The Moonshots Story: Building New Products Inside High-Growth Startups
In late 2015 I was heading Product Management at Influitive, a cutting-edge and very fast-growing marketing tech startup. We’d gone from 12 employees (and near-zero revenue) when I joined in 2013 to, at that point, more than 125 employees (300+ paying customers) — and we weren’t showing any signs of slowing down. It was great — so great, in fact, that I needed out.
It sounds counterintuitive, I know. The rapid growth, massive success and constant stream of new customers flooding our conference rooms and inboxes was intoxicating, sure. But, for me, the real excitement is in the new — the chaos, even. When companies are lean, nimble and everything hasn’t been figured out yet, I thrive. Crazy? Maybe. But completely central to my entrepreneur identity. I was definitely feeling the itch to build something from scratch — again.
The Moonshots
I took that spark and ran with it, first to Influitive CEO (any my longstanding mentor in entrepreneurship) Mark Organ. We agreed my skills were best suited to experimentation — to creating and scaling new products but that, this time, I’d do it at an arm’s length from Influitive. I would dig in and build a startup within a startup, tethered to Influitive without the trappings of its impressive success. This new offshoot could be lean and nimble, free to explore ideas and chase opportunities, as long as they were related to the space Influitive operated in (so that we could harness the unfair advantages and access that would give us and . We could have our cake and eat it, too. I was IN.
We didn’t have a crystal ball, of course, so we didn’t really know how things would pan out. But, still, we planned to fund the Moonshots (to be fair, we named the team before the the first season of Silicon Valley aired…) for a year.
And we got a lot of advice from folks that had run successful skunkworks, such as early members of the Lotus Notes team. Fast forward a year later and we have built a powerful new product that’s generating meaningful revenue and fresh excitement at Influitive today! Our startup-within-a-startup produced Upshot, a rapidly growing app that connects advocates, customers and creatives to produce engaging, informative content quicker and cheaper than ever before.
Off to the Races
After the Moonshots decision was made, I immediately began talking to Influitive customers, marketing insiders and, really, anyone in the extended space. I hired Anand Chhatpar, one of BusinessWeek’s Top Entrepreneurs and, already, a long-time entrepreneur himself. Together, Anand and I interviewed, ideated and spent days categorizing ideas then systematically eliminating them. He was the perfect partner-in-crime — someone who had been an entrepreneur and, also, run an agency with a heavy brainstorm focus. Mark and I also recruited Rahil Virani from within Influitive, which was made easier by the fact that Rahil and I had co-founded a company in a past life.
Together, we built a model to test our hypotheses, attempting to strike a balance between time and effort. The simplest and least time-consuming task we could find? Interviewing people — so we started there. We’d engage and interview prospective customers from within and outside Influitive’s customer base) and collect feedback quickly on these new ideas — if one didn’t make it through this pretty basic litmus test, it was out. We found that the quicker we ran this process, the more opportunities we were able to discover! I learnt that rapid elimination is one of the keys to hyper-creativity. It also helped us not get married to any single business opportunity too closely and be able to look at things objectively.
Looking back, some of our ideas were flat-out embarrassing — I’m not above admitting that. And some just weren’t a good fit because of the nature of the project: for example, we played around with a Glassdoor-esque platform for transparent pricing on SaaS products. We decided to shelf that that because we really didn’t want Influitive customers to get prickly. (Side bar: for the record, I still think this is a good opportunity. If you want to run with it, let’s talk…)
But the not-so-embarassing ideas — the ones that excited potential customers? Those made it to the next level where we started wireframing and setting up landing pages as basic smoke tests. At that point, we hired a talented young designer from Toronto, Maggie Cai, flying her to our Moonshots office in San Francisco to help with user testing. She, literally, watched our target customers engage with tests we’d set up to gauge over-the-shoulder reactions. It was clear that being part of Influitive was clutch — sure, we didn’t want the trappings (and process) of success, but we did, hands down, benefit from having an audience and being known quantities, something that most startups don’t have and spend a lot of energy developing. And that audience? We leveraged them big time. Finally, we’d conduct “Wizard of OZ” MVPs, basically taking customers through neat wireframes, emulating the experience of using the product we still hadn’t written a line of code for.
Breakthrough
A few months in, we honed in on the one idea that tested well over and over. The concept was rooted in a simple notion: happy customers — authentic advocates — are the best source of content for a brand marketing team. And storytelling is the best form of content (hey — you read this far, haven’t you?) The challenge? Getting those advocates to help produce high-value content or, simply, to be featured in content. Coordination and content development is time-consuming — just scheduling and interviewing customers could take days, before any content is actually written. And that’s not even the end of the line — there’s the editing, the review, the legal review. It boiled down to this: every company we met wished they could get more customers to participate in content creation in order to get the story of their success out. But customers just didn’t have enough time when they were asked formally.
When we spoke to their customers, we learnt that they were not really interested in this very formal, vendor/customer blogging process. What they really wanted was to tell their story in their own words, on the platforms where they had the biggest personal audience. They wanted to be thought-leaders in their domain. Who hasn’t seen their peers publish blogs just like this one on LinkedIn (or Medium, Forbes, etc.) and not felt mild FOMO? If we could create a streamlined, mutually beneficial experience for advocates and the companies they support, we could drive organic content creation experiences.
That is the foundation of Upshot: turning content marketing on it’s head by letting company’s sponsor a premium content-creation experiences for their customers. We immediately dove in and started to productize: at first just hacking together a TypeForm that solicited responses from advocates and filtered feedback to us. Armed with that intel, we scheduled Skype calls with our users, acting as their ghost-writer and editors. I did the actual writing at first (another embarrassing experience,for all involved, honestly!). With a few trial stories under our belt, including for premium names such as MongoDB, we were confident that we were ready to build a product.
Letting Go
As we evolved our process, a path to success started to emerge. After creating an account, companies would create custom calls-to-actions and select customer best suited to tell stories against those CTA’s. The best match received a personalized invitation to share their experiences with a professional writer — an editor who would interview them briefly and craft a Upshot story for them.
By bringing experienced writers and editors into the process, we were producing stories that promoted our customers, offered major value to readers and most importantly, made our advocates look like rockstars in front of their peers — aligning everyone’s goals and creating value at every interaction. And, with multi-channel distribution baked in to the product, we could generate the widest possible reach for each post, offering powerful distribution tools that couldn’t easily be found elsewhere.
Upshot was succeeding and continues to excel. To date, the product has tens of leading B2B companies as customers, tapping its unique approach to content marketing — an approach that’s expanding as the social landscape and general content demands grow.
And me? I moved on from Upshot in fall 2016. We enlisted a GM from Influitive and Upshot is expanding just as we planned. Leading companies like Cisco and Zoom are paying for Upshot services, and seeing tremendous results — one very large customer has publicly said that Upshot stories are 70% more cost effective than their own content. That’s a powerful statement and a testament to the value of the product. Upshot was able to cut the average blog production time down from over 3 months to just 18 days!
It’s just the beginning for Upshot, so keep your eyes peeled on more to come from Influitive. In the meantime, I’m back out there, looking for chaos and discomfort — because, for me, where the sausage is made is also where most of the magic happens!
