Achieving Product Market Fit with Subha Shetty, VP of Product Management at Fanatics

Today's featured guest, I'm thrilled to introduce Supasethi. She is the VP of product management at Fanatics, which is a leading global digital sports fan and partner engagement platform. She's also an active FI mentor and an advisor to multiple CEOs, all kinds of startup CEOs, on products specifically. She's been an angel investor in multiple tech companies, especially with a focus on e-commerce and marketplaces. She's been an experienced board advisor and an accomplished product management and design executive with a background in engineering. She has a marketing MBA and brings extensive experience in scaling global e-commerce. So I mentioned e-commerce before, at eBay, at walmart.com, their website, at Upwork, and at Synchrony, which are a lot of, yeah, multimillion-dollar budget brands you've probably heard of. And she's worked with large teams of more than 50 members. So yeah, she has a really proven track record of partnering with businesses and teams to launch market-leading innovation capabilities at the intersections of tech, data, artificial intelligence, and customer experience. And yeah, we're thrilled to have her here today. So with that introduction out of the way, Subha, please feel free to add to it anything I might have missed out on your CV, but I'm going to shortly turn the floor over to you to bring up your slide deck and take it away.

Thank you so much, Dustin, for the very kind and generous introduction. And I now have the risky task of sharing. And I always tell myself this is sometimes a little hard given, you know, technical issues can happen at any point of time. So if there's At any point of time you're not able to hear or see, please do give a shout out. But I'm here to talk to you about product-market fit, something that I'm really passionate about because having built personally one-on-one and with teams, I know hundreds of products from a digital customer experience standpoint. These were some of my learnings that Dustin reached out and asked me to share. So I'm happy to share that with you. My favorite thing about product market fit is, goes back to a quote, which I'm sure all of us have heard about, which is if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, you know, we would have never built the car because people wanted faster horses. So one of my first learnings is just that, you know, need versus want is very different and we always need to stay cognizant of that and do our due diligence in terms of what a product market fit actually would be. And also that a faster horse leads to a product death cycle. So how many times have we all seen what seemingly looks like a great product that we all built with a lot of passion, but actually just no users, no traction, no impact. And that's also one of the learnings from actually having a better product market fit is to be able to escape that death cycle so that we can actually create products that people can use and enjoy and improve their lives. And that's really at the center of what I like to do also in terms of like product management. So I have some tips on escaping the product debt cycle. It's basically, you know, again, a lot of this is common sense, but it basically starts off with identifying the problem that your customers are facing. And it could be something as simple as the time that they're spending on a specific task or, you know, or a task that they're really struggling with in terms of like the complexity, you know, so really understanding what problem you're trying to solve. Or unlocking an unmet need. I mean, again, needs versus wants are two different things. And really having the courage to be able to really go to the root cause of what the problem actually is. And again, differentiating between the need and the want and really focusing on the outcomes of what we're trying to build from a product standpoint are certain tips to kind of escape that product debt cycle. So again, Why I'm saying this is because if you have a product that nobody's using or you're having trouble getting traction on, these are some tips to actually help break that product that's— So having set that context in terms of product market fit, and hopefully you understand how passionate I am about this because in my journey of building hundreds and hundreds of products, you know, there are many that have been successful and an equal number, even more that have probably, quote unquote failed, but I don't believe there is any failure, there's only learning. You learn as you create products and try to get better at it. So hi everyone again, my name is Shubha Shetty. I am the VP of product management at Fanatics. We're a digital fan platform. We're most commonly known for our sports merchandise and e-commerce stores, but we are also, you know, we wanna be wherever there is a fan, whether it's sports, whether it's music and/or entertainment. I have about 20 years of technology experience. I started off as an engineer, came to the United States, did my MBA, and was very fortunate to find great product management work at companies like eBay very early on where they invested a lot in product. And so I have some great product mentors that I still learn and rely on. I was the lead PM who actually built the first and the second versions of the Walmart grocery project. I don't know, you know, hopefully you guys can relate to this, but I don't know how I would have gotten through the pandemic without online grocery. And when we started this project 15 years ago at Walmart, we were scoffed upon, but, you know, online grocery is truly here to stay. And if you're using Instacart and Amazon Fresh, you know, these were founded in the last decade when we started the prototype and actually rolled out Walmart Grocery about, you know, a decade and a half ago. So we'd like to believe that we were ahead of the time and we were thinking really, you know, more about the need versus the want, as I mentioned, and really building something that would be useful and valuable and time-saving for customers like you and me. I also had the chance to work at Upwork, which is a labor marketplace, and hopefully you all heard about it and potentially are using this too, because it's a great way to get some burst capacity in terms of freelancer talent. And was very fortunate to have had that, had an IPO. Then worked at Loop Commerce, which is a multichannel retail gifting solution. We were acquired by Synchrony, which is the world's largest retail credit bank, where I spent a year and a half doing a lot of the post-merger integration work, after which now I'm at Fanatics right now. Outside of the day job, I love to, you know, obviously mentor and work with founders in a couple of different, startup accelerators like Founders Institute, Spectra, 500.co, and I dabble a little bit in like angel investing here and there, but most importantly, I really like to find the chemistry between founders where I can really help out on their board or as an advisory role. So that's just a little bit about me. I'm based in San Francisco Bay Area, and right now I'm actually in Tampa. So, because some of my