Omer (00:11.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This is a story about two product managers who were looking for software that would help them do their jobs.
When they couldn't find what they needed, they decided to build a tool themselves.
It was simple, but it did the job.
And over time, they kept making it better.
After two years, they had an insight.
They realized that there were other product managers who would pay to use their tool.
So finally they had the guts to quit their jobs and go work on their idea full time.
They had no customers and had raised no money, but they figured they could bootstrap the business for six to 12 months.
They had their first customer in about six months and from there they kept improving the product and getting more customers.
It took a lot of time and hard work to grow their business to around 30,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Things were looking good until they lost focus.
They ended up wasting a year trying to do too many things instead of doubling down on what was already working.
At the end of the year, they started thinking about raising money.
It wasn't something they wanted to do, but they felt they had to.
And it was around this time that they had another aha moment.
They identified one metric that they believed could make all the difference for them and they decided to have everyone on their team focus on improving that one metric.
That's all they did for the next three months.
And amazing things started to happen once they focused.
In this interview, you're going to hear their story.
Discover what that one metric was and you'll learn some of the counterintuitive things they did to get more customers.
So I hope you enjoy it.
All right.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of prodpad, a product management tool for product managers.
Prodpad helps you to build product roadmaps, uncover the best product ideas to work on next, and build what matters most to your customers.
ProdPad was founded in 2012 and its customers include companies such as Disney, Automatic and ebay.
The company has been bootstrapped since day one and is based in Brighton in the uk.
My guest is also the co founder of Mind the Product, an international product community which has now grown to consist of over 50,000 members and sold out events in 100 cities around the world.
So today I'd like to welcome Jana Bastow.
Jana, welcome to the show.
Janna Bastow (02:51.950)
Hey.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, Omer.
Omer (02:54.750)
Now I want to get into your head, so mind the product mind.
I want to get inside your head a little bit and find out what makes you tick.
So do you have a favorite quote that you know, you can share with us?
Janna Bastow (03:05.310)
Yeah, sure.
And I actually had to look up who this was, who this was from.
It's a Confucius quote, I think.
But I love it because it basically says, choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.
And that was something I heard years ago and absolutely spoke to me.
Omer (03:21.970)
And are you there now?
Janna Bastow (03:24.130)
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it was quite a few years ago that I realized that building something, actually getting involved in building products and working with a team that would help me do so was something that was going to be just absolutely fulfilling for me.
Omer (03:41.740)
Well, I think it's always really, you know, anyone who gets into that situation is able to do that.
I think is.
Is really lucky.
And I was having this conversation with somebody recently about something similar where in terms of trying to figure out what you love and sometimes they're the things that you find the easiest to do and you get kind of like the most joy from doing them.
And it's hard to imagine it as a job because it just seems like fun.
Right.
And so I think that's just a great place to be and I don't
Janna Bastow (04:19.520)
want to trivialize it and make it sound like it's not hard work.
It certainly is.
Everything is challenging, but there's always a new set of challenges.
And I think part of it comes down to the fact that you get to surround yourself with the people that you actually want to work with.
That makes a massive difference.
Omer (04:35.540)
Okay, so let's dive into Prodpad.
I gave the audience a little overview of that and we know it's for product managers, but tell us a little bit more in your words, like, what does the product do?
Janna Bastow (04:48.580)
Sure.
So it was actually created by my co founder and I when we were both product managers ourselves.
We were both working for two different companies based in London, and those companies were going through funding and growth and all sorts of great things.
We just needed tools to do our own jobs and nothing like it really existed.
So we started building it.
Now, originally our target customers were people like us, so people working in digital startups.
But we realized that the problem that we had was actually much larger, that we were actually finding consistent problems amongst even enterprise customers or customers in finance and retail and media, or even manufacturing.
All these companies sort of had the same problem.
