How to Build a Winning Go-to-Market Plan with Moshe Mikanovsky of Rootquotient

So I would almost try to think about maybe align what retention means in every stage, and then see, does that make sense for that stage? Now, in addition to that, I mentioned before, you know, the aha moment. So how can I get them faster to that aha moment? And if I can test first what aha moment means, that creates that value to the users. And I can then have this as a key indicator for people to try to get to that aha moment. Um, and then maybe even to show that after the aha moment, the retention is growing. So people that saw the moment will retain more than people that didn't see the aha moment. Uh, this could be good ways for me to start tracking that and, and see how I can apply means in the product to get them faster to that.

Welcome everybody, thank you so much. For your patience. You know, it's the holiday season here in the United States. I'm coming to you live from Austin, Texas. My name is Martin Martinez, um, head of all our programs here in Texas at the Founder Institute. Also serve as our entrepreneur-in-residence for Founder Institute Global. I've been doing these events for a number of years. I'm actually back in the saddle. I've been off for, for a little bit of time, so I'm excited to be back. Thank you again for your patience. I know y'all been anxiously waiting for this event about building a product-driven go-to-market strategy with our friends over at RootCourse. We're gonna dive right in right now. I know y'all been actually waiting. I'm so glad that y'all stuck around with us. Get our friend Moshi up. There he is. How we doing, amigo?

Hello, how are you? Finally, I got over all of those technical issues that I had.

Oh, the crowd has been anxiously waiting, but—

I am so sorry for that.

A minute too soon, my friend. I will let you take it from here. The hour is yours. I'll be hanging back. You're going to see me, audience, disappear into the ether, but please check out that chat, ask those questions. I'll be back up towards the end of the hour so that we can get through those.

Yeah, yeah, we definitely want to have time for Q&A, so I will try to keep it for around half an hour and then Q&A at the end. I just want to make sure, do you see my presentation? Yes. Okay. Because for some reason I don't see it. I do see the chat, I do see myself, but I don't see the presentation on the app here. So I just want to make sure everyone does see my presentation. Perfect.

Let's make sure we get that up going for you for sure.

No worries. Yeah, no worries. Okay, good. Because I know sometimes I've been in situations where people were talking, talking, talking, and then like, where is the presentation exactly? So I want to make sure everyone does see that. Um, perfect. So let's start. So, uh, today we are going to talk about how to build product-driven go-to-market strategy.

I think we might be still needing to get that— so slides up for you, my friend. So let's get that— let's get that going, and then I'll let you know when, when we get it up for everybody. Yeah, the audience loves seeing your face, but they also want to see those slides.

Now they are shared. I do see that they're shared.

Yeah, let's see. We are. Let's make sure. There we go. All right, everybody. I'm gonna hang out backstage. I'll be back up later. Thanks, y'all. Now we're in business.