biggest teams are actually here. So spending some time with them. And as you can imagine, it's pretty hot in Tampa, which feels great because I'm from South India and it feels like I've actually come back home because it's hot and humid here. So that's just a little bit about me and, you know, a little bit about why I chose product management as a career. I mean, I had various options, as you can imagine, going to business school really opens up some options for you, especially like consulting and finance and investment banking is so front and center. I chose product management because at the heart of it, I'm a builder. I like to build things. I like to create experiences and products that actually solve problems. I like to, obviously given my engineering background, the fact that I like to do that through technology was a natural fit. I consider myself a little bit of an imagination, like a dreamer. So I like to really imagine what that ideal end state utopian customer experience for whatever product that I build needs to be. And that has actually served me really well because that truly is the foundation of creating a product vision in terms of that ideal customer experience. So that skill has actually served me well at many different levels of product management, including in my current role. Although I have not started any company, I can totally empathize with how entrepreneurial and what entrepreneurial actually means in terms of what you bring to the table, being very resourceful because 'cause we obviously don't have so many resources. I remember after Walmart going to Upwork when we were a 40-person team and we were a small startup and really strapped for money and resources and actually building out some of their time tracking tools and all of their B2B platform was a great experience and actually thinking about how to really evolve the business with little to nothing. So I have deep respect for entrepreneurs like yourself who are struggling on a daily basis with the resources and prioritization. So that's just a little bit about why product for me. And obviously I like to lead teams, I like to lead cross-functional teams, go to a shared vision and really build something together that really solves problems. And I'm really fortunate to have been at Fanatics for the last 8 months now. And at Fanatics, we're really creating experiences that solve solves a lot of fans' and leagues' problems, as you can imagine. And people are coming back to sporting stadiums. So the need and the problem is definitely there. So, so taking a step back, so what is product market fit? Again, I mean, if you go to Wikipedia, you'll get a definition of what product market fit is, right? I mean, product market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market need or a demand. And especially at early stages like you, it's very important to actually focus on product market fit. Otherwise, remember the product death cycle. You'll spend a lot of time, putting a lot of effort, creating products that not many people are using. And so product market fit is really essential at any given stage, but especially in early stage, you know, environments like yourself. What I'm gonna be focused on in this is not to tell you theoretically what product market fit is. This you can Google and find it. But what I'm gonna tell you is some tips on how you can evaluate the degree and the satisfying a strong market need better. How do you know that your product has product-market fit? What are the ways to evaluate it? What are the ways to actually, you know, align and kind of like launch and really learn and iterate? So my conversation with all of you today is going to be more about the tips and tricks for achieving product-market fit to assessing that degree and to assessing that degree to which that product that you're building actually satisfies the market need. So, and the framework is how do you validate? How do you evaluate? How do you align? How do you launch? Align is important because, you know, if you have more than one person on your team, you have to align. And the best teams are where we have completely different point of view and we're coming to the table and discussing and debating and then aligning. So I think that aspect of creating a product is really important. So let's get deeper into it. So how do you validate product ideas quickly? Well, first it's important to know that you should validate product ideas quickly. We, you know, time is on nobody's side in this world right now, especially post-pandemic. There is just a, there is always the, I'm going into team meetings where the focus is always about, How can we do things leaner? How can we do things faster? And so really, I think there's something broader happening in society in terms of people being more impatient and really time is not on our side. So that means we have to get to market quickly. We have to validate our product ideas quickly. And for that, you've obviously heard of minimum viable product. Really perfection is the enemy of good enough. So really start off with the minimum viable product, test it with probably a set of, you know, power users or customers, test not only the product, but test the hypothesis, test the outcomes, build a prototype quickly. And a quick example of that is when at Walmart Grocery, it was a completely new thing that we were actually building. We didn't even know if this is gonna succeed or not, although we had the data that actually told us, yes, there is a business model here that we should explore, but we didn't spend, and this was very different from Walmart, by the way, we didn't spend a year just building an MVP and putting it out there. 10 to 12 weeks, we had a prototype out in 2 of our stores where we were able to see and assess how people are actually interacting with the product. Now, it's not just about the interaction of the product, it was about testing the hypothesis and testing the outcomes, right? So it was about, is it actually helping save time from a grocery shopping standpoint? And when it's saving time, how is it saving time? Is it saving time in, Understanding what to purchase, or is it saving time checking out, or is it saving time when you're actually in the store and can actually have a multichannel experience? So you have to know what your hypothesis is and what your outcomes are and be able to test and measure that very quickly. So that's the first and most important tip that I would actually give. The second is how do you evaluate if a product has gone well or not? And this is where an evaluation of a success of a product launch is extremely important, which will help you understand whether your product has product market fit or not. The easiest thing to do is to have a couple of KPIs and measure that. Of course we should do that, that's baseline. But here are some additional tips to actually do better and get more insight on the product market fit. Are we getting a better return on our investment? You could spend $10 million and develop a product that actually gives you a million back. Is that the best ROI? And I'm sure all of us can agree It's absolutely not. So build something that has a better ROI. And