I’m Akshay Pruthi, an entrepreneur who loves to build products from the ground up. Over the past 6 years, I have built multiple products from scratch and scaled them to millions of users. This is my attempt to share our most important lessons from building one of those apps: Alora (Android) and Alora (iOS). 🤗

Note — Calm Sleep is my side hustle that I started with Ankur Warikoo, Anurag Dalia, and a team of 3.

Every week I’m going to write about the different problems that we faced while building the app from the ground up. This week, I am going to cover how to decide what your MVP should look like, and how to go about launching it in a month.

After conducting thorough research on the idea, it was time to get our hands dirty. 🚀

I always get excited at this stage of the company; so many open problem statements to think through, prototyping, wireframing, coding. Urgh! Goosebumps!!

Gear up, this is going to be an interesting article. We are going to cover:

1. The problem areas that we need to solve.
2. What’s the minimum you need to do with your product to solve the problems plaguing you?
3. How to navigate from ideating the MVP to building wireframes to high fidelity and finally shipping the product.

Let’s dive in! 🤓

What are we really solving? 🤔

It’s always good to document heavily at this stage. Why? It helps you in the journey that awaits you if you find yourself in murky waters somewhere down the line, looking for reasons that prompted this journey in the first place.

As the first step, we created a company strategy document. Here’s the template for it.

We tweaked a bit for Calm Sleep. Here’s how we did it:

Let’s jump to the next question.

How to approach making your MVP? 👨‍💻

I remember getting on a call with Ankur where we discussed:

1. What was the ideal product we could think of?

An app that users can approach to get the desired content format (sleep sounds, stories, or meditation), and fall asleep.

1. What was the minimum we could start with to test our hypothesis?

The easiest and fastest way to test our hypothesis was to launch with sleep sounds as it was easy to find and cheaper to experiment with.

This forced us to think deeply about what our MVP should look like.

Key factors to decide on the MVP 🪜

1. Tech cost should be low [Developer time ~ 10–15 days to build]
2. Experimentation cost should be low [Even if we fail at this, we would have a plethora of learnings to help us to do a better job with the launch of sleep stories or meditation]
3. The impact visibility should be high [with fewer moving parts on the app, we will have higher visibility on what users are doing on the platform]

Note: I have seen many founders often strive for the perfect product, whatever that means. The arguments that they give to themselves:

“This is the most important feature for our app. Without this, users won’t like the app”

Or

“We need to have a perfect product to launch as it’s going to be the only chance”

Or

“Let’s just do this extra bit. It will help users do ABC”

The worst you can do to your product at this stage is launch all possible features at once. What this essentially does is:

1. Lowers the user learning experience.
2. Reduces the chances of success for multiple experiments.
3. Complicates the product.

Framework for MVP

A detailed approach is mentioned here 👇

I will try to touch upon the key aspects to take care of while building the MVP.

1: Aim for a Uni-Dimensional User Journey

While making the MVP, you should strive for a phenomenon that I like to call a “uni-dimensional user journey”. Think of the product like a story with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.

For instance, Launch the app > Select the sound they want to play > Play the sound > Sleep > Collect feedback.

Benefits of creating a ‘uni-dimensional user journey’ during its infancy:

1. Helps users achieve their end goal quickly.
2. Attracts focused feedback.
3. Opens up room for experimentation

2: Create a Wireframe and Kick it Off With Your Dev Team

It’s always better to create a wireframe with pen paper and kicking it off with the development team to estimate the time it will take to build your ‘baby’. Personally, if my dev team claims that it is going to take over a month to build, I hit refresh and restart from Step 1. A sweet spot for your MVP should be around 15–20 days.

This is how our first MVP looked like which was built within 15 days.

If you want to play around with our first prototype, it’s here.

Back then, it seemed the simplest we could do to start with. Wait for my next blog where I will talk about how we made this simpler.

To facilitate this, I had an amazing lean team. Kudos to:

Ankur Warikoo: The man who gives us direction!

Rajan Dube: Currently in college, a design maestro. 🍥

Hiresh Pillay: Currently in school, the coding kingpin. 👨‍💻

Anurag Dalia: The usual suspect, my partner in almost every product I have built over the last 3 years. 🤝

Nagajuna Mullapudi: The data scientist who has always given us a reality check on where we stand at any given point in time. 📈

Concluding with the Final Checklist to Launch the MVP:

1. Document your company strategy doc.
2. Document your user stories and see if your user journey is uni-dimensional.
3. Create a rough prototype and collect feedback from within and outside the team
4. Iterate until you get it right and keep your experimentation cost to a minimum.
5. Start coding and avoid making any changes to the design once finalized.
6. Input the right data analytics to conduct quantitative research after the launch.

We launched our MVP. But early signs were bad. We saw poor retention. What to do next? 😕

The same will be answered in my next article

• How did we get our first 1000 users?
• Our Day 1 retention was ~19%. What did we do?
• What were the early bad signs?
• What were the early good signs?

Until next time 😉

Buy me a coffee here

1. Our Mental Model for research
2. We could have easily picked any idea we feel passionate about and started working on it. But why Calm Sleep?
3. The playbook on how to do research before jumping on any idea? 📋

Hey there! This is going to be a series of blogs covering how we came up with the idea of Calm Sleep, scaled it to over 700,000 users in less than a year with less than a $1,000 total investment. 🌱

I’m Akshay Pruthi, an entrepreneur who loves to build products from the ground up. Over the past 6 years, I have built multiple products from scratch and scaled them to millions of users. This is my attempt to share our most important lessons from building one of those apps: Calm Sleep. 🤗

Note — Calm Sleep is my side hustle that I started with Ankur Warikoo, Anurag Dalia, and a team of 3.