We're in business. Perfect. So as I said, today we're going to talk about how to build a product-driven go-to-market strategy. But before we even start there, I want to actually ask you this question. When, when I say what the go-to-market, what comes to your mind when you think about go-to-market? I want you to write it down in the chat, and I'm going to start looking at the chat to see what are the things that come to mind for you. Selling to customers, customers, good. What else? Get first users, expanding the market size, the launch, iterative process. Amazing. First approach to market for product market fit. Oh, there is a lot of text over there. I cannot read it so fast. So that it's okay, it's good. It means that everyone have some thoughts about it. Feedback from potential ones, selling products to retail, uh, product launch, sales strategy, conversion. Amazing. So There is a lot of good stuff over here and I want to keep thinking about it as we go through this presentation because there is some misconceptions about go-to-market and some things that we really want to focus on. But before I start with that, let me just quickly introduce myself because I'm sure that there was some introduction before, but I couldn't hear anything. So, um, just quickly, so my name is Moshe Mikhanovsky and I am product director at Root Quotient. Um, at Root Quotient, we help our customers strategize, build, and scale better digital products. We have done it for over 5 years. We've built hundreds of solutions for our clients. Um, our team is over 150 people right now in more than 5 business domains, and you can see some of the logos of the customers that we help. Personally, I've been building digital products for over 3 decades. So I've done a lot of many different things with many different technologies. And that's about it. So now let's dive in a bit into go-to-market. So you all put like great thoughts about here about what product what go-to-market might mean. But I first want to get into a bit some of the misconceptions even in go-to-market, because some of us, when we think about go-to-market, we only think about the marketing. So we always only think, how do we get to our clients? How they will know about us? Or we think about the sales strategy. So how we're going to sell it, what are going to be the channels through which we're going to find our users or get them to buy our product. We think about it as a one-time exercise, but someone did mention over there that it's iterative. So that's actually right. It's not just a one-time thing. It's also not just for startups. Every company in every level of its existence and in every level of the product needs to have some type of go-to-market strategy even between different features or between the changes to the product. So there are two big types of, or two main types of, go-to-market strategies. One of them is the sales-driven and the other one is the tech-driven. The sales-driven is where we have a lot of sales efforts to get the product out there and to find more clients and more clients. The tech-driven is more where we have a specific technology that we— is very— either it's trendy like AI these days, or it's a technology we know very well, or we really develop this even as a research and development, and we want to create some products with that. That technology. But there are some downsides for using those. They could fit in some type of organizations, but one of the downsides of using a sales-driven go-to-market is that it can create this misalignment between the customers and the product, or between us and the customer and what they really need. And also, it will eventually compromise this product quality or the fit of the product to the market. Because we are not always looking at what customers really need rather than pushing a product that may not fit them exactly. And on the technology side, we also sometimes, because we use a specific technology, we might ignore the market validation that actually this will solve the problem for the client, for the market. And we also can create because of that some wasteful utilization of our resources. Because we can spend a lot of money and time developing in a technology that might not be the best fit to solve this problem. So this is where product-driven go-to-market comes into the picture. And with that, what actually we are doing is we are putting the, the market in the center, but not just the market, we are putting also the product in the center. The product is helping us with customer acquisition, it helps us with retention of the clients, and eventually to get to this product market fit. So the product market fit is the first thing that we really want to get. We know it's an elusive thing. It's not always easy to get. It's not many times easy to even know that we have a product market fit. But when we focus our efforts with a product-driven go-to-market strategy, we can actually— it can help us with adoption and customer engagement, as well as with adapting ourselves, learning from what we have done and adapting our product as well as our organization, and continuously improve that until we do find this product-market fit. And eventually, when we get that product-market fit, we can start sustainably and scalably grow the product, grow the organization, and grow the business overall. So to do that, what we have put, uh, what we're doing at Root Quotient— so we, we have, we have done that, uh, through many of the projects that we build for our clients, and also looking into, uh, the addition, the, the what happens after, what happens after the you start, uh, launching your product and getting your product in the market and building and iterating on this and trying to get this product market fit. So at Root Quotient, we developed this product steering wheel to help us with that and really to help our clients to steer into a better direction. So imagine that your organization is like this car and you have this destination in front of you. And that steering wheel is really helping you with the different drivers. And I will go through all of these drivers in a second. But through these different drivers, it helps you to move in the right direction wherever you are in your stage at the moment. Like, at the center of everything is the vision. So we talked about it in a previous workshop that we did. The first workshop was about product Product Discovery, and it's all recorded, so you can all find it online and, and watch it if you have not done it yet. Um, back then we talked about, uh, what drives, uh, what the risks that the organization have to face when building products. And the vision is really the one that help us move forward once we have the definition of the vision, to then later on define our strategy et cetera, but identify all the different things that we need to get to. We— I have for you— sorry. And then those are 3 drivers that we're going to talk about. So we will talk about the market drivers, we'll talk about the organization driver, and we'll talk about the product drivers. They all help together as one cohesive plan in each one of the phases of the working on creating the next version of the product. So those 3 phases are the pre-build phase, and this is where we identify what are the problems, what is it that we hypothesize that will work for our users. And then there is the next step is the build. This is where we build and we get ready to actually validate all of these hypotheses that we built before. And the last stage is the launch, where we actually launch it into the market and we put it out there. Now, we have to think about it in every stage of our product. So it's not necessarily just when we start, we have this and that's it, we launch it and we're done. It's really an iterative process that goes again and again. And in every stage of the product, we have a new hypothesis about what will work next and what are the things that will make it even better. In the beginning, we want to get product-market fit, but we have to start somewhere. So we start with some prototype, we start with an MVP, we build MVP, we put it out there, we launch the MVP, and then we start learning from that. But in order for us to eventually be able to see, are we there yet? Did we get to that product-market fit? We have to plan ahead upfront when we pre-build to decide what are the hypotheses that will make us get to the product market fit and what do we need to build within the product in our organization using these three drivers to actually get there. And after we got to the product market fit, it continues because the product market fit is something that is not static. It can change over time based on the changes in the market. Based on changes in our offering, whatever that is. So if we continue, I want to go through each one of those phases and tell you what some— what are the drivers, the 3 drivers in each one of those phases. So we also put for you this time, like always, we, we're sharing everything with everyone. So we have a playbook for you. I will share at the end of the session, a QR code where you can go and download this. And throughout the session, there will be a few highlights from that workbook, the playbook, on things that you can do in order to help you in your specific process. So you will see this little sticker of the book throughout, and I will mention that. But just have in mind, you don't have to worry here. You will have it later on. You will be able to get to it. So the first thing is, um, um, our pre-build. So now we are in the pre-build phase, and you see here there is a sign in front of us on the road, and the sign is towards value and viability. Again, this is going back to the first session we had with the 4 risks of building product: value, viability— so value to the users, viability to us— um, usability, and feasibility. So we will talk about these other two in a second, but first of all, here the direction is how can we create value to our users and is it going to be viable for us. So when we look into the market drivers here, the market is basically our users and then a segment of that, uh, in the market. So we have to understand the segmentation that we're going to build for, uh, what is their pain points. So understanding what exactly we're trying to solve here, what is the real problem, and then what might be resistance that they might really don't want to switch to our product. So there are many products out there that provide a lot of value, but, um, sometimes it's hard for people to move from one product to another. There could be resistance like It's too expensive for them to move. They already spend their time or money on a specific product. Another one could be they just don't want to change. So I can tell you from personal perspective, whenever somebody is trying to get me to maybe use an Android, I'm like, that's not for me because I'm an Apple person. We're getting attached very quickly sometimes to products that we that we like. And if there is a new product in the market, um, and we are now on this other side, we are the one trying to sell this, this product in the market, how do we make it more convincing for, um, our users, the market, that they will be able to change or they will want to change to us? So, so those are drivers from market perspective. Uh, from, um, the organization drivers, We also want to think about how we are going to plan ahead to move this product and make it successful. Some of it is service