Building two products from scratch ten years apart — Dashlane & Stonly — Alexis Fogel
Alexis Fogel starred in the last keynote of the day at “La Product Conf 2022” in Paris. The two-time founder of Dashlane and Stonly took the stage in true Gad Elmaleh fashion. Alexis started off by comparing his own performance with the French one-man-show. He made a parallel with the startup world where we tend to always compare SaaS companies with Slack.
Alexis’s keynote followed the thread of lessons learned from his two startups. Alexis founded password manager Dashlane in 2009. Ten years later, he founded Stonly, a platform for self-serve support and activation.
The cold start problem
At Dashlane, the founders started from a vision: making it easy to navigate the internet. They started off with a product so complex they soon realized it was impossible to make it work. The founders switched gears and explored the use case of password management. This first use case ended up supporting the vision up until now at Dashlane.
At Stonly, Alexis did the opposite. He started from a use case: reinventing the product help center. He then expanded it to a global vision with product adoption and self-serve support.
At Yousign, we started from a vision: to make it simple to sign online. Our mission is to get rid of paper while making sure people sign valid and binding contracts. We started with a very simple eSignature product. We’ve evolved since to cover more signature levels and expand beyond eSignature.
Finding product/market fit
Data was Dashlane’s creed. The founders focused on improving the product based on quantitative feedback. This strategy led to good outcomes. Yet it also brought some failures. Like when they did a foray into gamification with the introduction of badges. You could e.g. earn a badge when you reached 10 passwords stored on Dashlane. The feature was an epic failure upon release, since nobody cared. Alexis reckons he could have avoided the flop by talking to users instead.
Contrast this with the Stonly story. Alexis started off by assembling a small community of early adopters. Then he leveraged qualitative feedback to shape the product. It’s an interesting story on how to build a startup from a problem and expand it to a wider vision.
At Yousign, the founders started off by solving a problem for a select group of early adopters. In the early days, they relied only on qualitative feedback. As the product caught on, we used data more often to optimize the user experience. The use of data also allows us to diversify our product.
Going beyond your early market
Speaking about diversification, Alexis explained how Dashlane made a stab at B2B. He warned that adding B2B features is way harder than you think. Dashlane struggled to make the move as it created a tension within the product.
At Stonly, the story was different. It was clear from the start that they would only sell to companies. This prompted a clear strategy: diversify the product and go upmarket. Selling to the enterprise isn’t a walk in the park (SSO, Soc 2, rights management). Yet Alexis reckons that the leap from SMB to enterprise is easier than from B2C to B2B.
At Yousign, we used to sell our product to every company, big and small. Accommodating for both the solo business owner and the multinational company was a stretch. That’s why a few years ago we decided to focus on the SMB market. We only sell our products to companies with less than 1000 people. Our growth avenues lie in making our product self-serve and diversifying beyond eSignature.
Lessons for startup founders
Alexis treated the audience with lots of lessons learned from the startup battlefield.
Our take-aways:
- You can either start from a vision and tackle a first use case. Or start from a use case and expand to a global vision.
- When launching your product, it makes more sense to use qualitative feedback first. Only later on, you can leverage quantitative data.
- Think about whom you’re offering your product to. It’s easier to go from SMB to enterprise than from consumer to company.