Every week I will publish an article about a different problem we faced while building Calm Sleep. This week, I am going to cover what helped us zero in on Calm Sleep as ‘It’.. This is what we are going to build. The Calm Sleep app — A competitor to Calm.

“Calm, the 7-year-old meditation app, says it’s now valued at $1 billion.”

When I read this article, I was amazed to see an app that helps people sleep or meditate achieve unicorn status. It was mind-boggling to discover people were willing to pay for a digital platform that helps them sleep. 😳

What’s more, the lack of competition to reach the pinnacle of this niche was not nearly as cut-throat as one would imagine. To be fair, entrepreneurs would never have thought that sleep was a problem they could solve without dipping their toes in the pharmaceutical pond.

Intuitively, it felt like sleep was something that everyone just did, which essentially means that the market had a crater that was primed to be filled.

With the advent and the popularisation of social media and mobile phones, issues like anxiety and restlessness have breached our lives. Not to mention the pandemic. This piqued our interest and prompted us to delve deeper into why it was worth exploring this problem area.

Mental Model for Research

It’s always good to have a mental model of things before setting off towards a new undertaking. If you are stuck somewhere, it helps by brainstorming basic fundamentals. The mental model for research would be:

1. Learn the basics: It’s important for one to learn the basics of the realm you are operating in. So, we skimmed all the information available about Calm, it’s competitors and industry articles. We documented them in an Excel sheet.
2. Learn from experts: Talk to people who have done significant work in the same field in the past. Learn from them, what worked, what didn’t work; for what you think you know might not be the complete story. So, reach out to experts in the field and get an understanding of the market. We reached out to many experts in the industry before we actually stepped in.
3. Set up a foundation: Use a broad understanding of the basic mental models of the world to bolster your understanding of the field.

We started doing our research. It was a simple 4-step process:

1. Read the reviews of all the top apps that are similar to Calm Sleep. 📒
2. Surf through online communities that are talking about sleep problems or are sharing their experiences around the problem.😴
3. Talk to the experts and gain insight into the core problem and the demands of the industry
4. Look at the data 🔢

Let’s dive into each one of these 🤓

Reading what people are talking about it

We dove into the deepest parts of the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, looking for apps similar to Calm.

We scrolled through almost 1,000 reviews to identify the gaps in these offerings.

“I was looking for an app to provide some basic soundscapes to help me fall asleep. I had zero access to any of them unless I paid the fee.”

“Will not renew the subscription. Only 1 author and very few different voices.”

“it’s too expensive for a student suffering from insomnia”

The following patterns emerged:

1. Users found the current solutions expensive.
2. Users liked to stick to a particular artist or a sound that worked for them.
3. Miniscule factors like the ending of a sound or the tone of the artist mattered to them and affected their sleep.

We studied our competitors and realized everyone was focusing on multiple things. We thought to ourselves, what’s the best form of meditation? The answer we got was Sleep.

“You meditate every day. It’s called SLEEP”, Ankur said.

It hit all of us hard.

We were almost convinced that we should do this. But we didn’t want our emotions to take the better of us. So we decided to immerse ourselves into further research.

Do we have people sharing their experiences on social media communities?

We went to Reddit and looked for the keywords around sleep. Subsequently, we stumbled across communities that were dealing with insomnia. When we read through the comments and the posts in these communities, we got further convinced that this was real, especially in regions like the US, UK, Canada, Australia.

We looked at the Google trends. The queries around ‘How to sleep’, ‘I can’t sleep’, were on the rise.

We also discovered sleep experts on Instagram who had garnered sizable communities around the pursuit of better sleep. We reached out to them, discussed core issues that people face, why they face them, what solutions are already there in the market and what solutions they recommend.

Our findings took us by surprise; what we never considered to be a big problem was a huge obstacle to people all over the world.

Looking at the Data Available

We wanted to know how many people are looking for similar apps and in which geographies. Therefore, we started exploring data from tools like App Tweak and Sensor Tower.

These tools offered us an insight into popular keywords around sleep and roughly how many people are looking for apps around the same issues.

The 2nd column in the following graphic represents the difficulty level to rank your keyword on the top and the 3rd column represents the popularity of the keyword out of 10.

It was evident from the data, that the demand was extremely high. When we started looking at it geographically, we discovered the demand was highest in countries like the United States, France, Spain, China, Australia.

This summarised the research cost. Now we had to figure out the tech cost to build such an app. With the help of Anurag, we came up with a basic version that could be built within 15 days from designs to shipping the product.

This was it. Our tech cost was not that high and we decided to move ahead with this idea.

Summarising, how you should do the early phase of research:

Question:

1. Is this a problem that is big enough for you to solve? You do this by checking who has solved this before, how they solved it, when they did it, and what was the market response to the solution?
2. You do the same by looking at the diverse feedback from people that have used similar solutions and posted about the same online, on various communities, reading reviews of various apps.
3. You validate your qualitative research by quantitative data. You do this by looking at Google Trends, ASO research, SEO research, app downloads across various apps and more.

In our next post, we will learn how we decide what our Version 1 should look like for the launch?

