Read on Twitter
See you in 5 minutes when we go live with @dcancel, Founder & CEO of @Drift, and @Lindsey3D, CMO of @thoughtbot! We'll be live-tweeting insightful snippets of the conversation here. We welcome you to follow along and share some of your own learnings too!
“Product-market fit is the most painful startup stage — the most glorified, but the most painful. Until you hit it, you’re just walking through the desert aimlessly without a reference plan. Every day, you think you’re making progress, but you don’t know for sure.” - @dcancel
“You know you’ve hit it [product-market-fit] when it’s repeatable. Your product isn't bespoke - you can sell it to a lot of different companies. But you’re never totally sure, so you keep going toward your landmarks to validate it.”
- @dcancel
- @dcancel
When asking for customer feedback, this is what @dcancel says you want, and what you DO NOT want.
“With hypergrowth, you’re looking for these fast-growing megatrends that are happening, you ride the momentum in that market, and it pulls you forward. It’s about identifying hypergrowth opportunities.” - @dcancel
"What you celebrate and what you tolerate become your culture." - @dcancel
When it comes to culture. Actions = louder than words.
With enterprise selling, “It takes a really long time to adopt and onboard anything, but a lot of times it has nothing to do with your product, and there’s nothing you could do to make an org adopt it. The feedback loop is really long, and therefore slow.”
Drift knew they needed to differentiate from thousands of MarTech companies, so they doubled down on brand. “But I wasn’t a marketer, I was an engineer, so I started reading everything I could about brand building, cognitive biases, human decision making. I just became obsessed.”
On @Drift's decision to become a digital-first company: “The world has gone through a global-level, massive trauma, and we can never go back to the ways things were.” - @dcancel
On having a product kill switch: “We are very willing to kill things. But even so, it always feels too long to me. As you add more clients, someone will always be using it, so it’s really hard to kill stuff." - @dcancel
"We kill stuff when all the iterations aren’t resulting in anything — it’s flatlining and no matter what experiment we try, it’s not moving.” - @dcancel