again, this is something very different. Every entrepreneur looks at ROI very differently. Some people look at it from a quarter-to-quarter standpoint. Some people look at it over a 2-year, 3-year standpoint, and whatever your ROI model is, have one and evaluate it against that. At Upwork, I remember quarter-to-quarter, we needed to show improvements. Quarter-to-quarter, it had to be net positive ROI, otherwise, projects would get killed and we would reallocate resources. So it was pretty strict. And I think that's one of the reasons why we got to where we were, because we were very disciplined with our ROI model. The next level of an ROI is the degree of differentiation. How much are you differentiated from your competition? Meaning, you know, when we built Upwork and we were actually building a lot of the core tools of like time management in Upwork, we needed to test, is there something out there that could actually do this? Because we did have other freelancing platforms. Upwork was not the only freelancing platform. I'd come from oDesk, which was then merged with Elance and became Upwork. So Elance was there, Fiverr was there, there were a few other tribal kind of like models, but how much is this product differentiated in the market enough that actually customers would use it is an important metric. And that time tracking tool that we built at that time was one of the more superior ones, I feel, in terms of the competitive landscape. So having a sense of the competitive landscape and where your product fits in is important. And the final kind of like, you know, metric in terms of how this would really, what can I say, really help you evaluate whether your product launch is a success or not is what is that level of positive customer emotion that you're actually seeking? So for building that time tracking tool in Upwork, For us, the most important positive emotion that we were seeking was trust. That when we have this tool in place, employers mostly like most of you, or as you know, some of you here at least, are able to trust that that freelancer and that contractor is actually doing the job. So we had ways of actually measuring trust through subjective focus groups, surveys, and we gathered a lot of feedback. And believe me, we had to iterate a lot because the early versions of the product didn't exactly get the level of trust and was actually cumbersome to use. So we had to, you know, work through a lot of kinks in terms of actually getting to a final product. By the way, just wanted to pause and say, I love the activity that's actually happening on the right, and I see there's a lot of questions. I'm not actively reading that and responding to that right now, but I'm hoping that Dustin and Danielle can help me filter and curate some of these questions as we actually move forward. I did have a few more, tips in terms of what I wanted to get through and then would love to have Q&A. So the next one is another tip for product market fit is aligning on conflicting product ideas. And again, if you have more than a team of one, you need to align. And the best ideas are when you have that level of conflict at the beginning because you have different points of view that you can bring to the table. And as you can imagine, having worked at bigger companies like eBay, Walmart, now at Fanatics, and if you don't know, Fanatics is actually a 10,000-person company we have in 5 geographical locations. It's, I think, possibly one of the bigger private companies that there is. As you can imagine, there is a lot of, you know, need for alignment. And what I focus on is one, encouraging, you know, diversity of, thought in terms of those conflicting ideas, really understanding where those ideas are coming from and the root cause of it, but most importantly evangelizing a north star of the product. So if we are building something, it's really important to evangelize why we're building, what we're building, and more importantly evangelize even the prioritization framework. Hey, we're gonna prioritize by business revenue growth. Like maybe that's something as simple as that. Maybe there is another thing which is I'm gonna prioritize by the amount of time I'm gonna save for my customers. Maybe another one is, you know, customer delight, which one ranks highest in the customer delight. Your framework is your framework, but have one documented, even if it's 3, 4 lines, and align with your team members on that. And you will see how simply and easily your prioritization meetings would actually go because people understand the framework. They, they, you will debate and discuss this, but once you align on this, you're able to move forward much more quickly. At the end of the day though, I tell product managers, this is not a popularity context contest. And if you are here to play a popularity context, probably product management is not for you. So we have to be prepared as entrepreneurs, you can empathize with this, to make tough decisions because there are lots of great ideas. There's only few that we can actually dedicate time and investment to. So again, being able to have a strong prioritization framework, aligning your teams on that, will take you a long way in terms of helping feel, you know, helping your team feel actually part of it. I have one more slide and then we're, you know, we'll be up for questions. I cannot emphasize how important it is to launch quickly. And the launch is always a trade-off of three different things. How much amount of time it takes, what's the money that it takes, what's the value that it actually brings to our customers. There is never a perfect balance of all of this. At every given point of time, you have to see what you have to skew towards. If you're coming up, so for instance, Fanatics is all about seasonal sporting events, right? Whenever we have a sporting event, that's the biggest market for us. So if we have, say, a feature that we need to launch for Super Bowl, we have to launch that by Super Bowl. So we have a time constraint against that. If, say, we're coming up against, a board meeting where the previous board meeting, we've promised some revenue growth. Hey, we need to prioritize according to that and show progress in that. If there is a customer NPS score or a value-based, some sort of a score that we wanna improve, at that time we will focus on that. So you really have to make a decision for your particular area. And I would say, The better product managers and the better product market fit kind of examples actually take this framework and do this for every decision that they need to make on possibly a weekly or a biweekly basis. And you will see how this evolves, but it's important for you to kind of like align your team also on this. So that's just some tips from me in terms of product market fit and kind of aligning on that. And most importantly, measuring the degree of effectiveness effectiveness of your product, which is so critical for early-stage entrepreneurs like yourself. I don't drink coffee, but I'm happy to grab a juice or an ice cream anytime, and you can reach me at this email address. And thank you so much again for having me. And Dustin, do we shift to questions now?