Here, I will broadly cover,

• How to narrow your user journeys down to the most crucial ones?
• How to avoid noise in your MVP?
• How will we know if this is working?
• A final checklist to launch the MVP.

Buy me a coffee here

How we came up with the idea of Calm Sleep. 💭 was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey there! This is going to be a series of blogs covering how we came up with the idea of Calm Sleep, scaled it to over 700,000 users in less than a year with less than a $1,000 total investment. 🌱

I’m Akshay Pruthi, an entrepreneur who loves to build products from the ground up. Over the past 6 years, I have built multiple products from scratch and scaled them to millions of users. This is my attempt to share our most important lessons from building one of those apps: Alora (Android) and Alora (iOS). 🤗

Note — Calm Sleep is my side hustle that I started with Ankur Warikoo, Anurag Dalia, and a team of 3.

Every week I will publish an article about a different problem we faced while building Calm Sleep. Here’s a preview of what you can expect from this series:

Article 1: How we came up with the idea of Calm Sleep. 💭

Here, I am going to cover:

1. Why we decided to build Calm Sleep over the other ideas we had. We had many ideas we felt passionate about, so why build this one?
2. The playbook on how to do research before jumping on any idea. 📋

Article 2: How we shipped our MVP in 15 days 🚅

Here, I am going to cover:

1. How to identify the most critical user journeys
2. How to avoid the “problem of plenty” in your MVP.
3. How will we know if this is working?
4. A final checklist to launch the MVP.

Article 3: The initial learnings from our launch.. How we dealt with early failure and how we overcame it 😕

Here, I am going to cover:

1. How we got our first 1000 users?
2. Our Day 1 retention was super low. What was our response?
3. What were the early bad signs?
4. What were the early good signs?

Article 4: How we used a North-Star metric to guide product decisions 🔢

Here, I am going to cover:

1. How did we decide on our North-Star metric?
2. The strategy that could help us bolster this metric.

Article 5: How we improved our retention from Day 1 ~20% to 40%? 🚀

Here, I am going to cover:

1. How we identified what’s missing.
2. What features we launched that helped boost the retention.
3. What was the role of data analysis in moving the numbers?

Article 6: How we leapfrogged our Day 1 retention to 70%.

Here, I am going to cover:

1. When your users tell you what to build.
2. On the journey of building new things, we forgot one most important thing.
3. How we activated the dormant users.

Some more articles will be published as and when we are ready to release more updates. Broadly, they will cover:

• When did we get to know it’s working. :D
• How a 2-day hackathon led to 20,000 installs
• The first step towards monetization.

Continuing with building in public..

A few days back, I conducted an AMA with TPF (The Product Folks community). I had a wonderful time answering questions about product and growth. A lot of people recommended to collate all the answers and share with the community. This blog post is dedicated to that.

Question:
“What are the important metrics to improve the MAU for
a. B2B apps (an extension for the SaaS the company is providing)
b. D2C apps
mostly looking at what metrics could be strengthened that helps the MAU rise to millions”

Answer:

Mostly my experience has been scaling social consumer apps. But I think this will help. The key metrics to focus on to increase the MAUs:

1. Referral rate: One customer brings how many more customers? Now there could be an easy way to go about giving a referral in your app. To excel in it, you need to take care of three things:
   a. Have a meaningful incentive for the referrer be it cash or credits or some product feature incentive which is of high demand.
   b. Incentivize the right behavior which means the referral reward should only payout when the new user has hit the goal asked to
   c. Make sure the program is at the heart of the product. It should be easily discoverable and should be prompted at various aha moments in the core product loops.
2. Lead to conversion rate: avg no of leads that end up becoming customers. This will help you with the lead qualities. If they are bad, it will help you raise the right questions to improve it.
3. 10x Value: This being really hard and very obvious, but I always prefer this over anything. Compare the existing solutions out there which solve the same problem as yours and see if yours is providing 10X value. Just for eg, GitPrime used to directly pick the progress of the engineers by scanning their git commits. Then, using that info, they used to provide beautiful insights to PMs on the health of the sprint. Compared to existing solutions where engineers have to go to tools and update their progress.

D2C apps:

In general for D2C, important metrics to consider:

• Repeats: How many times a customer is coming back to your platform to purchase the product. To crack this, go deep into the lifecycle of the customer and observe where all you can send a reminder to purchase. For eg, you buy shampoo every month or two. So, your monthly mailers around special offers could run around that time period which creates repeat behaviors.
• No of SKUs: Continuing from the above metric, I have seen with more SKUs around a category, the brand recall gets better. Good to keep the customers excited and launch more SKUs with time.

Other important metrics to track:

CAC: Customer acquisition cost

LTV/CAC: Lifetime value / CAC. It’s a signal of customer profitability

Question:
I wanted to ask, what are the 3–4 most important metrics I should focus on to get my first 1000 customers once I have 100 users

Answer:

Read this (https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got) and this (https://www.akshaypruthi.com/post/10m-installs-in-8-months-revealing-randomly-club-s-secret-sauce)

Brief:

1. When moving from 100 to 1000, you still are early and discovering whether people love the product for its current value or not. This means you need to talk to your 100 customers and gather as many insights as you can to understand why these 100 customers love your product.
2. You need to create a strong referral program for them to be able to get more customers to your platform. One of the questions asked earlier: “Referral rate: One customer brings how many more customers? (Can read about this in the earlier asked question).
3. Create something for people to talk about. Human beings live on gossip. This is an insight. Use this insight and plant use cases or ideas in users’ heads for them to talk about with their friends. Eg, “Dude, you can order condoms from dunzo”.