And a lot of it came down to gathering ideas from your team or feedback from your customers and prioritizing it based on what the customers want, what the objectives are, and basically a dozen different drivers that might be part of your strategy and then creating the roadmaps and communicating that vision to the rest of the team and other stakeholders.
At the end of the day, we wanted to build something that helped you build the right products and also just keep your sanity as a product person.
It's a hard job when we get that.
Omer (06:02.670)
So when you came up with the idea, this was really about you and your co founder at Simon, right?
Janna Bastow (06:11.790)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (06:12.750)
It was really about you, the two of you kind of scratching your own itch and saying, look, we've got these problems that we're trying to solve as product managers ourselves and, you know, let's kind of figure out a way to do that better.
And so at that point, it wasn't really a.
A business, it was something that you were building for yourselves.
Janna Bastow (06:33.590)
Exactly.
It was just a tool that we used internally.
We actually use this thing internally only for the first two years.
We got into it because Simon at the time was a product minded friend and I showed him some ideas I'd had around a tool to help me do my job, but I wasn't capable of actually coding it myself.
And he actually stepped up and said, well, hey, this would be easy enough to do.
I could build the back end code for this.
And I was like, great, well, I know how to do front end code.
I basically lied.
But this was back when you could build an app out of jQuery and Bootstrap and you didn't need everything that you see in SaaS apps today.
It was just something to help us do our own jobs.
We launched it, we made it available to people in our team.
It was over time that our other product friends started paying attention to what we were doing and asking for access to.
Was only after a couple of years that we, we actually got up the guts to quit our jobs and go focus on it full time.
Omer (07:31.580)
So what led to that decision?
Because I know from what I understand, even when you quit your job and you were the first one to quit your job, you'd had the product or the tool around for a couple of years, but you didn't have a lot of customers at that point, right?
Janna Bastow (07:52.990)
Oh, we had no customers at that point.
Yeah, it was just us using it.
There were actually a couple interesting tipping points or nudges for us.
One was that I'd Actually stopped telling new people in my company that I built this thing.
I wanted them to use it because they appreciated it, not because they thought I'd built it and was forcing it on the team.
So it actually kept quiet about the fact where it had come from.
And I remember one of the interesting bits of feedback that I kept getting from people on the team was that they loved this tool, but they couldn't find any record of it online.
Like, what was this thing?
So, you know, it's one of these things, like, if I could build something that actually fooled the engineers in my team and, you know, actually added value to people who weren't just telling me nice things because they knew I made it, then maybe there was something there.
And Simon and myself were also lucky because we'd also started working with another product manager, Martin Erickson, who founded the Product tank Events.
And we were running product events for product people every month.
And we were basically surrounded by product people who were good at giving us feedback and telling us what was going wrong in their jobs.
And that's when we started realizing that this was something that was widely applicable, not just for people in our tech startup sort of setup.
Omer (09:07.010)
Okay, and was there another tipping point as well that led you to decide to quit your job and go full time?
Janna Bastow (09:14.370)
I mean, at that point in time, I'd been with the company from when it had been seven people.
We'd watched it take on funding and go through Series A and grow the team, and it was hitting a new phase.
But I also realized that this tool that we built was actually potentially more viable as a product and certainly more relevant to my interest than what I was working on with the other company.
And so I decided it was about time to step out and give it a go.
Omer (09:38.850)
So why not wait until you've got some customers?
Janna Bastow (09:42.690)
Because getting customers, we knew that was still going to take a little bit more time.
We built this tool, but it wasn't available as a SaaS tool.
There was still another six months of work to do that involved building the.
Turned out to be six months.
We thought it was maybe less than that, but we had to add an invite flow, an onboarding flow, a payment system, basically other things to help you manage your account and whatnot.
But we did quit with the agreement that we weren't going to build it as a startup.
We didn't want to have to do something that required us to take in funding and do all those steps.
We wanted to build a business.
And by that I mean something that was funded based on customer Revenues.
