Thanks to a heads up from Joel, I saw a fantastic talk from Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder and CTO of Hubspot. You most likely know him from the great blog he is running OnStartups.
I thought of watching the video and extracting the 17 best quotes I’ve found. If you are a Buffer user you can highlight the quotes and hit the Buffer button.
1.) The problem with early VC: You shift your problem from customer problems to investor problems.
2.) If people don’t cancel the subscription with you, it DOESN’T equal they are delighted.
3.) 1# Sales Velocity, 2# Acquisition Cost 3# Lifetime Value: Improving one often degrades the others.
4.) If you invest into your product’s experience instead of your product, everybody wins.
5.) Don’t make customers happy. Make happy customers.
6.) Measure your customer happiness through: frequency of use, breadth of use, stickyness of features.
7.) In every meeting we have a stuffed bear (Molly) representing the needs of our customers.
8.) Customers are usually very good at identifying their problems, not so much the solutions.
9.) Nothing regarding your product is forever, everything is an experiment up to a certain point in time.
10.) Don’t make “x” software. Make “x” superstars.
11.) Don’t try to take market away from your competition. If the market is big enough there should be enough non-consumers you can be selling to.
12.) Ask yourself the question: How do we get people on the sidewalk into the game on this product.
13.) Transparency trumps secrecy.
14.) We have no vacation policy. People take the time they need.
15.) Freemium is not about tricking and trapping customers into paying.
16.) Don’t build something where the company wins and the customer suffers.
17.) Dream Big. Execute small.
These thinking points where the most important I found. I also highly recommend watching the session if you have time, Dharmesh is a very down to earth guy I am sure you can easily connect with.
What do you think about his thoughts?