Question
I have a couple of questions for you which are as follows:
What are the most valuable lessons that you have learned while scaling a product?

Answer:

1. Growth is a mindset. It’s very little to do with the skills but more to do what the mind. If each and every individual in your company thinks growth, it becomes a cakewalk to get to millions of users. Use slangs in the company that is growth driven. This shall help :)
2. Data is gold. I have run startups not looking at data and just building on intuition. Doesn’t work. Your intuition gets better when you get better at data analysis. You are able to predict things much faster for your future releases when you have been very much data-driven from the beginning.
3. Crave for insights. You can keep growing if you can keep building on insights. It’s the most powerful tool IMO. What do we as human beings crave? Launch features fulfilling those cravings. Insights often relate to humans’ intrinsic motivation. “The constant urge to learn”, Duolingo, superhuman is built on these. Be on a constant lookout for such things.
4. Have fun while scaling it 😊

Question
What are some mindset/habits for a highly effective PM for growth, how are those different from a classic PM or a classic marketing manager?

Answer:

A PM Growth is someone who does a product-led growth strategy. This often means a low- or no-touch sales channel as part of their go-to-market strategy as against a marketing manager who just relies on standard marketing channels like performance marketing. They work with PMs, engineers, and designers to deploy multiple growth tactics. It’s important to understand that PM’s KPI is to focus on customers while Growth PM’s KPI is to focus on business.

In my view, an effective PM growth manager should:

1. Be on top of data
2. Be optimizing the growth funnel on a regular basis. More on this: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro
3. Not put boundaries or limits to growth. This really tells how big the person is thinking.

Imp reads:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DRPGGQ7/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

[A growth team] is a hybrid of marketer and coders, who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, etc. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is a pre-product/market fit, [a growth team] can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.

— Andrew Chen, Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing

Question
What are some of the things you do/ places you check out outside of work, to get inspiration for growth and work?

Answer:

1. Love to play sports. It teaches the hunger for creating new records and also the chase of existing ones.
2. Very recently developed an interest in reading history and evolution. It helps me think about how innovation happens.
3. Daydream and list ideas. I have a calendar slot for this :)

Question
How to grow MAU for an app selling the traditional service online for eg: A sweet shop

Answer:
Tricky one. I am not sure if I would want to optimize on building a customer base on my website first or setting up my distribution channels. I think the best way in early days is to ride on existing channels who have millions of users. For eg, listing your shop on platforms like swiggy, zomato will help to generate some daily orders.

Then it’s a function of quality and user feedback. With this early base of customers, I would focus on providing a 5-star quality and asking users to give feedback around it.

I wouldn’t probably even work on my MAUs until I have exploited all distribution channels for growth.

Question:
How to innovate yourself early in a market with lots of competition selling the same solution for eg: Online photo print

Answer:
Technology: I think Photo print has a massive opportunity to innovate and go digital. With the applications of AR in today’s world, one can recreate the entire experience.

Question
Metrics are every changing with business how to model analytics accordingly to get the right info

Answer:
Consider this as a course for that: https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000465251-Data-Taxonomy-Playbook

Question
How to measure the loyalty of customer for eg: one customer placing multiple orders for a value of 1000 vs one customer placing a single order of value 1000

Answer:
Loyalty comes with repeats. One customer placing an order with your shop multiple times means the customer is loyal to your brand.

Easy to measure repeats by observing the number of orders a customer has placed in X period.

Question:
One question that i have is: what all are the common challenges that you have faced when scaling the user base?

Answer:

Ah! So many, but answers lie in basics. To walk through a few,

1. How to scale from 100 to 1000?
2. What to do on a daily basis so that users start coming to your app?
3. What distribution channels to set to get the traffic coming?
4. How to do all of the above at zero cost?
5. What am I missing? How did others do it?
6. How to improve the quality of users coming to your platform for higher retention?
7. How to hack the system to scale?

Like I said in one of the answers above, for me — Growth is all about mindset.

So, step 1 is to develop that mindset for yourself and then for the company. And you got to be patient and keep experimenting with multiple growth channels.

Question:
How to gather behavioral insights from data and how to validate them in early-stage products which might not have much engineering resources?

Answer:

Step 1 — Learn the basics of data analysis. A lot of guides out there. Personal fav here.

Step 2: After you know the basics, set up all your events on to a data analytical tool like Google Firebase / Analytics (free) or Amplitude (personal fav but paid) / Clevertap (paid).

Step 3: Look for behavioral correlations and patterns around it. For eg, for one of the social consumer apps in the sleep space, from data we discovered more and more people stop sleep spend after 43 min (avg). For this, the users had to wake up to shut off their phone, pause the sound, and go back to sleep. We used this insight to launch a timer feature. This feature allowed users to set up a timer as to when they want the music to stop.

With this, we saw a jump of 23% in our retention numbers. A pure delight for users.

To answer the second part of your question, with limited engineering resources, best is talk to your users daily. Or put up feedback loops inside your product for users to send direct feedback to you.

When I did this for one of our products, we got roughly 2000 responses at an early stage. We looked for patterns or trends. Anything that was being said on a repeat basis was an insight.