So our goal was to launch something that we could get payment for within the first month, get it payment for as soon as possible, and then grow it based on that revenue.
Omer (10:31.690)
Okay.
So it was kind of like you sort of set out this period of time to say, okay, we kind of have this tool which we've been using ourselves.
There are signs that there's a bigger opportunity here, but we really need to focus on kind of productizing it so it can actually be used by other people.
Janna Bastow (10:53.530)
Yeah, I mean, in hindsight it probably wasn't that as organized as in terms of thought process.
Part of it might have been just that we just got excited.
I put out a, put up a landing page, a mini website saying we do product management software.
Click here to buy now.
And lo and behold, people started clicking this thing.
And I was like, okay, well that's a good sign.
If only they could buy it, maybe we'd have money.
So I quit my job basically around that time that I started seeing some traction on the landing page.
And then it was another six months before we launched sort of a version that you could purchase and actually sign up for properly.
And we made managed to actually start getting our first customers within that month.
Omer (11:36.370)
I watched you, as I mentioned to you, I watched a talk that you did at Turing Fest about the power of product focus.
And I thought that was a great talk.
I'll include a link to that in the show notes so people, if they want to, they can check that out.
But I think from that.
I remember you said that you had this website up and this landing page and a buy now button and.
And was it going to like a 404 page at some point?
Janna Bastow (12:00.290)
It wasn't a 404, but it certainly didn't give you anything helpful like where to sign up.
It was sort of a thanks we'll let you know sort of thing.
I didn't put nearly enough effort, I didn't put any effort into turning it into a nice flow.
It's just an email capture and just to see if anybody was interested.
Obviously it wasn't there for long.
It was just a test.
Omer (12:20.210)
Okay, so six months to kind of get the product ready.
And then how long did it take you to get your first customer?
Janna Bastow (12:27.250)
Within a few weeks we had our first paying customer.
Omer (12:30.610)
How did you find that person?
Janna Bastow (12:32.850)
They found us.
We actually mainly got our first users because we'd been talking about it, we'd been blogging about it, actually something we'd been doing before we even quit our jobs and went to go focus on it was we would just blog about how to do a roadmap, how to write good Personas, how to write user stories, how to do specs.
Just helpful bits and pieces that we put onto our blog and that actually helped build our credibility on Google and increase our page rank.
Now, of course, at this point in time, not many people were looking up roadmap software or product management software.
So we were absolutely at the top of the search results, but no one was really looking for it.
But for the few people who were looking for it, we were right there.
And so we just ended up with our first customer signing up and paying for it.
Simple as that.
Omer (13:25.690)
That's always nice when someone you don't know comes along and gives you money, right?
Janna Bastow (13:29.930)
Proud to say my first customer wasn't my mom.
That's great.
Omer (13:33.530)
Yeah, yeah.
I've spoken to a lot of founders who always say that, you know, regardless of where they may be or how much revenue they're generating now, there's something so priceless about that first customer.
Janna Bastow (13:45.370)
Yeah, absolutely.
Omer (13:46.570)
And then, as I understand, it took quite some time for you to kind of get that up to your first 10 customers.
And so what was the process that you went through and what did you have to do to get those next nine customers?
Janna Bastow (14:08.310)
So the next nine customers or so found us again pretty organically through search results.
The process to get them on board, though, involved a lot of feedback, a lot of iterations, a lot of changes to the product based on what we were learning from these early customers.
The thing to remember is that our customers are product managers, and product managers have a lot of opinions about how product should work.
They're really great at giving constructive feedback.
And so I was just constantly on Skype or by email or wherever, just picking up this feedback and then building in iterations.
Some of the stuff that was missing in the early, early version of Prodpad might have been something like, oh, well, you can tag products, but you can't untag them, or you can't filter by them, or our search was subpar or other basic things.
And so it's just figuring out what these pain points were.
What was missing from our, I guess you could say our mvp, the first version of the product that we needed to flesh out to make it viable for other people to use.
