Here are 8 product design concepts that enabled founders to create better mousetraps, unlock faster growth, some beyond $1M, some even beyond $30M annual recurring revenue.
#1: Practice a Customer Mindset
Product design tactic, unlocking growth, brining over $1M ARR – #1: Practice a Customer Centric Mindset.
This sounds obvious.
But I believe it’s more of a mindset you need to continuously practice.
Practicing a customer centric mindset means practicing deep empathy for the persona you are trying to serve, which requires continuous reflection, being curious, asking better questions, and listening not only to customers answers, but more importantly, to their actions.
Linden Tibbets of IFTTT, who is reportedly making $1.7M in annual revenue from 650 customers as of 2022, learned from the games design industry to always be thinking about the customer:
“What I liked about games and movies was you were automatically oriented around the, the, the, the user, the person that was consuming it, right? Like you, every decision you make was just naturally, whether you were a designer or not. Like you were thinking about this other person and you were building something for them”
#2: Make Customer Feedback Visible to Everyone
Product design tactic – #2: Make customer feedback visible to everyone.
Some of the hardest decisions you need to make is what to focus on, and exactly to develop. One thing that helped me make better product decisions and create better team alignment is to record discovery conversations with customers or prospects. With these recordings – other team members can listen, become more empathetic with customers perspectives, and make their own judgement of what prospects said and what they meant when they gave a particular piece of feedback. By doing it you get Everyone in the team to be accountable to continuously learn about customers viewpoints. Rather than only me, or another product lead responsible for prioritising product features, I aim for creating a process of an open culture, and alignment towards what are we doing and why, starting with what customers said and how do we serve them best. So it’s not about who is the boss, or has a better brilliant idea around the table right now. It’s not about who is right. It’s about a process of being data driven towards getting it right.
#3: Remove
Product design tactic – #3, brining $6M ARR : Remove.
When you design your product – remove features until there’s nothing else to remove.
I love the story of when Michaelangelo was asked how did he create the beautiful sculpture of David. He answered – that he merely chipped away everything that wasn’t David.
I love the quote by David Girouard, the Co Founder and CEO of Upstart saying “simplicity is a feature”:
“I think the single biggest thing I have learned that I would uh, pass along to my younger self is to fight the complexity as absolutely hard as you can, particularly in enterprise technology. 📍 📍 Because starting with a product, the usual thing of large customers and everybody else pushing complexity in your product and trying to serve every 2% of users who have different needs. That’s part of it and maybe that’s the obvious one people know, 📍 📍 but the organizational complexity, you know how your sales teams are structured, how sales teams are comped, everything about enterprise businesses pushed toward real challenging complexity that really ultimately becomes inertia and, and slows things down. Hard to bring new people on because they take three months to understand the price list, things like that. Right? So I think if there’s anything I’ve learned is like it’s, it is the CEO’s job more than anything, to just, to just realize you have to say no a ton to a ton of things, and that the 📍 📍 📍 📍 simplicity is a feature of every part of whether it’s again, a product 📍 organization, compensation no matter what you want to, like simplicity is a feature and you should fight like hell for it as much as you can.”
Goldcast reached $600K MRR in under 3 years. By focusing on simpler onboarding for event organizers, removing advanced features which required too complex understanding of the product.
When I asked – which product features or concepts contributed the most to simplicity and better onboarding, here’s Palash, CEO and co founder – response:
“So there were two aspects of do it. One is the attendee experience itself. So as a buyer, I would first see how it looks like as an attendee, before I even decide to talk to a customer. And so our attendee experience was actually pretty simple. A lot of players at that time were optimizing, actually all of them were optimizing towards adding as many things as they can,
like adding speed, networking, or adding a bunch of things like surveys and polls. So what happened is it started looking clunky and the attendee experience was not that great. So we focused on simplicity, saying okay, your brand and content is front and center will make things simple so that you can engage people and deliver that brand while making it not overwhelming.
So that was one. The second part is the ease of use for the organizers. So events can be super complex. Events when, Especially as you go beyond two, three hundred people. You want a lot of things and then there is like a good balance of how much configurability you add and where you say no.
And I traded on that very fast in the four months we were in beta. So we said okay, anything that requires a marketer to understand, like an advanced concept that they don’t already know, we should not do it. So it’ll just be a few toggles, a few things that you can contribute, but not beyond that. So we deliberately cut on functionality, which was a risky decision at that time.
But our bet was that a simpler sort of first onboarding and adoption experience will be worth it for them to realize, okay maybe I don’t need those many bells and whistles”.
#4: The One Thing
Product design tactic unlocking growth, brining $30M ARR – #4: Make a product that does only one thing.