Yeah, let's move to some, let's get to some Q&A here. So yes, as Daniel just said, don't be shy. If you have more questions, please drop them into the chat here, and now is the time to ask before we move to networking. So I guess I'll kick it off first with a question in here from Scott, who is asking, what are some tips for getting a clear picture of an ROI in an early-stage startup when the return part of that return on investment is not necessarily easy to define, I guess, numerically or like in sales data? Any kind of thoughts for Scott on ROI?

Yeah, so ROI comes in very different forms or fashion, right? Everything is not just improving the revenue. That's an obvious ROI for businesses like yourself that are seeking investment, seeking to grow, et cetera. But there are various other ROIs, you know, there are quantitative ROIs and there are qualitative ROIs. The quantitative ROIs, obviously we talked about the business ROI, but you know, if there is like a, to your point, Dustin, you said some sort of a sales, lead gen tool or something like that, maybe the ROI is just how many new leads are you able to generate on a biweekly or a monthly basis? I would question that, you know, every business should have a quantifiable ROI. It doesn't need to be a revenue, it needs to be broader than that, but you need to understand the drivers of actually what is contributing to the revenue, which is really important, you know, in terms of the business. So that's why ROI is important. The qualitative ROIs are usually overlooked, but actually equally important. So what if you've generated a million sales leads, but your sales managers, your sales, you know, your people in companies are struggling through the product, are having data issues, not able to see it on the phone. Salespeople are very mobile and, you know, on the go. If you don't have that right product with that right data, you won't solve the problem. So qualitative ROIs like customer satisfaction scores, like, you know, very for work, very workflow-based products, things like, customer effort score. Happy to, so Scott, more, but ROI isn't just revenue. It's a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics that I would definitely encourage just sitting down and understanding how, what are the revenue drivers and also what are the smaller customer satisfaction metrics that we want to drive. I hope that answers his question.