Question
Also, what metrics to optimize for to increase the stickiness of the Product?

Answer:
Retention numbers, Day 1 retention, Day 7 retention, D30 retention, D90 retention.

You can also measure the stickiness of a feature in a product by looking at data and observing the retention of those particular features. Tools like amplitude help you gathering all such insights.

Question
Where do I find users to interview, to ask about their experience using our product? (Consumer tech)

Answer:

Love this question.

1. Firstly, start gathering information about your users. Anything, phone number, email.
2. Do 10–15 calls daily and note all their answers in an excel sheet.
3. Do this until you start observing some concrete patterns or trends around their feedback.
4. Try drawing a persona of your potential customers. Now, start looking out on the internet as to where you can find such groups.

I have a document around how to do user research that shall help: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ighVrAFSUMQNpz4tG4QLOhFvtB9gOQ79BZFaymbDggg/edit?usp=sharing

Question
Have multiple small SAAS side projects. How can I get started to growth them big ?

Answer:

Frankly, I am juggling through the same question

But here’s how I am approaching this:

1. Before writing the first piece of code, I went out talking to my potential customers, asking them to play around with the prototype. If they love it, ask them if they would like to be my paid beta customer. And the business model right now is going to be simple, Pay what you like. This way, I am trying to gauge the value of my product.
2. I ask all the potential beta customers if they can introduce me to the top 3 people who should use this product. And request them to make a connection.

Using this strategy until I absolutely figure the value of my product and the price people are comfortable paying for it.

Then the strategy is to go and pitch bigger clients. One by one. I am new to this field but I have heard, most of the money of SAAS companies comes from one big client.

Question
What are those the major paid acquisition available right now for early stage startups?

Answer:

1. Performance marketing (fb/google/instagram/twitter/youtube/snap/hotstar ads)
2. Building your PR engine by contacting various bloggers and publications asking them to either do guest blogging or paid write-ups.
3. ASO paid services for keyword boosting
4. Influencer marketing

Personally, not a big fan of paid acquisition channels.

Question
Improving retention as company scale is also important, can you share some frameworks on product-led retention examples you’ve seen in products?

Answer:

https://www.akshaypruthi.com/post/stuck-on-your-product-and-don-t-know-what-to-do-next-follow-this

Shall help :)

Question
What according to you is the difference between growth hacking and digital marketing?

Answer:

Not the best person to answer but here’s my view on it:

Growth hacking is basically a product manager, designer, and engineer getting together to run multiple experiments that lead to product-led growth.

Digital marketing doesn’t really have to do much with product-led growth. There are channels like performance marketing (ads), SEO hacks, content play to get more users to your platform.

Question
What are your favorite go to blogs/websites to read about about scaling and growth?

Answer:

Blog: https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/

Books:

1. Deep Work
2. The Subtle art of not giving a fuck
3. Good strategy, bad strategy
4. Measure what matters
5. Lean analytics
6. Your goto guide to creating ridiculously good content
7. Explain Data and inspire action through story
8. Why Buddhism is true
9. Waking Up
10. The most underrated product management skill Influence without authority

Question:
According to you which channels are most effective for acquisition of customers for financial products if you have experience in it ?

Answer:
I’m afraid I haven’t. But I have a read for you that shall help:

“First of all, let’s talk about a few ways you can build trust with users:

1. Social proof: If people that you trust are using a product, you’ll certainly be more likely to trust it. Some examples of this in action. How might you leverage data and testimonials from people already using your service to create social proof — how many people are using it, what kind of people, from where, and for what purpose? Help your users immediately see that people just like them are already using and loving your product.
2. Authority: If someone in authority has vetted a product, you’ll be much more likely to trust it. Some examples of this in action. How might you surface your certifications, approvals, badges, awards, seals, or endorsements from authority figures? How might you acquire more of these? Whatever you have — make sure your users see these early and often.
3. Guarantees: If something goes wrong, who’s got my back? What’s the downside of giving this product a shot? How might you make your users feel like they’ll be safe and protected no matter what? The Airbnb Host Guarantee was an incredibly powerful tool for getting new hosts over the hump of opening their home up to strangers.
4. Reputation: This is likely less relevant to your business, but reviews from other users (e.g. Yelp reviews, Uber reviews, Airbnb reviews) are one of the most powerful ways to communicate trust. If many other people have had a good experience, it’s likely you will too. Here’s a good read on this topic.
5. Great UX: A badly designed site/app immediately introduces suspicion. Particularly when dealing with money. Pay attention to the details — the resolution of images, padding, grammar, performance, and general visual polish. Listen for these issues in user research. Little things can make a big psychological impact here. Watch Joe Gebbia’s TED talk about how Airbnb designs for trust.
6. Deliver: With our increasing interconnectedness, word-of-mouth spreads quickly. Particularly if you do something wrong. Nothing destroys trust in your brand more quickly. At the same time, if you consistently provide a great experience, and deliver on your promise — that’s how you’ll build real long-term trust. The Amazon Flywheel is a good example of this in action.”

By Lenny

Question:
As someone with zero exp in PM but 5yrs in general management, how can i transition to become a ‘data driven PM?’ what should my roadmap be?

Answer:

I’d say two things need to go hand in hand.

1. Read as much as possible to help you get more context of product management.
2. Start hustling by doing a part-time product management internship at some company. You could also shadow some Product manager and handle all the product ops which shall give you a very good glimpse of how product management is done. I have done it with someone, proved to be very effective for him.

