"What became clear in our reflection and research is that we made a few mishaps. And there was one in particular that we wanted to fix ASAP."
Lesson one, don’t gatekeep your aha moment. Deliver value to users right away or say goodbye.
Quick background. Smallstep is building a product-led go-to-market. This approach can be amazingly powerful when done correctly and has produced some of the world's strongest performing companies. The core concept is the organic adoption of products, not sales adoption of products. It worked for Zoom, Slack, Calendly, Expensify, Dropbox, Hubspot, and many others. Our product launch looked to emulate these companies but fell short in a few key areas. This is the first in a series of posts highlighting a few of the go-to-market mishaps we are making here at Smallstep. Yes, you read that right, a blog series on where we went sideways and some suggestions on how to avoid them in your world.
So let’s get started. First up, 'making your users wait forever for that aha moment.' Or to put a positive spin on it, 'filtering users to only the truly dedicated through an involved onboarding process'. But before we get into that, a quick summary of what you might have missed.
How Did We Get Here?
It started with a zinger of a blog post from Mike Malone that set the direction for what was to become our first product. The post created a strong reaction that we parlayed into over 100 good discussions with would-be users. We quickly formulated an MVP and shared the details with the team. To prove we could do it, we spent a day building a throwaway prototype. With a prototype in hand, we set out demoing the product to anyone that would listen. The reactions were SUPER positive and translated into a good number of early access users to help prove out the value. We love our early access users. They helped more than they know and quickly became friends. Plus they gave us direct and honest feedback:
With our core functionality in place and real-world users pushing us to build the best product, we focused on the final mile, onboarding. We created user self-service. No sales calls or required professional services, just try it and find your aha moment.
Post continued on smallstep.com
Top comments (0)