excellence, and excellence means different things to different people. So you have to define for yourself what does the service of supporting this product mean to you and how you want your brand to look like to your clients. And it all connects, it's all connected to each other. So at the end of the day, without defining the service level that you want to give them, it will be very hard for you to prepare to this go-to-market. The second part here is, can we help them in reducing switching costs or reducing this resistance that they might have to move to our product? And many of those things can be done by creating the right service flows, the right people to do it, the right processes, whatever needs to be done to make ready to go to market. And then the last driver over here is the product driver. And this is, you know, quite— should be quite obvious where, you know, what are the value we're trying to create to our users, um, what is the actual solution that we're building here. So this is where we can pick and choose the different features we will build that will solve this specific value and prioritization and all of that. We can also bake into the system, into the product, things like incentives to incentivize people to come and use the product or stay with the product. And then also things that will make valuable for us at the end of the day. So it could be as simple things as backend processes that will help us support our, our clients in much better way, or increase activations, increase retention, etc. And we'll talk about it also a bit later on. So this is in the pre-build phase. And if I'm moving forward, before I get to the next phase, in the handbook, we have this product-market fit assumption canvas. So it's a small canvas, it's one-pager that give you all of these specific questions and directions so you can fill it in and you can identify how do you define your assumptions for your product market fit. And they're coming from all of these different drivers. And the idea there is that before you continue into the build, or before you decide what is it that you're going to build and get ready for the build, you want to make sure that you are planning towards, uh, uh, getting to your product market fit Therefore, you will be able to build properly towards that and to also launch properly towards that. Now, again, product-market fit is not just for your first product launch or for your first product that you are trying to see if there is a good fit. It's actually for every new big feature that you are adding that might change could change sometimes radically how your clients will see your product, whether they will like it or not, and whether there is— you're still having that fit in there. So it's always important to actually think about, are— do we still have product-market fit or not? Okay, so next we're moving into the build phase. And in the build phase, um, this is where we're actually building it and making it ready for launch. This is where we are looking at the feasibility and usability. You see the post sign in the road is to look into that. This is about, is it feasible for us to build? We have to make sure we can build the solution we're trying to build to solve this problem and to create the value for the users. We also need to make sure it's usable so our users will be able to use it. Then to make sure that we can actually support all of that and that we'll be able to to— if people get in stock and it's not usable for them, or they're getting stuck and they need support, we will be there to help them with that. So on the market drivers, we can define here what will make our MVP, what will make the next version, the beyond. So every version, really, what's, what's the next thing that we have to put in there? So our users will find the the best value in there. So the V is very important in there. So it's, it's, it's viable for us, but it's valuable for the users as well. And then also, what does it mean to be successful with this specific market? So what will be a KPI like retention, like activations, like time, time in the application, but you will have to define also your own specific KPIs based on your situations because it's, it's quite individual for every product and every product market fit. Um, the second thing, uh, on the organizational level, we have to be ready for supporting this product. So, uh, the first thing is, um, aligning all of our stakeholders and making them ready. So do our marketing department know what is it that we're building and they know how to market it and create campaigns for that? Do our salespeople know what we're building and they know how to sell it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So everyone really needs to be aligned to that. And then support readiness. Can we support it? Do we know how to support it? Do we have the right people to support it? Are the things related to this could be done, needs to be done manually, and therefore there needs to be some processes for that to make that happen. So everything related to the support, so we don't just release it to the world and it's just sitting there. So it's not just about people are seeing the product and they use it, but also we can actually help them to use it better. And the last one is the product drivers. And here, this is where we put in our features, the level of quality of the product. The quality can differ between different versions of the product. MVP, usually we always said we don't need very, very high-level quality because we might spend too much time on the quality where the value is not there. The most important thing is to get the value in there. Then things like ease of use, so the user interface, the user interactions, And education material. Education materials, many times we think about creating videos that people can get maybe on our website or things like that. But we can also apply a lot of methods that are baked or part of the product to help us with that. And the next slide, actually, that I want to share with you here, you see this— little tree of techniques. We have it also, and it's all spelled out and explained. Each one of those techniques is explained inside the playbook in details. But the idea here, and we use here the ARRR, the pirate matrix of growth, that you might be familiar with that for acquisition, activation, retention, referrals, and revenue. And the idea there is to, um, provide you here with many different options for types of mechanisms that can be implemented within the product to actually drive those, uh, for you. So, um, in acquisition, for example, yes, you could still do marketing campaigns through social media, through ads, you know, on Google or wherever it is, which is outside of the product. But there are many acquisition ways and methods that you can choose to try and do within the product. So for example, you can create, you know, freemiums or free trials so people can actually try the product before they use it. You can entice people to invite their friends or to invite their team members. Depends if it's B2B or B2C, to the product so they will be able to also use it and extend the acquisition that way. And each one of those areas you see on this tree are actually ways for you that many companies have tried in the past and some of them are doing quite successfully to activate users in better ways through the product, retaining users through the product, etc., etc. Some of them you might not even have to develop on your own. You could find different third-party products, usually SaaS products that you can integrate with that already provide these functionalities. So there are some specialty products for that these days, which is really nice. 'cause most of the time all you will have to do is a simple integration between them and it will give you this additional functionality that then you will create the content. So like onboarding, for example, or in-app messaging in the product to help people understand your product. There is many tools out there that you can use that for. Great. So this is also inside the playbook. And then next, we're going into the launch phase. And the launch phase is where you actually put your product out there. And you validate all the assumptions that you make. And then you assess where are you? And are you close to product market fit or sustainable product market fit, as you see at the top here in the sign on the road, because that's really where we want to get to with every version of our product. So the driver here for the market, the market driver, is looking at the value we're creating for the users, but also identifying, is there any value issues? So if there are many value issues, so we are not creating value to the users, we're not seeing the users coming back to get this value again, then we have to do something about it. Um, and then also we, we can look into user behaviors and feedback, and we can analyze you know, what people are actually doing in the product and what people are telling us about the product, or what we see that the behavior of the users. On the organization driver, uh, we want to look at viability to us. So is it viable to us based on what we have done and the way that we release the product, um, and everything we're learning through the, the usage of users, but also everything we learn about how we support that? And is it still a viable thing for us to do? Um, does it, um, all of a sudden we find out that it's very expensive for us to support because, um, um, you know, the servers or the hosting cost us a lot? Or, uh, all of a sudden we found some issue with the security or with, uh, some compliance that we have to deal with? So all of those things Many times we might know them upfront, but many times we will find them as we go. Then based on all of this information, we have to make a decision. Should we continue the route we took or should we pivot? This has been always really a critical decision-making for us to do. Based on that, we can update our roadmap to continue the way we've gone and enhance that, whatever we found out that needs to be enhanced to create even a better product-market fit. And the cycle goes back into, again, uh, the, the pre-build, create a new hypothesis for what's next, etc. Um, or we can pivot completely, change, uh, the, the market or the segment, or change the product, or change both. So all of these options are always available for us, but it's always important to learn based on what we, we validate it and find out. And lastly, the product itself, we have to look into any usability issues. So are people getting stuck somewhere? So maybe we have to unstuck them, or maybe they cannot find the specific features, so that's why they never used it because it's hidden so well in the product. And also quality issues, bugs, and how many times people are coming to us with issues about they cannot use the product, or the etc., etc. And again, of course, inside the playbook, we have this little decision flow to look into and ask yourself those questions about where you are in your product journey and what information you have so we can actually continue forward until you get to a decision. Yes, I got this product-market fit. This is It's very hard for us to write something that will work for everyone, but we try to make it generic enough so you can plug in your KPIs or plug in your understanding of your product and where you are. And therefore you will be able to tell, okay, probably we are at this