Question:

In terms of product design what are the things you read or refer to so that your products have best design/UI in the market ?

Answer:

There are a lot of Instagram pages which can really help:

https://www.instagram.com/tranmautritam/

https://www.instagram.com/numicor/

https://www.instagram.com/ofspace.agency/

https://www.instagram.com/ui.colour/

https://www.instagram.com/ux.ale/

Other than that, I keep on taking inspiration from dribbble and Pinterest.

Some other resources that might help:

https://pttrns.com/

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

https://coolors.co/f7f052-f28123-d34e24-563f1b-38726c

https://flatuicolors.com/

https://www.materialpalette.com/

Fonts

https://fonts.google.com/

http://fontpair.co/

If you wish to do a course: https://learnux.io/ (above resources are taken from here)

Question:
I am new to Growth and previously was a software dev for a couple of years. I am still in the phase of figuring out how to become good at Growth. Any tips/ suggestions?

Answer:

If you are someone who likes to play around with things, experiment, you might be the right fit.

Being a software engineer has its own added advantage as you can aim to become a full-stack growth guy.

I would suggest, read + build small tools, very basic ones, and try to grow them on your own using technology.

Read the story of Jon, owner of http://bannerbear.com/

Not a very famous guy but he built a saas tool, scaled to $6000 MRR single-handedly by just experimenting and building

Happy to help with any more questions you might have DMs open here

I was thinking about this the other day.

Is it even fair for us to expect customers to start loving the product from day 1? When psychologically biologically you don’t do that in life.

My team and I had worked hard to get a product to the finish line. We were remarkably excited on the launch day. And our expectations were that the customers will fall in love with this product.

The end result — No one gave a shit about the product.

We were so disheartened. I pushed through and thought to go deep into the WHY.

We all sat on the drawing board and started answering a few basic questions by using an empathy map.

For eg, for a product-task management tool, it will look something like this:

Quoted from an article, “customers don’t want to be amazing at our tool. They want to be amazing at the context. It’s not the customer say that I’m amazing at this camera. It’s that they say I am an amazing photographer”

When we created the empathy map, I realized, all we did while creating the product was how effectively we can make our customers use this product. We never thought about how they felt after using the product? Did it satisfy the needs that they had? Did they feel good after using it? Did it have any recall after using it for the first time? Did the experience stay with the user?

Looking at Steven Reiss’s 16 common needs of human beings, and from the brainstorming session of empathy map, we tried to list the reasons as to why a customer would be interested in adopting any new tool. For eg, a product-task management tool should address the following needs:

1. Independence: The product needs to nurture the feeling of independence and freedom of work.
2. Social Contact: It needs to have the fun element to be able to remove the monotony that comes with a task management tool.
3. Tranquility: Customers should feel safe and relaxed while using the product. Anxiety at work might push them away from the tool that brings it.

With the amount of data that we have, we tend to forget that we are selling the product to humans and not robots. Which means, humans still make emotionally charged decisions, they still do impulse buying, they still want to feel significant. And once we make that emotional decision, we try to associate a logic to it.

I remember buying super expensive shoes. When people kept saying I could have bought the same for a cheaper price, I kept on justifying why the cost is justified.

Summing it up, we followed the framework below:

1. What does your customer do vs what they feel? The approach is simple, Ask them.
2. What are the intrinsic motivations that your product embarks on the customers? Again, simply ask them and list it down.
3. What reason can you give your customer to justify the purchase? How do people explain why they use your product?

The secret sauce is if you put all of this together — a clear perspective of what they feel, the motivations that drive those feelings, and the justification to use, you can gradually evolve into a product that people love. That’s what happened to us.

Just like when you meet your partner, you first try to understand what they mean when they say something, what are the emotions that trigger them to say, and what’s the justification s/he gives to make you understand. When you start to understand this, eventually you fall in love :)

How did we make people fall in love with our product? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My mind was wandering. From one question to another.

What will I accomplish today?

How’s my life going to improve?

Am I happy?

My favorite song from Coldplay “The Scientist” was playing in the background. I started singing along. When the song got over, I started thinking..

While singing the song, I was so happy. I was enjoying the lyrics, the rhythm. The song took complete control over my emotions, my thoughts. I was thinking nothing, just enjoying and singing along.

I thought to myself..

What if I could live my life like that? What if I could enjoy everything that’s happening in the present.

I drew some key lessons from this experience:

1. You can only think about the past or the future. And it’s frustrating to even think how much time we waste thinking, knowing this will have absolutely zero returns. You can only LIVE in the present.
2. How do you live in the present? Focus on gratitude. The realization that I can afford a car and drive to my office while there are thousands of people who cannot, brings gratitude. And this helps me focus on my present.
3. What’s the outcome? Improvement of your mental wellness. When I practiced living in the present, I started finding happiness in the small things that improved my mental wellness.

Some powerful statements:

Do not dwell on the past. Do not dream of the future. Concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~Buddha

“There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it’s because you’re thinking or focusing on what you don’t have…. But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.” — Anthony de Mello

“Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.” — Tennessee Williams

Often, while building products we get stuck. We believe we did everything we could still, it didn’t work. I have come across this situation multiple times while building products. Hence, I decided to create a framework to help surpass the situation.

All situations mentioned below are real examples of different apps I have worked on. This will be very useful for people who are building products in consumer space.

