What I Learned During My Internship at Cooby, a Sequoia-backed SaaS Startup
I’ve worked at a handful of Big Tech companies. Yet a part of me wanted to experience startup culture. The opportunity came when I was accepted into Northwestern University’s MBA program at the Kellogg School of Management. I had a little break before heading off to Chicago, and that’s when I found Cooby.
Founded by Wen Shaw and Jocelin Ho, Cooby is a Sequoia-backed SaaS startup in Taiwan that focuses on making WhatsApp work better for businesses. At one point, before I took the internship there, I happened to listen to a podcast in which Jo and Wen talked about why they left Facebook in Silicon Valley and came back to Taiwan to start Cooby.
It was fascinating to hear how they’d enabled the sales team to leverage instant messaging for businesses. Moreover, I was inspired by their ambition to build a global software company/product in Taiwan. I quickly reached out to Wen and Jo to ask if they were looking for help.
Luckily, my skill sets matched what they needed. I became Cooby’s first pre-MBA intern and first product team member.
Time flies — as I write this post, three months have passed, and I’ve had a wonderful journey with the Cooby team. To summarize, here are a few things I learned at Cooby:
1. Speed Matters! Build a “Real” MVP!
I experienced one of my first culture shocks after learning the definition of Minimum Viable Product (or MVP) from a new perspective.
Back in my role as a product manager at Shopee, scalability was always one of the key considerations when we planned new products. Shopee was growing fast at that time. Millions of users browsed and shopped on Shopee, and more than two million orders were created every single day. With a proven business model, we focused on scaling. Building a product that scales mattered tremendously there, even just for an MVP. It was possible to spend weeks or even months drawing product structures and analyzing impacts on other product lines before kicking off product development.
But at Cooby, we shipped products FAST! We ran sprints and shipped new products every three weeks. I built a feature in which users can “create” and “read” but they can’t “edit” or “delete.” Did the feature offer an imperfect user experience? Yes. But the trade-off enabled us to ship the product in just one sprint and gain feedback from the market fast.
In the digital era, working from the outset to build a perfect product, only to find out that no one uses it, is a waste of time and resources.
2. Pivot, Pivot, and Pivot until You Reach PMF!
One of the key goals of a seed-stage startup like Cooby is to reach Product-Market Fit (PMF). So planning a precise long-term product roadmap is unrealistic. Under the high-level company mission, it’s best to keep pivoting your product and strategy to reach PMF.
That’s why we needed to build the MVP. We needed to ship the product to market fast. Then, we learned from the market and customers. I constantly updated my assumptions about our customers based on new insights. Every new insight helped us iterate our products, or sometimes made us pivot in a new direction.
The pivots could be big or small. They could be changing your go-to-market strategy, changing the specific user pain points you want to solve, or even changing the focus on what target customers to serve.
I couldn’t tell you how many product brainstorming sessions we had internally. We produced way more product ideas than products. We made the best product ideas compete with each other for priority, and kept updating those product ideas with the new insights we received.
This entire process helped us polish our thinking. It also locked resources on the products we were most confident would hit PMF at certain points in time.
To me, working on products at startups is like steering a speedboat in the ocean. Working at Big Tech is like steering a cruise ship. It takes a long time for a cruise ship to change direction. It’s also hard for Big Tech to change product strategy in a short period of time. Yet, it is relatively easy for a speedboat to take turns or change its direction; the risk, effort, and capital a startup needs to pivot are less than those for Big Tech, and a startup uses pivots to find its PMF.
3. Early Customers Are Your Best Feedback Source
I learned so much from our customers. Cooby’s early customers were tremendously valuable to us — especially those who complained about the product and requested features.
Early customers are willing to spend time talking to you because your product likely solves some of their pain points, but they want more and want to participate in making it better.
I joined lots of sales calls to hear how customers are using Cooby’s products. I also listened to their complaints. By talking to them, the team is able to quickly validate customers’ needs and priorities. Personally, I consolidated their shared pain points and converted them into a product they could use to address them.
Early customers not only helped us validate product assumptions, but they were also a key source of some product ideations. Customers don’t always use a product the way you originally imagined. When we dove into customers’ industries, their day-to-day operations, and how they used our products, there were always new things for us to discover.
For example, I learned an entirely new group purchase monitoring use case for our products while talking to one of our customers in Southeast Asia. We started to brainstorm a few potential monitoring metrics, and that eventually became a product idea.
4. Be Hands-on and Make an Impact
When I first joined Cooby, there wasn’t a full-time product manager. Only two weeks later, Albert, the new head of product, joined the team.
In the early days, Wen and Jo managed the high-level product direction but there was limited written documentation for Cooby’s products due to limited time and resources. Most products went into development directly from design spec via the company’s talented product designer.
To lay down a solid product development foundation for Cooby, Albert and I started building up the product team documentation and the product development process. We introduced product specs, which covered the product solution in detail and provided more background and user stories for readers.
Albert created a new channel for team members to submit their product ideas and arranged a few product-related meetings with different stakeholders. I helped build up the product roadmap to help our design and engineering team quickly follow up on and prioritize products to build.
It took around two three-week sprints to lay the foundations and familiarize the team with them, but all the effort paid off. Some back-end developers let us know that the new product spec documentation helped them better understand the structure of features, as well as more complex product logic that needed more room for explanation.
The design team said our work helped them better understand the background of the problem we were solving. It also gave them more buffer time to focus on product design before the sprint began.
At a startup, any single team member can tremendously impact the company. You just need to take the first step!
Interning at Cooby was a fun and memorable experience for me. I fell in love with the startup vibe. I had so many new experiences in just three months. I was learning new things every day. And I was surrounded by many talented, energetic people, which made coming to the office a joy!
Saying goodbye is never easy. I will miss everyone at Cooby, and I hope our roads will cross again one day :)