stage right now. We have enough validation, there is some retention, etc., etc. And there is a line in there you will see in the book that is highlighting where you are. Did you get to product market fit or not? To wrap it all up, I wanted to share an example or a case study from Spotify. Now Spotify is a huge company. They have lots of products. Actually, while researching for this, I was surprised how many products I didn't even know they have. Which is really amazing. I've been a Spotify user for a number of years with my family and we love it, and I think they're doing an amazing job. And here we picked one specific feature, not even a full product, just the collaborative playlist feature. So we wanted to try to, to, to show you how we would have gone through that with, with our steering wheel where in each one of those phases. So let's start with the pre-build phase. And in this pre-build phase, we have all of those drivers, right? We have the market driver, the organization, and the product driver. So the market drivers over here would be things like diversified user with social interaction needs. So they already have a lot of users in there, but many of those users are also using social collaboration on other platforms and they are already aware of how to do that. Then they might already do some sharing of music across between them and stuff like that, but they might find some workarounds how to do it, maybe outside of Spotify at the time before they released it or whatever that was. They did identify here a need and a pain point in the product. But still, the opportunity there was to even create a stronger, streamlined music sector. So they wanted to keep their leadership in that, and that's part of it for the organization as an organizational driver. And then from a product driver, once they have— if they include this already, prophecy, that they would have if they include these features inside the product. They will boost new music discovery, they will boost engagement and retention, and also even increase stickiness of the product because then it will reduce people from moving to other competing services. We know that there are a few of them out there that are competing with Spotify. So all of that, helped Spotify look into the pre-building towards, okay, first of all, should we build this thing? And then what is it that we really want to build in there to make that happen? So then when they decided to do that and they get ready for launching and on the build itself, so on the market drivers, they had to identify what will be KPIs that will actually tell them that once they release it, it's actually working and this specific feature has some type of product market fit and it helps overall with the product market fit and growth of Spotify as an overall service. So KPIs such as feature adoption and retention specifically for the feature, and then also planning how to segment the rollout. Usually Spotify and many other organizations, especially big organizations like that that have millions of users all over the world, they will not release it right away for everyone. They will do some segmentation to release it and they will have different reasons for that. One of the reasons is the users themselves, but the other reason is also can they support it? We'll talk about it in a second. This is on their organizational drivers. Preparedness for performance and availability. So imagine that if their hypothesis was that this is going to increase the number of users by X or the number of playlists by Y, and these X and Ys are in the millions, they also need to be able to support it somehow for performance, for availability of the service. So every feature like that could change the viability to the organization itself. In addition, they want to make sure their marketing is ready for that, so it's not just out there and no one knows about it. So there could be some campaigns getting ready for the launch or for the rolling launch based on the segments. And then preparing the customer support to help the users. With every feature like that, people will have questions, will not know how to use it. Even now, I think they don't support it yet on all the platforms. I think it's only supported on the mobile and on the native app, but not on the web app or something like that. So there still might be some support related to that and they need to be ready for this. And imagine Spotify have huge volumes. When you start and you have small volumes, it should be easier to support. When you grow and you have huge volumes, You have to make sure that all of those volumes are available and ready, especially if you support with multi-languages across time zones. All of these can make support much more complex. And then on the product itself, you know, as simple as, you know, what are the sharing features that they need to build, what type of tutorials maybe inside the app to build it, easy playlist integration. So how it's actually done easily and the usability of that. And even they created some in-app, specific in-app messaging and notifications for users to make them know about this more and notify them. So that was part of that launch as well. And then on the launch, once they launch it, the market drivers is really to track, to track the key KPIs that they identified before to see are they actually moving the needle a lot or a little or not at all, etc., on the different type of KPIs. On the organizational level drivers, they needed to see how it impacts their sustainability in the market from performance, from availability, and all of that stuff. And on the product drivers, things like, surveys to the users inside the application, tracking the users even deeper than just asking the users, but deeper as in flows, how people got from one place to the other place. Did they get stuck somewhere? I'm not sure if they're using heat maps or session replays, but that would be some of the mechanisms that I would use for that. Also, many of these things exist in applications out there that you integrate with the products, so you also don't have to develop many of those things on your own. And other things like, you know, an easy playlist integration. But they also noticed, as they were going through that, they noticed that there is an alert fatigue. So a lot of people were complaining about that. And as they iterated, they put more changes towards that. Okay. And then their outcome of this was just of that one feature that they added was getting 10 million new subscribers, reaching to 200 million premium users. Additional 70% of users discovered new artists and/or tracks that they didn't know about because now they were able to collaborate with other people to create those playlists. And 60% felt more connected through shared playlists. So there is a whole big, um, uh, positive effect of that. And, um, since then, um, Spotify added more collaboration features. Uh, recent— the last one I've seen, uh, is called Jams, where people can do live jams that they can invite, I think, up to 30 or 30, 32 people or something like that. To actually add live— so it's not a playlist, but it's rather a live jam that people are doing. So they really took it to many different directions. But the only way they could have done it is by making those hypotheses upfront, delivering on this, and seeing if there is good traction, and then growing it and moving even forward to even more. Okay, so now that we have gone through all of that, I want to go back to the beginning where In the beginning, I asked you what do you feel, you know, what do you think about go-to-market? Now I want to ask you, at which stage of your product's lifecycle would you consider using product-driven go-to-market? So think about where you are right now and what stage you are and when do you think you will start using product-driven go-to-market? Write it down in the comments. I will switch to the comments over here because I'm really interested to see. Let's see. Right now. Amazing. Isabel wrote right now. Yeah, I would, I would say that should be the answer for everything. Before even starting to build. Very good. I'm using the go-to-market page phasing. Okay, this went a bit up. Okay, I don't know why I have this. Okay. Here, I need to make it right after market validation. Okay. Yeah, market, market is really part of this. So you definitely want to validate right before prototype. Okay, I think that, you know, all of the answers are right based on where you are. And in many cases, you may need to take part of it and break it down to see where are you right now. Right now with the prototype phase starts at the idea to prototype. Great, great answers over here. Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts on this. So last but not least, I promised you in the beginning that I will have a QR code for you. And I still people coming in. Great. Amazing. I love how everyone is sharing their thoughts on this one. Before the founder gets too excited. That's a good one as well. I like that. But some of it is really about, you know, we're saying don't fall in love with the solution, fall in love with the problem. So sometimes when you get too excited is when you think you have the right solution for that. But I love that prototype to MVP. Amazing. That's great. I hope I will have access to all of this chat after because I would love to read all of them. It was so fast going up. So as I said, last but not least, I do want to share with you the QR code. Is it the next slide? What is going on here? Why can't— I don't know why it doesn't move to the next slide. I have one more slide, I promise. But for some reason, it doesn't. Today and those technical issues, I'm like, what is going on? Okay, come on. Okay, wait, maybe I will try to stop sharing here and then I will share again. I do want you to get this QR code. Then screen sharing. Yeah, I'll stop my share. And then see if I— now you can only see me, right? And then, you know what, something happened to my presentation here because I cannot go back either. So I don't know if it's the presentation or it's the share. And first of all, we can put the QR, uh, the, the link in the comments. So I think that we sent you the link earlier, earlier. And maybe we can just put the link in there. Let me try to share again. Okay. Yeah, my presentation completely got stuck, so I cannot even go backward. I might have to just refresh this or stop it. Let me see if I stop that. And go here and go here and share. No, not share. I want to— oh, it is presented. Okay, let me try to share again. Come on. Okay, okay, okay, this is moving. I'm just, um, skipping. I had to restart the presentation, so I'm skipping to the last page, and this way I don't have to, to see all of that while I'm doing this. Here we go. Okay, and then I'm going to share this page And here we go. Okay, do you see the QR code now? Yes, perfect. So scan that, um, all the, um, you will be able to download the playbook over there with everything that I mentioned. Um, also you have here some, um, links to Root Cause website and to our LinkedIn and my LinkedIn and our podcast Beyond Product. Please feel free to connect with us and connect with me. I also have on the Founder Institute office hours. So if you can find time on my office hours, they're quite limited, but I'm trying to add more, hopefully more in the new year. So I can also have more one-on-ones with you. And let's open it up to questions. How much time do we have, Martin?