I think it did because he— yes, Scott says, uh, thank you, that's the feedback I was seeking. So you gave a great answer for Scott. Um, perfect. Yeah, I have a second audience question that we have, um, queued up here. Uh, well, Renata had asked about your email address, I guess, and you did share that on the last slide, and everybody will receive a replay of this, uh, session, uh, within like 48 hours, so you can see that again. Uh, this question from Verica is asking about building a no-code MVP. So this is quite specific, um, uh, how to build a no-code MVP, uh, with AI. So the value prop itself is— has some form of AI, uh, and they need to test a hypothesis. Uh, this is sort of a question I, I had for, for you as well, kind of, uh, around, I guess, um, no-code or, uh, you know, product development for non-technical founders. So I don't know if you can address this AI, no-code, specifically.

Yeah, I can, and actually we've done something like this. So at eBay, I was very fortunate to lead the core buying product. So if anybody has shopped at eBay, the core buying bidding process flow is something that I actually managed. And so as you can imagine, it was a great experience because there is millions and millions of transactions and billions of impressions that you get over a period of even like weeks, which was really gratifying. And we wanted to improve the experience in terms of making it actually even faster. So I decided to copy Amazon's one-click model and actually create a one-click bid for which, you know, my engineering manager and I have the patent for it. And as you can imagine, you are gonna roll this out to, you know, 200, at that time, 200 million users. And it was pretty nerve-wracking at that. And so the first thing that we did was really understand how to lower the barrier of risk in terms of actually implementation. A no-code MVP is a great way to actually lower that barrier. We built a one-click bid with completely no code. It was a fully functioning, just independent prototype. However, what we did was, I mean, 20 years ago, it's not like AI was really advanced. I mean, now everybody talks about it, but at that time my engineering manager said, hey, How about we actually use, you know, their purchase history and actually, you know, present to them some complementary products after they've actually placed the bid? Because you've placed the bid in one click and then we realized that it was just too quick and then they needed something to like anchor on to. So we said, okay, so we have some real estate, what can we do here? Let's cross merchandise. And this is really the starting of like collaborative filtering that actually happened. My engineering manager did figure out a way to be able to create a very thin sliver of an AI model, which by the way, most AI models start with a spreadsheet with like conditions, if-then conditions. Really starting with that and actually displaying, coming to a conclusion about some list of products to actually present. We did focus groups and user research studies with approximately 100 users in 3 different countries now. Again, here's where eBay resources, we could actually do it, but you could do it, you know, on digital platforms right now, you know, like, I think like Pendo and things like that. You could like actually do online research. I'm sure there are more platforms that I'm probably missing. For a small fee, you could do it with like 10, 15 users and actually get great insights and data. The fact that you're even thinking about doing a no-code MVP is great. So I think we should because you need to lower the barrier of risk as we are launching. And third, with AI, every AI model starts with a spreadsheet. So even if it's a spreadsheet like we did at eBay back then 20 years ago to display complementary products after a one-click bid was a way to start. And I'm sure you can find some parallels too. And right now you have so many digital platforms where you can do it with a dozen users and get some great feedback. I hope that answers Varika's question too.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great answer and yeah, definitely very encouraging. It sounds like for the strategy that you're going out and an endorsement for no-code and getting, as you said, the speed, I guess, aspect of building that MVP. So yeah, hopefully that is helpful. Here's another question from Galit. Galit, I hope I didn't butcher your name too much, who's asking, really like the concept of measuring positive customer emotion. Could you give some examples of how to measure positive customer emotion, especially if we're relying on other businesses, I guess, to give you this information? So he's a B2B food supplier, is what he says his company is. So yeah, ideas for measuring a positive customer emotion in a kind of B2B context.