This tactic is taking the previous one ‘remove’ all the way to the extreme. Design the product to do only one thing. One Bryan Clayton reached $3M/mo with GreenPal lawn making matchmaking service. His best advice designing a product is following the law of the red route. Which resembles the red route in London which can only go one way. Founders make the error of trying to build their product with many options to mimic the likes of AirBnB. You are not them. At the beginning, you have to design for one thing:
“We design for Homer Simpson drunk. That’s how easy it has to be. And, uh, when it comes to product design, I read a book, uh, on product design. And there’s this one little simple here is that called the, uh, the law of the red route. And in London, uh, there’s this red line that goes down the center of the street and that’s the line at the bus goes down and it can only go one way. And so the law of the red route is when you’re designing a product, the user can only go one way. Uh, could literally you start here yeah. In here and you can’t go anywhere else. I think a lot of new founders look at, uh, established companies like Airbnb or Expedia or whatever. And like, you could do all these million things with it. You’re not them. You gotta do. You gotta be the best in the world at one thing. And that’s how we’ve approached building green palette. It’s the best in the world of getting so many, come make your grass short.”
#5: Pre Integrate into Their Workspace
Product design tactic unlocking growth #5: Pre integrate into their workspace.
Nadia Fischer of Witty.works started her language tool which helps to write more inclusively, as a web app, but listened to feedback that customers don’t want to use a new dedicated app, but rather, they want the tool to help them write more inclusively within the tools they already work with such as email clients, and notion, so she had made the bold decision to cut $23K MRR coming from the web app, and rebuilt the product from scratch as a browser extension.
“We used to have an MVP with which we tested the market to make sure that are we really sure that actually um, inclusive language is something that companies would spend money on. And with that MVP already that was also a self serve um, product. We reached an MRR within uh, 8 months of $23,000, so very quick, but we realized that it had flaws. One was that it was really limited only to job ads. And uh, many companies told us yeah, but we don’t want to write inclusively only when it comes to job ads, right? We want to write inclusively everywhere. And the other thing was also that it was a web app. So you had to kind of switch away from your internal systems to that web app. And that’s why we then um, build the browser plug in. And with that browser plug in, we are now live um, since January with the freemium and with the premium um, since April and we already see here the first contracts, coming through”.
#6: Integrate Deeply
Product design tactic unlocking growth #6: Integrate deeply. According to Palash Soni, co founder and CEO of Goldcast, the key is not merely doing many integrations on the surface level but rather nailing fewer integrations that really matter, a lot more deeply:
“The core sort of value prop in how we hooked people for the long term was our integrations. So again, our focus here played a big role.
So a lot of people were claiming that they have integrations with 50 players, but integrations are hard to get and they mean different thing for different people. And we basically picked two integrations, Marketo and HubSpot which is 80% of the market in B2B and we really killed it in those two.
And that helped us a lot in the early days”
#7: Replace Integrations
Product design tactic, bringing $100K MRR in 4 weeks – #7: Replace customer experiences that require to integrate and glue multiple products, into one product with all the functionality built organically into that product, dismissing the need for cumbersome integrations.
Jon Darbyshire invested in dozens of startups and realized that people are wasting time glueing integrations together. So he founded SmartSuite and reached $100K MRR in under 4 weeks, by investing in, and launching a product that replaced the need to glue a few systems together.
“I just want to have one product that’s like a business operating system that I can just run my business on and interact with people and do my work. And not have think so much about, these systems and how I begin to build them out. You know, Using one off systems and products, uh, to kind cobble together to solve that problem.
So the original idea for SmartSuite and the business pain that we saw was that people are working with six or eight different products to get their jobs done. Could we maybe, uh, bring that down to one to two, maybe to three different products that they need to use each day to do their job”.
Workee grows 30% M-o-M by pre packaging a website builder, a payment system, and a scheduling system, replacing the cumbersome alternative where solo-preneuers used to glue and integrate these different tools together:
“We were thinking about the market and we will think that on the market they were like marketplaces. A lot of different marketplaces and they’re like a lot of different website builders, a lot of different, uh, video calls, et cetera, et cetera. And our first, thoughts, since two years from now, was to put everything in one place to have it like without extra integrations just out of the box and have it free for our users”.
#8: Drive Customers Faster to the Aha Moment
Product design tactic – unlocking 30% month over month user growth- #8: Drive customers faster to aha moment.
Users give you a few seconds of grace before they are being distracted by the next thing. If you don’t deliver clear value during those seconds, your activation rate will suffer. Workee transitioned from stalling growth to %30 month over month growth by shortening the time customers realise an aha moment to a few seconds. Throughout onboarding, they pulled information from their users social media to automatically populate and create a personal website with as little user input as possible.
“So before it was like paying or filling all the data uh, about yourself. Now it’s just like pick, pick up the photo, uh, click domain and click publish three buttons and you already have it up and running. That is very important to you because you are getting about 10, 20 seconds of your user’s attention after sign up”.
Nadia of witty.works tested a few product onboarding flows and found that the fastest you drive users to the Aha moment the lower your churn:
“what improved a lot was something very simple actually was the product onboarding. So we tested several product onboarding cycles. And we realized, this one works really well and just by then finally choosing that one and making the aha moment very early. So you kind of download it and you click once and then you see already how it works. You can test it out directly yourself that really made churn come down very quickly because people realize Oh okay, this is how it works. And this has to be very fast, especially when you kind of going into product led growth as a go to market strategy. The aha moment has to be very soon. And um, yeah it took us some while to find that out, but once we did the churn went down uh, immediately.”
While these design concepts are simple to understand, they are not easy to implement. Implementation is more art than science, but if you do, the path towards your product scaling to $mm revenue is going to be a lot easier.