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

We got all the time in the world, my friend. Hopefully our audience is still gonna stick around a little bit. We have plenty of time for networking too. We always love to keep the, the Airmeet networking tables open immediately following the broadcast. So thank you again. I know we had to speed through it a little bit faster than we wanted to. But, you know, you know how things go in the internet world with these online. Sometimes our computers work with us. Sometimes they, they like to be a little feisty. I like that. I like that today. I love the energy in the crowd. They were so eager to get this knowledge. And it was fantastic knowledge, great content. So amazing. All y'all in the chat sticking with us and giving us that patience that we need to deliver such great, thoughtful stuff as you're planning this go-to-market strategy for your startup. Heading into the new year. You know, we're definitely dropping links to the playbook. So if you are having any trouble, you know, seeing the QR code, getting the QR code in, we'll be dropping links directly to download it in the chat as well. So thank you again, Michelle. Let's dive into some Q&A. We got time. You know, as long as you're with us and the crowd's with us, we can get to all these questions. I'm here as long as you need me to be here. So let's do this. Everybody, thank you again. Please use emojis, give some claps for that presentation. If you have been interacting with us in the chat, you're dropping questions in chat, make sure you bounce over to the QA tool. Use the QA tool. There's upvote mechanisms in the QA tool that we can surface some of those relevant pressing questions that maybe all of you have. Some of you might have specific questions. If something directly about your startup, I would encourage you all to stick around, drop into some of the root quotient tables, meet with some of the team, and get some of those more, more refined direct questions about your specific issues. With the Root Quotient team as well, and they can be more thorough in kind of the answers. So we're hopeful that some of the questions that we're gonna ask right here are gonna be relevant for the whole room, and it looks like we got a lot. So I'm gonna do a quick refresh and see what we have. So Shoaib has a good question. First one at the top is, you know, actually kind of a very existential one. Moshi, it's how do you know when the product is not a market fit? You know, again, we talk about it all the time, but like, what does that mean? What are some metrics that are good, you know, foundational things to look at when maybe it's just not working, maybe it's time to pivot?