Yes, so at Upwork, which was at that time oDesk when we actually built the time tracking tool, What we wanted to measure was trust. Can you imagine measuring trust? I mean, how do you measure it, right? I mean, there's one thing measuring, hey, do I like the product? Am I able to use it well? Am I able to do this task in much less time than without the tool? That's one thing which you could do some time studies and do some NPS surveys and get some feedback. How do you, how the hell do you measure trust? But the fact of the matter is that we had to measure it. So one, don't give up. The positive customer emotion and the measurement of that is important. So stay with it, debate, discuss, you know, this with the team, and I'm sure you'll find a way about this. But for us, trust meant two things at Upwork. The first is that trust will easily translate into repeat business. So if Dustin is on the Upwork platform and is seeking for help and I'm the contractor and I'm using this time tracking tool, We want Dustin to post another job to give me as a freelancer more jobs. So repeat business was a clear indicator of whether this was trust or not. And the second is level of engagement. And level of engagement means Dustin will actually go in and go into my profile and say, Shubha has done a great job at, you know, this project that we actually gave her, or he would, you know, give a review for Upwork, which at that time was oDesk and very small. And we had like, we really relied a lot on like BBB reviews and we used to send like marketing emails about it. So the more Dustin engages in that, the more he's trusting the platform, the more he's trusting the contractor. And so those were some quantitative ways, but also don't forget the qualitative ways. I mean, just a simple email out that says, hey, how was your first project with Shuba? And how was the experience overall? Can just reveal so much about, and having some sort of like free-form text where they can enter some feedback is, reveals so much. So that's what we did at Upwork. And it was a clear indicator for us when first we launched it and it completely didn't work and what we needed to do to iterate to be able to get to the point where Dustin will post more jobs and give Shubha more business, for instance. So we had to get there. It was a journey.

Yeah, yeah. Really interesting example, yeah, with both again, the qualitative and the quantitative side. And on the quantitative side for something as complex or like amorphous a concept as trust, having some kind of these different proxies basically that are ways to measure that on the qualitative side. Yeah, so sometimes you might have to get creative sort of to have that be measured.

One of my PMs is actually teaching me a little bit about trust too. So if we do broad-scale product launches, I believe a measure of trust is also the health of the social media content and presence, which wasn't there back then, 15 years ago at Upwork, but now it's a thing. So if you've launched a big feature like Instagram Shops, like, you know, that's a big launch that they actually did. Bad PR and bad social media content can really, you know, can get there. So really monitoring all of those key channels in terms of the mood, the sentiment, and I believe there are tools to do that too, which is great. So my PMs are actually teaching me now about the new age of, trust and the content that can be measured in this new world, which is exciting.

Yeah. Another, I guess, a term of art that probably most are familiar with, but the NPS scoring, I feel like is one of the more well-established quantitative ways to go after some of these fuzzy qualitative feelings, I guess.

Absolutely. Actually, to add to that, One of the best customer emotion measurement models is if you've traveled in Europe and the bathrooms in the European toilets have a simple like smiley and no smiley, and it has like a simple 3 things. It's a smiley, there's a, you know, kind of a poker face, and then there's a, I hate it. And I'm not kidding, I've used that so much. Obviously with COVID we're not traveling as much, but before I used that so much and it's such a great way to get feedback. On the cleanliness of the toilet. And I thought that was a really nice way. So there are more, NPS is obviously the gold standard, but also you could look at customer effort score, customer satisfaction scores through this simple smiley model. There are various ways to actually gauge emotions.

I've seen that smiley model embedded like towards the footer of emails actually to say like, did you like this email? So another sort of simplified way that, yeah.

—answers Gallant's question.

