Zero to 1: Product Fundamentals for Go-To-Market

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Top Highlights

• We never used “chat” to describe what we were building. Rather, it was “a messaging app for teams” and later the more abstract and broader “Where work happens” once we’d shifted into delivering our platform experience.

• When anyone can sign up and immediately start using the tool, it’s very important to position and package the product correctly. Positioning is how you tell customers what your product is.

• This is why you don’t need to specifically focus on selling to managers. Yes, it’s their credit card. But it’s their ego, too. They want to be liked, and if their team wants a tool, they’ll try to buy it for them.

• The ability of a brand new user to understand and complete the core workflows of a product determines whether your product delivers immediate value to your customers

• onboarding the most critical part of any growth strategy

• organic adoption.

• great onboarding kickstarts organic growth and expansion.

• Before there’s a team, a single person has to have a great experience using the product and want to share it with other people.

• Determine what the top 2–4 capabilities or workflows of your product are, and use those as the onboarding experience.

• When we say “surprise and delight” or “product polish” we really mean the feeling of This is cool that accompanies a novel experience

• People want to both be seen feeling masterful and they seek to affirm their positive experience by checking in, This is cool… right?

• Prominent in-product invites can capture the intent to share socially

• Follow-up emails and social push notifications should deliver actions that create customer value instead of trying to “educate” your customer on the product. Show don’t tell.

• saw how pairing email outreach with a great onboarding experience helped drive activation.

• Lag kills good feelings

• broken product promises and lack of customer service destroys feelings of affinity that a customer has with your brand.

• Resurrection of product qualified users is a growth lever you will want to use, but one you can easily negate by treating former customers with disrespect.

• The opportunity and risk of a self-service product is that anyone can sign up and immediately start using the tool.

• very important to position and package the product correctly so that prospective customers form the right assumptions about what the product experience will be like.

• It’s much easier to hone a message for individual stakeholders from an existing go-to-market built for a much broader base; conversely it’s very hard to broaden a message tuned to individual stakeholders into a message that will inspire broader adoption.