Yes, this is a good question. So usually you want to find signals that will show you there is a market fit, and that's where you feed it with your initial assumptions, etc. Um, when you don't see those signals, the absence of the signals is where you will not have a product-market fit, I would say. Um, so it's almost like looking at the absence here rather than at what is. Um, if I would define the most important thing, probably, with product-market fit is retention. And if you see that the retention is going down all the time, usually a retention will be a good retention. We'll have a graph like, you know, it starts with 100% and then it's kind of like either go even. A great one is that people coming back, so they will share, you will get value to them more. But if you see that people are going down and it's going down all the time, so over time, people that started using the product, they will not continue using it over time. That's a bad signal that there is no good product-market fit. Um, there are of course other things that you have to measure that are based on your product. Uh, but you know, and retention is sometimes not easy, depends on the sector, depends on the type of product, depends on whether it is a one-time thing they do or it's an ongoing thing that, that they get value from. But that's usually what I will look for.

Awesome. Let's actually double down on that because the subsequent question right after is, as you're building your roadmap, what are some good tools or techniques that you're using to keep track of that, manage that?

This comes from Alex. To keep track of the roadmap or to keep track of the I would assume to keep track of your KPIs.

I would say a little bit of both. You know, Alex is asking mostly just on how you keep track of the roadmap, but to tie in with the previous question, you know, how are you also— what are some tools, maybe same tool, yeah, to help manage all, right?

Yeah, the reason I'm more leaning towards the second one, because roadmaps are changing all the time. Roadmaps are not something that is set in stone and that's it, you have to deliver your roadmap, and if not something bad is going to happen. The idea there is really to see what are the current hypotheses that you have, what is the current vision that you have for the future, and, and based on that, to try to see how do you get this value to the, the specific market that you're creating, or that you're catering for, or that you're trying to sell to. So keeping track of the roadmap is not You know, you have a plan, you have to keep with the plan. But the more you— the more often that you release something, the more often you will get feedback to show you, yes, I am— I should continue with a roadmap or not. And if you get early signals that everything you're doing is not working, and it's probably, you know, and if you analyze it properly, you will see that it's not just you, but it's also the market. And it's, you've done everything in your power to do the right things, but the market doesn't respond, etc. Then you should pivot earlier than wait until the roadmap is done, right? So I would say, you know, be able to release as often as possible. So shorten those cycles. Circle the cycle time. On the tracking of the KPIs. So there are tools out there that, as I mentioned, that could be integrated within your product. I would, you know, start with maybe simple tools, but evolve over time to the more sophisticated one, because they also cost more money, the more sophisticated ones. So tools like Pendo, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap. They're quite— they're, you know, some of the leaders in the market. They do have versions for startups. So they do have versions where you can start with low number of users. And if in the beginning, you don't have a lot of users, it's fine, it will still work. And you may not have to pay a lot for that. Or it might be even free. But the important thing is that you start tracking how people are using the product, the step they're taking in there and associate that with your KPIs. And so if some of the steps are related to specific places where you want them to get to see the, the aha moment or to see the value in the product, do they actually get there? And are there any spots in the product that are getting— people are getting stuck? And they're not getting to that aha moment. So there is a lot of things you have to plan ahead. And that's what in the pre-build is the planning of how am I going to actually measure those things inside the product.

Got it. Got it. All right. Very, very useful. And I think that ties in with another question. If it's not working, you keep trying new channels. So it seems like that's an obvious yes. So let's keep going. That answers another question that comes in. You know, there's another question coming in here from Mark Johnson is how do you pick a PLG or an SLG or even hybrid go-to-market based on startup maturity?

I don't think you'll pick it up. And I assume when he says SLG, it's meant sales-led growth or Spanish. Now, on purpose, I didn't talk about PLG because PLG are specific methods that work for some type of products. It doesn't work for every product. Um, and they work mostly for B2B, and they work mostly in places where, um, the functionality is quite, um, uh, easy to learn and very useful to a lot of people in a, in, in small scale. And then they can help you scale it internally. Um, I think that the, you know, picking SLG versus PLG versus anything else really, at the end of the day, goes into the alignment of everyone in the organization. Because I've worked, for example, in organizations where the founder was a salesperson and he didn't know any, any other thing other than selling. So they were very much sales-led. And because of that, there was some misalignment between how the organization was selling to what the product was able to deliver. So the organization sold based on quotas of each one of the salespeople, and they had to reach the quotas. And quotas are usually very short-term. They are just for the quarter or for the year. They don't think long-term. And they would come with clients that were not very good fit for the organization. And we had then to deliver on top of that. So that created a lot of tension. What you want to see, that there is a good alignment. If there is a good alignment, you could still go with the sales-led organization if it makes sense, because some industries are also much more open to salespeople to come and sell them. If we're talking about lawyers or we're talking about some traditional industries, there is a lot of this culture of sales culture. We're going to a golf tournament, we're going to restaurants, we're going to conferences, whatever we're doing in order to sell. But if the salespeople are not aligned with what the product is and who is the right client for this product, they will sell whatever they can sell. Right. So, so I think the most important thing is really to make that alignment, and the alignment, um, start with a shared vision and a shared strategy and making— and transparency in the organization and making sure that everyone are aligned to the same goals.

Fantastic. Good stuff there. Um, we got— let's get through as many as— how much time do you have with us, I should be asking? I can be here all day.

We have a lot of That's true. That's true.