Situation 1: How to improve the Onboarding drop off funnel?

Only 60% of the users are entering the home page.

For one of the apps, for every 100 users that installed the app, only 60 users were landing on the home page of the app. 40 users were dropping off at various points in the onboarding. When we did the analysis, we saw a 15% drop off in the OTP verification. 10% drop off while entering their details. Another 10% drop off while selecting interests. 5% drop off at the launch itself.

Things we did to improve the funnel:

1. Reduced the number of steps to land on the home page
2. Improved the designs of the onboarding screens
3. Change the OTP service to ensure OTP gets delivered on time.

After releasing the revised version, we saw a minor 10% improvement in the data. Still, a 30% drop off was huge.

We got stuck! We had to do something opposite of what we were trying.

Re-Work:

1. We worked on the narrative. We did text changes. We made it ultra basic for any damn user to understand what the app does.
2. We used some hacks to reduce the drop off at OTP verification. We used to auto-detect the phone number, show that as a pop-up for users to choose from. Once the user tapped on any number, we marked those as verified. We removed the OTP verification process altogether. Our hypothesis was, if users were choosing the number from the pre-emptive pop-up (a google service), it’s unlikely that the number chosen is wrong.
3. We brought the core proposition of the app in the front. For eg — This was an English Learning App. At the onboarding itself, we gained the trust of the users by putting up a short interactive action-based reward loop of how quickly they will learn English.

Action: Select a word

Reward: A tutor speaking how to pronounce that word.

Result: Trust on the method of how my (user) English is going to improve.

Situation 2: How to improve the D1 retention of the app?
D1 retention was 12%.

Out of 100 users who opened the app on Day 0 (the day they installed the app), only 12 users came back the next day to use the app.

Things we did to improve this number:

1. We talked to the users.
2. We set up notifications for D1 users (users who installed the app one day before)
3. We improved the D0 feed

After doing the above changes, we saw a 4% increase in D1. Which wasn’t good.

We were out of ideas. We couldn’t figure out why people won’t come the next day?

Re-Work

1. We downloaded 5 other apps in the same domain and tried using it for a few days. We started tearing it down. The onboarding, new user interactions, the notifications one receives the next day, the social proofing. Everything. And we kept a note of what they did uniquely.
2. Then we started tearing down our application. And started working on the changes.
   a. What’s the source of the users and accordingly, define the user journey. For example, if the source of the user is coming from some specific UTM category, we started landing the user directly to that category.
   b. What’s the onboarding experience. Onboarding doesn’t stop number verification. It’s the entire experience of the user on the first day of using the application. We didn’t unlock all the elements of the app at one go. We changed the designs and unlocked different features as and when the user found the need for such features. For example, we had an option to set an alarm. We didn’t show that option until the user finds the need to explicitly set the alarm.
3. What were our power users doing? We observed the behaviour of our power users who were coming on the app on D30 and tried to understand the path they follow. We brought that experience at the front of the app. For example, we saw a majority of the power users discover content by going to a particular category and then deciding what content to consume. Though, in our designs category view was hidden. We decided to change the designs and have the home page as just a view of all the categories.

Result: We saw the D1 retention moving to 35%. This was remarkable.

Situation 3: How to improve the D30 retention
D30 retention was 5%.

Out of 100 users who installed the app on Day 0, only 5 users were opening the app on Day 30

Things we did to improve this number:

1. We thought if we keep improving our D1, minimize that drop of 100 to 35, we will automatically improve D30. So we kept improving D1.
2. It reached to 50% but D30 improved only by 1%. We had set a target of 10%.

This time, we had seriously nothing. No ideas. We didn’t know how to bring the users back on the app repeatedly.

We started thinking from first principles.

Re-Work

We observed three things that were bringing our users back on the app:

1. Notifications
2. Content
3. Alarm or reminders

We dived deep into all these three things and tried tearing it down further. We asked questions like:

1. Are the notifications getting delivered to all the users?
2. What’s the shareability ratio? (share/view ratio)
3. Is the alarm or the reminder working properly? Are people finding it useful?

To answer these questions, we started going deep into data.

Observations:

1. Notifications delivery rate — 56%. Which means, 44% of the active user base was not receiving the notification
2. We had a very low shareability ratio avg 0.01.
3. 61% of the users were using the alarm/reminder feature on D1. It dropped to 17% by Day 15. And we didn’t know how useful it was.

Actions

1. We started working towards improving the delivery rate. For most of the Chinese devices, notifications were not getting delivered. We figured a hack where we were able to increase the penetration to 87%.
2. We set up a new target for the sharability ratio. We had to increase that by 100%. So we started working on the content.
3. We launched a feedback pop-up on the app asking users how useful they found the alarm/reminder feature? And if they are faced with some issues with the feature. We got a whopping 933 responses. This helped us conclude that the alarm/reminder feature was extremely useful and there were some feature requests with respect to an alarm that a majority of the users asked for. We launched with necessary changes.

Result: New Day 30 retention — 12%. Isn’t that awesome?

I strongly believe, if you continue to ask the right questions you can achieve the business goals for your company.

Are you stuck? Happy to chat :)

One day, I sat to myself thinking how did my mom learn cooking? Or How did my dad learn about finances even though that’s diagonally opposite to what he does in his profession?

This thought led to me do a google search for a free design course online and I ended up spending two days learning design. When the course got completed, it felt as if I got new superpowers.

