Building a Great Product (“How to Start a Startup” + Slack’s Story)
Sam Altman taught a class last year called “How to Start a Startup.” In his first lecture, Sam discusses why “Building a Great Product” is critically important (15:01 to 25:23 in the video below).
Coincidentally, around the same time as I watched the portion of Sam’s talk around “Building a Great Product,” I also came across this article: “From 0 to $1B — Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy.”
What’s amazing is that many of the insights that Sam discusses in his lecture were also important to the story of Slack’s spectacular rise. In this post, I’ll discuss my top take-aways from Sam’s lecture, as well as how Slack independently put these same lessons into practice.
“Until you build a great product, almost nothing else matters.” (15:51)
Sam makes the argument that, after picking a winning market, the most important thing for entrepreneurs to focus on is building product. Every successful founder spends the early days of their startup doing nothing else but talking to customers and building product. Everything else—fundraising, partnerships, even PR and marketing—is secondary. In fact, Sam makes the astute observation:
“Most other problems that founders are trying to solve — raising money, getting more press, hiring, business development, etc. — these are significantly easier when you have a great product.”
Everyone on the founding team needs to contribute meaningfully to the product. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has to code (although that is ideal). Founders can contribute to building the product by talking to customers, documenting features, creating wireframes and mock-ups, etc. But things like taking fundraising meetings with VCs, bus dev meetings with partners — those things should take a backseat to building the product. This is the reason why most founders are PMs, engineers, or designers — they can directly and meaningfully contribute to building the product.
“Your job is to build something that users love.” (16:42)
Sam’s next major point about building product is really important. It’s critical to build a product that users love. Not just like — but love. How do you do that?
It starts by focusing on a small group of users and making them really happy. Here’s what Sam has to say:
“It’s better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like… It’s much easier to expand from something that a small number of people love to something that a lot of people love, than from something a lot of people like to a lot of people love.”
You want to use the small group of users as your beachhead to expand into a much larger pool. If you delight this small group of users, and they fall in love with your product, you know you’re on to something.
How do you know that you have built something that users love? You will start to see growth from organic word-of-mouth. According to Sam:
“One way that you know this is working, is that you’ll get growth by word of mouth. If you make something people love, people will tell their friends about it. This works for consumer products and enterprise products as well. When people really love something, they’ll tell their friends about it, and you’ll see organic growth.”
The team at Slack started with a small group of users—themselves. Then they progressively recruited other companies to start using their product. First Cozy, then Rdio. Rather than expanding too fast, however, the Slack team dove deep with these initial customers, and iteratively improved the product until they had built something that their users loved.
With Rdio, for example, Slack was initially used by a small team. “They used it with a small group of front-end developers for a while but then it spread to the whole engineering group and then to all 120 people in the company,” recounted Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder. Organic word of mouth caused Slack to spread to other teams within Rdio.
Slack’s users really love the product. You have to go no further than Twitter than to see users expressing their love of Slack:
“HELL YEAH WE’RE USING @SlackHQ AT WORK I. LOVE. SLACK.”
“Dear @SlackHQ, I love you. Yours, Dan”
“@SlackHQ YOU COMPLETE ME”
So what’s the first step in building an awesome product?
“Start with something simple.” (20:33)
In order to build a product that users love, you have to start with something simple. If you pick a few simple things and do them extraordinarily well, you have a much better chance of having an awesome product. If you clutter your product with a lot of complexity and unwanted/unusable features, your product just won’t succeed. According to Sam’s lecture:
“Start with something simple. It’s much much easier to make a great product when you start with something simple… It’s hard to build a great product, so you want to start with as little surface area as possible.”
“Another reason why simple is good, is that it forces you to do one thing extremely well. And you have to do that to make something that people love.”
Starting with something simple is really hard. It forces you to make difficult choices. But it also focuses your resources on becoming absolutely world-class in the one or two things that are the essence of your product.
The Slack founders had read a blog post by Paul Buchheit (known as one of the creators of Gmail) called “If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.” Some of the key passages from Paul’s post were:
What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it — no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg — nothing but the essentials, well executed.
By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs “everything” in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good.
The Slack team took Paul’s blog post to heart. They decided to focus on three key things within their product—search, synchronization, and simple file-sharing. Focusing on these key areas allowed Slack to deliver a product that was radically better than anything else out there.
According to Stewart Butterfield:
“We had a lot of conversations about choosing the three things we’d try to be extremely, surprisingly good at. And ultimately we developed Slack around really valuing those three things. It can sound simple, but narrowing the field can make big challenges and big gains for your company feel manageable. Suddenly you’re ahead of the game because you’re the best at the things that really impact your users.”