So let me get a quick refresh on these. Thank you all. And again, if you are— if you're in the audience, you have a question, as you can clearly see, we got a ton of folks here. We've got hundreds of folks here in the audience, and you can get lost in the chat. So make sure you're heading over to the Q&A function, those two little chat bubbles right beneath the chat icon on your right of the screen, and get those questions in. You can upvote as you see it, add some comments to it. That's the best way that I will be able to surface these for our speaker so that we can get to your questions as quickly as possible. So again, we've talked about roadmap tracking, we've talked about metrics, when to figure out is this not working? We got another one coming in. Oh, Gabriel. Gabriel is one of our founders out of Austin, alumni and current entrepreneur residence for our Austin chapter. Good to see you, Gabe. He's got a few, so let's crank through these. These are solid. How can early stage businesses effectively integrate kind of these feedback loops to define that go-to-market strategy without overwhelming the teams? Again, these are small teams right now. You're dealing with a lot of data sets, a lot of, lot of nodes coming in with all these data points. Any good best practices there?

Um, yeah, it's a good question. Um, you know, it's a balance between overwhelming the team to transparency and really get the team to not just understand what is going on, but come up with ideas that might solve it in different ways. So the teams are really an important part of it to make sure that we, we find the right solution to the problem. And sometimes the right solutions will come from the team, right? So I would say that it's probably up to every leader, leadership style. But as long as there is a clear understanding of the vision, where we are going, and the why behind everything. So a real understanding of, you know, what is the real problem we're trying to solve here? Why is it the right problem to solve? Is it a real problem? And, and it can go to each one of the new features with that we add. Each feature will have its own why, etc. So as long as we communicate that, I think that the team will be empowered enough to really solve the right thing and think about the why and make that happen. So I would say that it really depends on the organization and the style of the leaders and the style of the team. And all of that stuff. But if I have to pick something so I don't overwhelm them, I will pick that vision and the, um, the why behind it and make it crystal clear all the time.

Interesting. All right, I love that. I guess at least with the follow-up that he, he also has as well, um, so in terms of— let's talk about those key, key metrics, um, especially during launch phase. I mean, again, when we talk about our Founder Institute and the audience that we have, you know, a lot of these folks again, you're trying to turn this idea into a company, maybe you already have, but now you're getting it right to market, you're right at the beginning of the journey, you know, is there any key metrics that startups should be tracking at that launch phase that helps them quickly, you know, maybe size up, you know, was pivot, you should keep going, or you scale, um, on this strategy?

Yeah, um, excellent question. And, and I think that to me Probably retention is the biggest one, but retention is hard to do when you start because you have to find the users and you have to get the users to start using the product and all of that stuff. But it's still, um, one of those things that you want to see. All of, all of those people, are they willing to, you know, what does retention mean with them, right? So does retention it could be that the initial stages of just them paying money for the service is initial step of retention because they're willing to get hard-won money paid to someone for that service. So I would almost try to think about maybe a line what retention means in every stage. And then see, does that make sense for that stage? Now, in addition to that, I mentioned before, you know, the aha moment. So how can I get them faster to that aha moment? And if I can test first what aha moment means, that creates that value to the users, and I can then have this as a key indicator for people to try to get to that aha moment. And then maybe even to show that after the aha moment, the retention is growing. So people that saw the aha moment will retain more than people people that didn't see the aha moment. Uh, this could be good ways for me to start tracking that and, and see how I can apply means in the product to get them faster to that. Awesome. I hope it helps. It's a hard question. I'm, I'm—

yeah, every startup is a little different, right?

Exactly.

Some are very different. So each one's going to be unique to you. So that's going to be interesting, what, what's going to be— what's relevant to you, what's necessary to you.

Exactly.

I guess a final tie-off because you're just throwing all the good ones out here. Is there anything to integrate these feedback loops? Things that are just— we actually covered that one. There's another one that he had. Actually, let's look at this one over here. Customer service. We had a question coming in from the chat that our HQ put in there. Any thoughts about the stage of involvement with customer service helps with this too, to kind of build on this piece? Question from our web, right?

Well, customer service is a really important thing that many— I've seen many startup founders neglect in the beginning or keep it to a later time, sometimes for good reasons. I'm not saying that you always have to have customer service right away. But it is definitely one of those things that you, you can balance between what you are going to include in the product and what can be done as a service. And customer service can fall under that. And maybe, you know, people can define customer service in different ways, whether then it's reactive or like customer support or proactive. There is customer success these days and customer service also. I think in retail means different things than in B2B, for example. But overall, when I'm thinking about servicing my clients and making sure that they are successful, there could be things that are less important to do right now in the product. Let's say in early stages, maybe you don't need to do payments, automatic payments, or any type of payments through the product, and it's all gone through customer service. So it depends on the volumes that you, you have of users. And, um, developing these things, even though these days it's much easier than it used to be, um, you know, many of us old-timers, uh, can say how long it took us to develop payment systems inside the product because we didn't have those services available out there. And then with PCI compliance, even more. But in general, there are things that are not that critical to start with, and you can put it under the umbrella of customer service. But you have to make sure that you can support that. So do you have the people? Do you have the means to do it? How do people reach out to you? How do you get back to them? What is your service level agreement for that? How long does it take you to do this thing? How do you define critical versus non-critical items and maybe have different SLA for that? Which tools you're going to use to track all of this and do that? So there is a lot of questions to put over there, but a lot of good people have done it before, so you can find a lot of information about these things.

Awesome. Awesome. And again, I want to make sure we're respectful of your time. The Root Quotients team time. And I wanna make sure y'all have time to sit at those tables, 'cause I know, I feel like the audience is itching to kind of just meet y'all more intimately. But I do wanna get through a couple more questions and then we'll disappear into the ether and y'all can do all the networking stuff. That sound good? Yeah, so yeah, maybe 2 more here. Actually, there's a great one from Alex that came in a minute ago. That, you know, Alex working on a primary business B2B, but it depends on a B2C segment. So this might be a marketplace kind of thing. You know, when you have two different, you know, kind of endpoints, you know, especially it's double-sided, um, you know, how do you determine product-market fit to both of these verticals? And you got two things kind of running simultaneously that might have different needs, different expectations.