And it was actually based on these early customers that we learned what the most important integrations were and other points like that.
Once we started getting a handle on sort of the key basis of functionality that we needed to have someone sign up, try it, love it, pay for it and continue using it.
You know, that was a few months, you know, the first six months of, of our process.
And I think it probably took us about maybe four to six months to get those first 10 customers.
Omer (15:42.300)
And then from what I understand you, you, you kind of started to get some growth until you hit, you know, the plateau of doom, which we'll talk about in a while.
But before you kind of got to that point, what, what else were you doing to find new customers?
Or was it kind of a continuation of just people finding you organically through the blog and the website?
Janna Bastow (16:09.850)
Yeah, I mean, in hindsight we would call it a content strategy.
To be honest, it was just me and my co founder talking, writing, teaching people, basically educating people on what product management is and why you need product management software.
And then from there the here's why you should buy prodpad was a much easier sell.
We just wrote about it, talked about it, did meetup talks and all sorts of different bits and pieces and that started spreading the word.
That started getting more and more credibility and more people linking to us and finding us.
At the end of the day, in
Omer (16:46.940)
terms of like getting to, let's say, the first hundred customers, did that get any easier for you?
Did that kind of growth happen faster compared to the first 10 customers?
Janna Bastow (16:58.730)
Yeah, there was a nice little inflection point and to be honest, I couldn't even tell you what it was that made the difference.
It might have been a key integration that we built in.
It might have been that we just completed enough of the functionality and made it convincingly enough of a good product that people just started signing up and buying it and our first hundred customers just came.
It was just pretty magical at the time.
And I don't think we realized how lucky we were to have a growth curve like that where we just had constant stream of customers signing up.
Omer (17:31.530)
And was it just still you and Simon and at what point did you start hiring people?
Janna Bastow (17:36.730)
We probably.
Well, we hired our first in house person in early 2015 and our first hire was actually a customer success person who used to be a product manager herself.
And at the same time we also had a couple team members, Bino and Alesh, who were technically outsourced, but they're actually still with us today and are part of the prodpad family who started working with us about mid 2014.
So it was more than a year into it that for the first year it was basically just Simon and myself.
And then in about 2014 we hit a point where we Actually realized we could afford to bring in extra help and professional developers and somebody to help with support and all that sort of thing.
Omer (18:24.820)
So it was two years of, from 2010 to 2012, of building this tool and using yourselves, and then kind of going public in 2012, and then another couple of years after that before you, you started building the team and, and kind of trying to accelerate what you were doing.
Janna Bastow (18:47.460)
Yeah, exactly.
We went public in February of 2013, and it basically grew from there.
Omer (18:54.740)
And we talked.
I mentioned at the beginning that you were bootstrapped from day one.
So presumably everything, you know, in terms of paying for people you were hiring, everything was coming from the revenue that you were generating from the business at that time.
Janna Bastow (19:09.950)
Yeah, we just had a constantly growing monthly recurring revenue number.
And every time we had enough money to afford somebody else, we would reinvest it back into the product, hire somebody to take on a role.
Omer (19:21.630)
Okay, so things are growing.
You know, kind of a lot of it is organic and, you know, things look good.
And then you, you, you hit the, the plateau of doom.
And so, so for people who are not familiar with that.
Can you kind of explain what you mean by that?
Janna Bastow (19:39.630)
Sure, absolutely.
And the plateau of doom is actually a concept I'd read about a few years prior.
It was written by.
Is an article written by Amy Hoy from Freckle, which was a time tracking app.
And I remember her writing this article that basically outlines that around the 30,000 mrr mark, they sort of flatlined.
Their growth was no longer going up and to the right.
And she kind of describes how they got there, how they noticed it, and what they did to get out of it.
And I remember saying to myself at the time, a 30,000amonth is massive MRR.
That's all the money in the world to us when we were making 30 bucks a month.