But it’s not enough to start with something simple. You also have to be laser focused on solving problems for your customers, and iterating your product with their feedback. Hence the final take-away from Sam Altman’s lecture on “Building a Great Product.”
Be “fanatical” about customer feedback. (21:32)
Creating exceptional, truly breakthrough products that users love requires you to be fanatical about customer feedback. Not only do you have to obsess over the little details, but you need to immediately seize upon customer feedback and use it to meaningfully iterate your product until your users are delighted.
Here’s what Sam has to say about being “fanatical”:
“Founders talk about being fanatical in the way they care about the quality of the small details. Fanatical in getting the copy they use to explain the product just right. And fanatical in the way they think about customer support… It definitely takes some amount of fanaticism to get a product right.”
The secret, according to Sam, is creating an extremely tight iterative feedback loop between the company and its customers. The founders need to lead the charge about creating this loop, and stay extremely close to their users, even directly responding to customer support feedback.
“You want to build an engine in the company that transforms feedback from users into product decisions, then get it back in front of users and repeat. Ask them what they like and don’t like, and watch them use it. Ask them what they’d pay for. Ask them if they’d be really bummed if your company went away. Ask them what would make them recommend the product to their friends. And ask them if they had recommended it to any yet.”
“You should make this feedback loop as tight as possible. If your product gets 10% better every week, that compounds really really quickly.”
“Great founders don’t put anyone between themselves and their users. The founders of these companies do things like sales and customer support themselves in the early days. It’s critical to get this loop embedded in the culture.”
This engine that iteratively transforms user feedback into product decisions is what enables teams to build products that users love. Founders need to model this behavior themselves, ensuring that nothing stands between them and their users, in order to instill it in the company culture.
Stewart Butterfield and the Slack team made customer feedback the cornerstone of their product development approach. According to the article that discusses Slack’s success:
Butterfield and his cofounders are voracious readers of user feedback, and they attribute much of the company’s rapid traction to this skill. From the get-go, Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as an opportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service. As they listened to their ever-growing flock of users, the Slack team iterated accordingly.
As Sam Altman pointed out in his talk, with Stewart himself deeply involved in gathering and acting on customer feedback, it became ingrained in the company culture.
Now, a year after Slack’s public launch, that reverence for user feedback is part of the company’s DNA. “We will take user feedback any way we can get it. In the app, we include a command that people can use to send us feedback. We have a help button that people can use to submit support tickets,” says Butterfield. They’ve got eyes all over Twitter for comments good and bad. “If you put that all together, we probably get 8,000 Zendesk help tickets and 10,000 tweets per month, and we respond to all of them.”
Where some people might see a huge customer-service burden, Butterfield sees one of Slack’s greatest assets — so much so that he fielded half of these messages himself for a long time. “Especially in the beginning, I handled the lion’s share of Twitter, and Ali Rayl, our Director of Quality and Support, handled the Zendesk tickets. Pretty early on, we combined quality assurance and customer support into one group that we called customer experience. They do everything from parsing customer feedback and routing it to the right people to fixing bugs themselves.”
So one key reason why Slack was able to build a product that its user love was because Stewart, one of the founders, was fanatical about customer feedback. He himself handled customer support, and looked at the channel as a valuable source of feedback to improve the product. As Stewart and team listened to their growing base of users, they iterated their product and built something that their users love.
“Breakout companies almost always have a product that’s so good, it grows by word of mouth.” Sam Altman makes this observation during his lecture, and I think it’s the key point that entrepreneurs and product managers need to keep in mind at all times. The most successful companies and products are so good, they grow organically by word of mouth.
To get there, you have to build a product your users love. Start by focusing on a small number of users, and build something that they love. Remember, not just like, but love. If you do that well, you’ll start to see organic growth by word of mouth. And then you have a shot at growing from a place where a small number of users love your product, to a place where a large number of users love it.
And how do you build something that your users love? Start with something simple—pick the 1, 2, or 3 things that represent the essence of your product. Do those few things extraordinarily well. Become extremely, surprisingly good at those few things. And then don’t worry about the rest. Remember Paul Buchheit’s words: “If your product is Great, it doesn’t have to be Good.”
And finally, be fanatical about customer feedback. Create the engine that seizes on user feedback, transforms it into product decisions, and then gets back in front of users and repeats. Seek user feedback from any source—especially customer support. Build this into your culture.
What is fascinating to me is that the description from Sam Altman about what it takes to build a great product is pretty much exactly what Stewart Butterfield and team did to build Slack. Amazing validation, and truly great lessons for every entrepreneur and product manager out there!