Yeah, um, that's a very good question, um, because, um, Many times marketplaces is like chicken and the egg. If you don't have enough providers and you bring, you know, buyers into the market or consumers, whatever it is, and the result of they will just see, oh, there isn't enough here and they will leave. And then on the other end, if you have a lot of sellers and you don't have enough buyers, they will be like, um, what are we doing over here? We're just wasting our time over here. So, so it is definitely a very interesting question. I think it goes hand in hand together that the product market fit is that you have enough retention of both. So what is the retention of buyers that are willing to stay, um, to come back and, and, and buy some more, or come back to the marketplace? And what is the retention of the, um, sellers that are willing to stay there and sell? Now, when you start, you might need to give a lot of incitements to the sellers to be there, especially if they're already selling somewhere else. So if they have their— if it's a marketplace that is not unique, but there are similar marketplaces like that, then how do you incentivize them to come in and and also be here. Many marketplaces will do it for free in the beginning to create, you know, traction over there. But then you also need to see where do you bring the buyers from. I'm using seller and buyer, but this is just for convenience. It could be whatever the two sides of the marketplace is. And this retention over time probably will have to measure for both of them. Um, it will be interesting to see over time if you have retention for one, does it already, um, predict the retention for the other or not? I'm not really sure. Um, I would be interested to maybe see, look at other marketplaces and see how they grew and to understand those numbers. Does it mean one means the other or not? Or it could be very unique for each one of those situations.

Got it. All right. Awesome. Let's wrap it up with one last one, because again, what I've been hearing a lot about, adoption in the beginning and then retention after the fact, right? You know, we'll close it out. Gabriel, we got one more and then again, we'll kick it over those networking tables.

Yeah, let's do it.

Thank you all for joining us again. Thank you to the RootQuotient team. Thank you to my HQ team behind the scenes making all this happen. Joining the event. Gabriel, uh, so again, we're taking adoption and retention, right? Is there, is there a way to identify and maybe leverage those natural growth levers to— maybe it's virality, maybe it's network effect, you know? Is there anything you recommend to, to increase adoption and then stabilize that retention, increase retention?

Yeah, listen, at the end of the day, it's really about value to the users. If you're not creating value to the users, you will not retain them even if you were successful in adopting. Someone saw it, they thought, oh, this will be a great product to use, I will try it. They signed up, but then they didn't see the value in it over time and they dropped. It doesn't really matter what strategy you're using to, um, to, to really adopt them or to find them, you know, to acquire them in the first place. Uh, network effect is usually an acquisition, um, strategy because, um, the content that people are creating will entice them to bring other people to see this content. Uh, so they are kind of telling other people, come and see my content in this platform or in this place or whatever that is, right? But even if they bring those people as acquisition and those people maybe will consume their content, but those people don't see any value either in this content anymore because you're still relying on your users, the content creators, to create that content, to create this effect, the network effect, then the newcomers will you know, drop? Or if they just came for you, um, would they come for other content creators, right? So think about like, um, um, a product like, uh, Medium, uh, or like, um, what's the name? I, I forgot the name right now. The one, uh, yeah, I don't have the name of the product, but something like Medium that you have to usually You have a few free ones and then you pay, you know, to continue reading for a specific, a specific author, right? Or a specific person in there. Would you come also for others or only for that specific content creator? So, so, so I think that you always have to look into what is the value you were creating to the users and if there is a value that will keep them coming again and again. And at the end of the day, whichever strategy that you use that fits your specific product— because a product that don't create any content, or there is no ongoing content creation by the users, uh, you know, network effect may not be, um, a good idea there, or it's not applied to them. So, so you have to choose the right strategy for your product as well and for your market. Uh, but then if you don't create value for them on an ongoing basis, they will just leave. That's so the retention will go down.

Awesome, awesome. I think that's a great place to leave it. So yeah, we're hitting up at the half hour mark. Uh, amazing. Thank you again, Mush. Thank you to the ReQuotient team. I think this is a really compelling webinar, and I think—

no pressure—

also felt the same way. The, the chat was electric.

So let's do this.

I appreciate y'all staying with us a little bit more. We are going to shift over to the networking portion. We're going to leave the room up for as long as y'all want to hang out. Again, all of this will be available. If you join this event, you obviously subscribe to our updates. We'll have an event follow-up email in the next 48 hours, recording, relevant links, anything that we discussed here. Amazing. Any final things you want to share? Mushu, with the audience before we cut it to the networking.

First of all, apologies again for the technology issue that I had up front. So thank you for sticking with us. And second, you know, we love helping, you know, at TruthQuotient, and me personally, we love seeing founders being successful in what they're doing. So you can check out our office hours, and I will have more in the future. Right now my time is a bit limited, but I will definitely have more office hours through the platform, through the mentorship platform. And I always love hearing what people are coming up with, so it's, it's always fun for me.

Awesome, awesome. Well, again, thank you for spending your day with us.

Thank you, Martin.

Thank you all again for being here as well. So we're about to wrap. Thank you all for joining. Um, and stick around if you want to network with some of the people you chatted with in the audience that want to join us on those tables. Root Quotient team is going to be there too. So if you didn't get a chance to get one of your questions answered live, you can definitely get some one-on-one time with each of them. Definitely take advantage of that. We will be following up by email with some relevant links and recording, all that fun stuff here soon. But in any case, thank you all again for joining for another Founder's Day.

Thank you.

For those of y'all staying with us in North America and stateside, hope you all have a great holiday. Ahead. Safe travels. Stay with everybody else around the world too. You do the same. Take care of each other. Keep building. We'll be coming back next week and many weeks ahead with a lot more of these online events here on Airmeet and elsewhere. But in any case, my name is Martin Martinez, coming to you from Texas. Thank you all again. Y'all be safe, be well, keep building the future, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you.