And the other point was, and that'll never happen to us.
We'll see that coming.
We'll notice it even faster.
I know how to fix all this stuff, I'm sure.
And then in 2015, we hit the plateau of doom.
And looking back, I realized why we did was kind of the perfect storm.
One was that we had started rebuilding.
So myself, my co founder, had built the first version of prodpad.
And in hindsight, it's actually a miracle it stood up.
But it still stands to this day, actually.
But we ended up rebuilding the app, and that ended up slowing down our development.
We stopped releasing new code because we're so focused on building the tech stack for the new version.
We Also kind of hit this point where we had, we were maybe 20,000, approaching 30,000 mrr, which meant that we could afford to hire a couple more people.
It meant that we could start dabbling in things like AdWords and trying your hand at different events and trying our hand at different odds and ends.
We started trying a whole bunch of different things.
Instead of just having our focus on what was working, which was teaching and educating and writing and talking and building a good product.
And I call it the year of faffing, about 2015.
We did a lot of things, none of them were particularly focused and so we had to find a way out of it because our growth had flatlined.
And a year later we were still basically at the same level of MRR that we were.
It wasn't a full year, but it was about six months of really, really painful non growth.
And it wasn't negative, it wasn't downhill, but it certainly wasn't to going, going up.
And it was this stark difference to what we'd had previously.
And so it actually took, there was actually a point where we almost took on external funding.
We were talking to all the right people, we had some offers of funding on the table, but it was actually when I was talking to investors that I realized that the question being asked was, here's a quarter million pounds, what are you going to do with this?
To turn it into something that's going to allow you to grow to this level 10 exit in a couple years time.
It was by looking at those numbers and crunching them that I realized that if we only focused on one number, we would actually make the biggest difference to our bottom line.
And strangely that one number wasn't actually something that we needed extra people on board to go fix.
That one number was changing the percentage of free trial users who turned into paid users.
So basically we had quite a number of people signing up for new leads, new trials.
We had a lot of new leads coming in and once they were signed up they seemed pretty happy with it, but the trouble was getting them to sign up.
And so I stopped everything in the company and just had everyone focus for a three month period on one metric.
And that one metric was free trial to paid conversion rate.
And we started coming up with things that we could do and we actually tested a whole bunch of things, we threw out a bunch of ideas, but there were a couple things that actually stuck and made a big difference.
Omer (23:36.410)
Okay, yeah, I want to talk about that.
And the year of fuffing around, which I think is a great term.
And I think there's a lot of us who probably have.
Have experience of doing that as well.
Was that really a year of, you know, you kind of looking at things like, you know, Google Ads and talking to investors and.
And those kinds of things and.
And was.
I know you talked about a lot going on in sort of rebuilding the product, but from a customer perspective, did it feel or seem like, do you think at the time that the product or the innovation or new features kind of were pretty stagnant at the time?
Janna Bastow (24:26.290)
I think we noticed it much more than the customers.
I've actually spoken to a number of our customers about it and they've said, oh, I didn't even realize, because customers don't notice or don't really care if the product works for them and it hasn't updated.
They don't expect weekly updates or anything like that.
But there was definitely a correlation between the amount of releases we did and what kind of growth we had.
It meant that we weren't adjusting the product to work with new and more interesting clients.
Right.
We ended up kind of stagnating with the sort of market that worked with us.
And a lot of our customers who were with us at the beginning of the year were still with us at the end of the year, and many are still with us today, and they didn't even notice.
But of course, let's not speak for all the people who might have tried it in that period, didn't find something interesting, maybe saw that it didn't work for them, and we weren't able to solve their problems and build a product that was convincing enough for them.
So we weren't getting enough of those people to actually sign up.
Omer (25:32.580)
Now, I know you considered a lot of other things at that point as well, like maybe we need to drive more traffic, or maybe, maybe we need to figure out how to charge more for the product or these kinds of things.