So yeah, yeah, I hope so too, Gallant. One question, I guess one more question here. There's another one at least queued up that I want to ask. It's kind of related. So this is from Polanyi asking how to evaluate these levels of user experience, you know, good, better, best, not great, bad. And she elaborates because reviews are not always the most accurate way to judge, question mark. So yeah, I guess thoughts on similar, I think you could do similar kind of level of surveying, right? You know, we could make this good, better, best, lowest, you know, score of 1 to 10, but just other thoughts on this specifically for a mobile app, but evaluating how the user's experience is.

Yeah, you know, it's a great question because when the user reviews for mobile apps started, they were intended to actually solve exactly the problem that— and I'm sorry, I can't see the name properly— that Parani actually mentioned. Because if you have a 1 versus a 5, it will tell you a little bit about which is the better mobile app experience. We live in an age right now where there is so much data and so many reviews, and they've invested so much in acquisition of those reviews that the average rating for a mobile app is, I believe, again, a PM told me, is like 4.4. What does 4.4 mean to you? It's a good experience, right? But maybe not because actually what that means is 4.3, 4.2 actually means you're actually in the bottom 20%. We live in a world where so much data is there in terms of user reviews that we definitely need a different way of calibrating mobile app experiences. So I completely empathize with what Parani is actually saying. We face the same problem at eBay with a feature called detailed seller ratings on various dimensions like shipping, customer service, quality of the product, like, you know, was the product as expected? We would rank the sellers, the buyers would rank the sellers on 1 to 5. And while initially it provided a level of differentiation, after some point of time it started becoming homogenous and everything was around the 4 and 5 range. So really then what is good and what is bad becomes very difficult to actually gauge. Because we live in that, I think there are two ways to actually glean the better experiences. I think the first thing is there is no substitute for actually trying out the product yourself. You're all entrepreneurs in a way, you're all product managers and you're all doing what you are because you are all either great or have the potential to be great product managers. And so, Take the product that you actually need, evaluate it, and use it yourself, and use some best-in-class products. Actually just spend some time on it. You will see how the experiences are different and how you're reacting to them. So for instance, something that has a signup page on a new app where I have to enter a whole form, I'd be much less excited about it versus something that actually has a Facebook Connect or, you know, Google Connect, for instance, like using their single sign-on APIs. Something that actually is an easy— like I'm very e-commerce, so something that is a very easy checkout process. Checkout is so commercialized and standardized right now. Like, for God's sake, I created one-click bid. I mean, there's nothing, you know, faster than that. A fast checkout experience using the existing payment methods is extremely important. So if you have— let me I don't really go through full long payment checkout forms, it's not gonna engage me. So there are various dimensions like that. The more you use it subjectively, the more you will understand what is a good and a not so great experience. But also some ways to do that is actually just Googling some, you know, broad-based internet reviews on them in terms of what people are saying on like Reddit or Twitter or things like that that can actually give you more data on actually how the experience is and how they're differentiated. If you're trying to do this for yourself, meaning you're not trying to evaluate a third-party app, but you're trying to evaluate your own app, which I wasn't able to gauge from Palani's question, there is nothing, there is no substitute than actually putting in some measurement, whether it is a short survey at the end of potentially some sort of like an experience asking them how good that experience was, sending them a follow-up email, thanking them and asking for some feedback, or more importantly, just if you could actually measure the cohort of the time spent on the app. Mobile apps are a lot about engagement and time spent. And time spent, there is a little bit of a complexity in this, which is we actually think the lesser, you know, the more time you spend, the more you're engaged. But we noticed that if you're actually confused with the task, you will spend more time. And you will then think you're better engaged. So there's actually, you, for your own product and for your own mobile app experience, you need to gauge what is that measurement of time spent and that engagement for you to be able to get a better picture of that. So Parni, I hope that answered your question. It's a broad question, but one, go beyond the reviews. I can totally empathize with why you want to go beyond the reviews and I totally appreciate your asking the question. There's a lot of, you know, third-party information and reviews actually available. Second, there is no substitute for using the product yourself and actually comparing this with other products that you want to use. Download a few apps and actually go through the experience. I test and run products all the time, whether I'm shopping or not, just the aspect of like search, browse, checkout, whether I complete the checkout or not, tells me a lot about how e-commerce has actually really evolved. And I like to stay on top of some of the, you know, new trends also. And, you know, again, at specific milestones, if you're trying to do this for your own app, Palani, then at specific milestones, you can put in a pop-up, however obtrusive it is. I mean, try to do this more elegantly, send a follow-up email, and gather the data directly from the consumer in terms of how they, you know, like or not like the experience and will give you feedback. I hope that answers your question, Palani.