The first thing about learning continuously is learning to learn.

That’s your first superpower. If you have learned the art of learning, you have accomplished a way to succeed, no matter what.

The other day, my rockstar designer and I were designing a new experience of an app. To us, it seemed like we did a great job of accomplishing what we did after completing the designs. Accidentally, my wife saw the designs and started giving some feedback. The feedback was so basic and we had completely ignored it thinking it doesn’t matter to the user. That day I learned something new.

How to stress-test your work? How to break the thinking patterns to keep innovating?

For instance, Tim Ferriss asks this question to break the thinking pattern and continue innovating.

What would I do completely opposite for the next 48 hours?

When he was in a sales job, he asked this question to himself and changed the cold call timings to morning 6:30–8:30 and evening 5:30–7:30. Most of the executives used to receive calls from the sales executives between 9–5 while he chose to do the opposite. Tim eventually started doing better than most of his team members and got more business to his company.

Similar questions to ask:

“If I had a gun against my head and could only work two hours a week, what would I do?”

“What would you have to do in the next 6 months to 10x the economics of your business?”

While I was working with Vokal (India’s largest vernacular Q&A platform), one of the founders once told me, by the end of 1 month we will achieve XX target. The target was almost 10x of what we were sitting at. I remember, almost laughing to myself thinking, he is in a different world.

By the end of the next month, we had achieved that target.

That day, I learned how our mind gets fixated on a few things. We accept things the way they are. In India, there’s this phrase — “Aise hi hota hai” translated to English which is “This is how it is”.

When we achieved that target, I learned the importance of pushing the limits. Which is also one of the key principles of learning.

Pushing the limits and uncovering your superpowers.

When I onboarded the first cohort for my design school, here’s what I did which can be applied to your life too.

1. Learn to learn
2. Break your thinking patterns.
3. Push your limits & uncover your superpowers.

Happy to help those who are struggling to find their superpowers :)

At 19, I started my 1st company. I was invited to a 5-star hotel for an investor meeting. It was my first. I sold my dream over a Dal Makhni and a Naan to the investor because back then, going to a 5 star was fancy! Ended up giving 1/3rd of the company against $100,000, free lunch at a 5 star, and a co-founder tag for the investor. Most of the calls in the company were now taken by the “new co-founder”, and ended up outsourcing the entire product to the agency. The product never released before 6 months. When it did, we realized our thesis had changed by then.

Learning 1: Money can’t buy success. Fancy is a shortcut. Never outsource tech of consumer products to an agency. By nature, products are iterative.

At 23, I started my second company Reach App. Raised $500,000. Never knew how and where to spend this money. Because I belonged to middle-class background, I was always on an optimization mode. Optimizing for hiring developers, operations people, HRs, and took all the responsibility on me to save the cost. Always played safe. Never reached to the PMF

Learning 2: Value your time more than money. Seed money is the experiment money to reach PMF.

At 25, I left ixigo (Reach App got acquired by ixigo) to start another company wishfie. My co-founder at wishfie was an ex-facebooker and an angel investor. My reasons to jump to the new startup were not because I was excited about the idea but because I was not enjoying my job. Also because of the credible co-founder that I’d work with.

Learning 3: Don’t jump into something new because you want to escape from your current situation.

At 27, I started working on multiple products. I used to feel handicapped on how to distribute these products to the right market. I had no clue how to grow the app beyond 200,000 users.

Learning 4: Now that product came in handy, I gave myself a new challenge to crack distribution. Having answers to the difficult questions like what’s the distribution strategy? How to get the first 1000 users? Do you have a plan to grow from 1000 to 1M users organically?

At 28, I am working on multiple products, consulting, and implementing new ideas. I feel I have come a long way. I am ready to make new mistakes so that I can write something similar when I am in my 30s. It’s such an incredible feeling.

Hopefully, this will help.

This is how your user feels when you onboard the user without guiding on what the product does. As product managers, designers and researchers we might have a clear idea on how the product flows but our users don’t. Defining the right user onboarding experience is the most crucial step in designing the app experience.

Let’s try and understand what is user onboarding?

User just saw an ad and landed to your play store or app store page. The onboarding experience starts from there. The Title, the short description, the long description, the reviews creates the first impression of the product. This is how users get an idea of how the product is going to be useful to them.

When you meet someone, you judge them by their looks first. No matter what, looks create your first impression. It’s after you talk to the person, you decide whether you would want to continue the relationship or not.

On Privacy by Design | Data Driven Investor

Similarly, the users judge your app (in seconds) by looking at the Play Store page. When the user downloads the app, it is then you are speaking to the user guiding the user on how to use the app. It can be as simple as a greeting and an explanation or as complex as a series of guided tasks for users to complete.

Check how Growth design described the onboarding experience of Hey

Onboarding helps users give a sense of what they are supposed to do on the app.

In my apps, I always try to think of creating an action <> reward loop. This is inspired from how duolingo solves it beautifully. Here’s how:

Having an action-reward loop in all your user journeys helps improve the user experience. Creating such loops help users reach their destination and validate themselves on why they should be keeping this app.

Duolingo does it beautifully by asking the user to perform multiple actions and keeps rewarding them by helping them reach closer to their target of learning a language.

Ending the article with a small exercise:

Send over the onboarding experience of your app at akshay.reachme@gmail.com and I’ll help improve it.

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How to have a perfect onboarding experience for your users? was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.