedback into the product. We shipped things in days, not weeks! Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

A while back, I had to run A/B tests to improve the activation rate. If you've never run in-product A/B tests before, it can be a little overwhelming so here's a simple guide on how to get started. The first test The first test we conducted showed a significant lift, increasing our core action from 14% to 21%. It was a tiny change, but it made a huge impact. And got buy-in to run more experiments. The second test After we working on activation, we went a bit deeper making sure each part of the funnel was tested. We found a user insight that we wanted to actively solve for. The result? If you look at the data below, you can see that the percentage of people that successfully went and selected a plan increased by 28%. And all other health metrics improved. The test concluded that if site traffic remained constant, we had improved trial starts by 6%. I also want to acknowledge that it was a relatively big change (involved positioning and messaging) that required a week of design and dev support. When we first launched the test variant, the test failed. So, we watched some Hotjar recordings. Discovered a few bugs and some design flaws. Everyone jumped in to help and we quickly fixed it. Had we lost faith in the test early on, we wouldn't have done anything to improve it. You can start via these 3 ways. I've over-simplified them so you know where to look and what to look for. Option 1 Step 1) Use a feature flagging tool like Flagr to conduct A/B tests. Developers will create two different environments (control and test). Step 2) Then send that data to Mixpanel, linked with the users' device IDs. Step 3) Next, analyze the data in Mixpanel. Mixpanel will directly calculate statistical significance for you, which is helpful. Option 2 Step 1) Send data from Segment directly to a tool like Statsig . Or via code. I chose Statsig because it was used by companies like Notion, Microsoft, Flipkart. It was self-serve (no need to speak to a sales rep to get started). They also offer a nice startup program if you wanted that? Statsig really speeds up the process of running experiments. You get to see all your metrics easily and can filter users with the user profile data that works best for you. I haven't completely explored the product myself, so it's a good idea to do some research on your own. In my own journey, I've evaluated Eppo, Optimizely, Taplytics, Split.io, and Launchdarkly. I finally chose Statsig. Step 2: Conduct experiments in Statsig. The process is similar: developers set up an experience, and you run a test, sending data to Statsig. Step 3: Then make a decision Option 3 Step 1) Utilize the experimentation tool in your analytics platform, like Mixpanel Experiments . Step 2) Ask developers to code the experience and run the test. What to test? To collect qualitative data for this test, I sent an email to users who signed up but did not activate in the product, asking for clear reasons why they didn't. It worked well but only after a bit of tweaking (adjust copy, timing etc). Here's the final template that worked well (h/t to Hillary for sharing): Subject : Brutal feedback for {company name} Body : Hi {first name}, I noticed that you signed up for {company name} but never did {core action}. Any chances you'd share why?—even a single sentence would go a long way in helping us improve the platform. Thanks! {founder's name} Founder at {company name} Start here with the user research if you want. Then validate with data. And finally, move on to building your test using the three options I shared above! Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

Everyone wants to build with AI but it's much harder to find an article from the perspective of an AI researcher, who experiences it from the other side. So, I invited Joy to write this article. He's also my brother :) Joy's experience spans both large-scale initiatives and resourceful projects on tight budgets. He's done a few cool things: Worked with the Government of India's Meteorological as well as the Agricultural department to build models for them. Was awarded a research grant of $2.8M from Google to invest in his AI research. He's also worked with me at Streamline. If you're looking to build with AI for your SaaS/tech org, reach out to him on Linkedin or via this email joylunkad@gmail.com . This blog is written to help anyone who wants to build something using AI but cannot figure out where exactly. It helps you build a strong intuition about what AI can do, especially for you, so you know how to find problems that can be solved and have a preliminary idea about how expensive it might be to build it. So let's dive right into it. What can AI do? Generally, I want you to think it can AT LEAST do whatever humans can do, given ENOUGH data and compute. Any process that has the following structure and satisfies the following constraints has an extremely high chance of being solvable by AI - Input → Some Intelligent Processing → Output Where, 1. There is readily available input and output data, or it can be procured. 