A lot of great advice, at least, yeah, out there. Do you have time for one more question? I know you have to go at the top of the hour. I do have time for one more question. Okay, let's do it. Let's just do one more. Joe is asking a question here kind of about market segmentation. It's very specific to his company. So he says, my product is called Slice.tech. It's a Photoshop for content writers is how he describes it. The market is broad. He's discovering different use cases across different industries and wondering, how to evaluate those different opportunities. So should he try to establish product-market fit maybe with just one of those use cases? Is there a framework to sort of think about those different opportunities? Or should he aim for the fastest product-market fit he can achieve, go after the biggest slice of the market, to make a pun on the name of the company called Slice, the most intense customer pain point? Yeah, so any thoughts maybe on on market segmentation, in Joe's case, where he's not quite sure exactly where to focus his efforts around establishing—

We live in an age where more, you know, I think less is definitely more from a product and from a design standpoint, but from a goal setting and ambition standpoint, more is more. So in an ideal world, you should solve all of those customer cases in the fastest possible way with all of those market segments actually captured. The reality of that is that it's not so easy, right? So you will see one trend amongst most companies, Joe, and that is there is a certain customer archetype or a problem or a use case that that company will own. I mean, like own end to end. Nobody does it better than them. That's kind of like your beachhead. So you should find your beachhead, and I would recommend everybody to find their beachhead. Fanatics right now is getting into sports, and you know, it's already in sports, but it's getting into music, entertainment, and there's so many avenues where Fanatics is in. But our beachhead is sports. Our beachhead, when you drill down, is sports league merchandise. So it is the fans like you and me going to NFL.com shop or NBA.com shop and shopping for their favorite jerseys and gear is our beachhead. And we do that extremely well because end to end from a licensing, product creation, e-commerce experience, fulfillment, we take care of all of that. You will— there is no other place in the world where you will get a better sports merchandise fulfillment, you know, shopping and a fulfillment experience than Fanatics. That's our beachhead. We then create whatever else we wanna do on top of that. We can do, you know, schools, colleges, which by the way, 40% of the colleges in the United States is actually all run by Fanatics. So if you've ever bought a college t-shirt or gear, which I'm sure a lot of us have, you know, gone to schools and are faithful to our educational institutions, you know, 1 out of, 2 out of 3 times it's probably done by Fanatics in some form or fashion. So there are various markets also in that, that Fanatics has its hands in, but the beachhead is the league e-commerce experience. So I would recommend listing down the use cases Understanding what the level of effort and the level of ROI is for each one of those. Documenting what the problem statement is and understanding how big the problem statement is for each one of those use cases. And deciding for yourself with that balance of like time, value, and money, which one is the best investment for, you know, your time right now. And I would recommend instead of growing broad, At this stage as an entrepreneur, that's just my personal thing, find your beachhead, find a space where you can actually truly rule and increase that degree of differentiation and customer satisfaction that you would be able to achieve. But obviously in your vision statement and in your pitch decks, talk about the rest of the use cases that you want to do. So it actually shows more broadly as a market, but from a product standpoint, you need to find your beachhead. Beachhead. So that's just a personal two cents. I hope, Joe, that answers your question.

Yeah, or at least I think provides a nice framework for, yeah, how to evaluate or decide, you know, which of those opportunities will be your beachhead market. So, uh, yeah, definitely. I want to thank you so much, um, for your time, Shubha. I'm gonna bring up here just quickly before we switch to, uh, networking, my slide deck again so I can go over some very brief housekeeping notes. But yeah, That was a really fantastic presentation. I think everybody— we had some great questions here from the audience. So I think everyone really enjoyed it. And yeah, I'm really appreciative of your time as well.