2. The input contains all the necessary information for a human to generate an accurate output. There is no need to include the person's skilled prior knowledge or general knowledge in the input. And, If prior knowledge is needed to solve the problem, then you should be able to formulate it as another solvable problem, ie, follows that structure and also satisfies the constraints. Are there any sharp bits that I should keep in mind? These being the only constraints just goes to show how many problems in the world are just waiting to be solved. But just because a problem is solvable, doesn’t mean it is feasible to build a solution. Gathering enough data and compute can be extremely expensive. In general, the lesser the prior knowledge that needs to be built in, the cheaper and easier it gets. And if a problem requires a ton of prior knowledge but someone else has already incorporated it into another model, the costs to train an AI become significantly cheaper. More data and more compute almost always translate into better results and similarly, if insufficient, the AI will be brittle, and make unpredictable and hilariously stupid mistakes. You can also try breaking down a big unsolvable problem into multiple small solvable problems, chaining their inputs and outputs in such a way that their ends look like the ends of the original big problem. You can do this in cases where you can't find enough data for the big problem. The benefit of solving a big problem without breaking it apart is improved performance on the final task. This is usually a very big boost in performance comparatively. The benefit of chaining smaller problems when you could solve a big problem is that it usually significantly reduces the expenses. What do I do after identifying a problem that fits in that structure and satisfies the constraints? I recommend that you have a simple discussion about it with an AI expert. There are many datasets and models out there, either open-sourced or behind an API, that can be used to bypass the expensive steps. This talk will help you get a crude idea about how feasible it actually is, and more often than not, it would be much cheaper and faster to build than you originally imagined and at the same time, more novel/revolutionary. I could go into detail about patterns and nuances to look out for that might help you identify and differentiate between ideas that are genuinely hard/expensive and low-hanging fruits but that might make this a very long and exhausting read with diminishing returns, and even then I wouldn’t be able to make an exhaustive list. You now know everything you need to know to identify solvable problems in AI. The blog ends here but if you want to develop some pattern recognition and clear up any misconceptions, I wrote examples of some problems being solved by AI. I highly recommend going through them. Example 1: Art Generation (Eg: Midjourney) I am using this as an example as it's not exactly obvious how it fits into the structure and satisfies the constraints. So, this example shows how far those rules can be stretched, helping you find opportunities where it looks like there aren’t any. If we rewrite the problem, we might get a clue. How about “creating realistic images and art from a description”? This allows us to put the problem into the structure → 1st constraint - For the input & output data, we could use the billions of images scattered across the internet, and we could use their captions as their descriptions. 2nd constraint - For an artist, a text-based description is enough to create a related piece of art. We can now be sure that it is possible to build such an AI tool. These captions are not always the description of the image, and also a single image can be described in many ways. Thus, our data is not perfect. Also, our model needs to learn a lot of prior knowledge about people, animals, objects, etc as well as some understanding about the world. We now know that these issues will make it extremely expensive to build it. Example 2: Automatically Detecting Fractures from X-Rays This is a pretty simple example, but it might clear up any misconceptions. Prior knowledge is only required if it is completely absent from the input and output data completely. If it is implicitly present, ie, it can be learnt from the relationship between the input and the output data, then we don't need additional steps. X-rays (input) → A doctor examining the X-ray → Report (output) 1st constraint - Hospitals should have huge and high-quality databases containing X-ray images and their reports. 2nd constraint - X-rays, maybe MRIs in really hard cases, are all a doctor needs. As for prior knowledge, the doctor only needs the knowledge of the skeletal structure which is available to the AI in the input data. Now that we know it is possible to solve it, and it will be relatively easy. Example 3: Self-Driving Cars Vision from the car's cameras (input) → A driver → some driving decision (output) 1st constraint - For the input, we require extensive sensory data from car cameras. As for the output, correct driving decisions can be collected from the steering wheel, accelerator, brake, etc. This data doesn't exist naturally, necessitating the preemptive installation of cameras and sensors on cars. Additionally, we must persuade customers to purchase these equipped cars to gather the necessary data. This poses a significant challenge, but it is achievable. 2nd constraint - For a human, it's just decent motor skills and some practice, hence it is self-contained, ie, just cameras are enough. Now that we know it is possible to solve it. Let's figure out how expensive it might be. This looks easy, but a sharp bit here is that it is very difficult for AI bots to do things in the real world. The input data must be all-encompassing, capturing every aspect of driving, from road conditions and weather effects to the unpredictability of human behaviour. The greater the amount of implicit prior knowledge hidden within the input data, the more extensive and varied the data required. Although the problem remains solvable, it's harder than it looks. Example 4: Facial Recognition for Security Current and verified images of the target’s face (input) → A person checks if it's the same person → Approves Entry (output) 1st constraint - Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple can ask users to tag themselves and others in images. Using this, you can create pairs of current and verified images. 2nd constraint - Self-contained, and no prior knowledge is needed. Now that we know it is possible to solve it, and it will be relatively easy. Thanks for reading! Joy Lunkad Linkedin | Email: joylunkad@gmail.com