What was the thinking process that led to you saying, no free trial to paid conversion is the most important metric for us right now?
Janna Bastow (25:53.770)
It came down to a spreadsheet.
I'd actually used a spreadsheet to just sort of highlight historically and projected our number of visitors, number of leads, number of signups, the number of people who stuck around for a number of months.
And I kind of started playing with those numbers and I went, okay, well, if I change the turn rate and bring that down, what's that going to do?
And, you know, changing the turn rate can make a big difference to your business.
But the problem with churn rate is that it can only.
The best way to fix Churn is to fix your onboarding, right?
Because you can't just build some magic feature that keeps people who haven't been active and haven't been using it.
You need to make them successful from day one.
So there's no quick fix for Churn and we needed a quick fix other ones.
We could have added more people to the website.
I'm sure there's plenty of ways we could have thought of to drive more traffic to our site, but it wasn't that we had a lack of people visiting our site.
It's not even that we could have had more of those people signing up for free trials.
But again, it's not like we had a lack of people signing up for free trials.
And one of the risks with trying to throw money at a problem to get more people to sign up for something is that it sometimes changes the type of user that you get.
Obviously, the people who were finding us were finding us through search and therefore they had a problem we could solve if we were going to start advertising at them.
What we started to learn was that the people we advertised at didn't have the same level of pain point as the people who were actively looking for those problems.
So we realized we could throw money at this and find more people to sign up, but they might not be the same people and we're still going to struggle to get them to convert if we don't fix this problem, which is not enough people are converting from free trial to paid.
So it's kind of a matter of looking at all the different options and weighing up which of these makes sense that can be solved quickly.
Which without money and with our own in house expertise, and changing a conversion rate from free trial to paid was a customer education problem and an engagement problem in those first 30 days.
It was tangible.
And better yet, we didn't need to hire marketeers or developers or salespeople or any of this stuff to change that number.
We just needed to focus on it.
Omer (28:10.260)
So you set a goal of a 15% conversion rate from free trial to.
To paid customer.
Let's talk about what you did to start moving the needle on that number.
Janna Bastow (28:28.260)
Yep.
So to start with, we did a whole lot of analysis.
We looked at who was actually signing up and also we started looking at at what point did we know that they were going to sign up?
Because before somebody gives you their credit card, they do a whole bunch of other things within your app.
And this is actually driven by my co founder, Simon Kast, who Pulled out all the data as to what people had done, what key actions people had done, and was able to show that we could tell with 85% certainty by day nine who was going to buy or not.
Now, it might not have been entirely scientific, but it certainly was indicative.
And we could follow these through and go, yeah, you're right, these are the people who signed up.
And it, you know, in hindsight it makes a lot of sense.
The people who used the app more were the ones who got the most value out of it and therefore were most likely to actually put down a credit card for it.
Makes a lot of sense.
But what we had were people who would come into the app and then not use it.
Of course, these people aren't going to pay us for it 30 days later.
They hadn't used it in the first 30 seconds.
So what can we do to fix that?
So we realized that if we could tell by day now who was going to use it or not, why did they have another 21 days to make up their minds?
We had a 30 day trial time because, well, we just picked a number and that seems to be the one that all SaaS companies were going for.
So we had a 30 day free trial and some people at the end of that signed up.
So we shortened the trial time to 14 days and right away that actually doubled our conversion rate.
Because what had happened is that the people who were ready to buy already had their credit card in mind.
They were ready to buy the people, people who.
So these new cohorts who had less time were more anxious to make use of the time they had and so used the app more readily, used more of the functionality and tried to get more squeeze more out of their 14 day trial and therefore by using it more, they managed to find it more valuable and ready to pay us money.
So that was great, we doubled our conversion rate.
But we also then realized that the number one support support request became, could I have more trial time please?
Because 14 days is not really all that much time to get used to a whole new tool and get your team on board and get all the integrations going.
And so we were usually quite happy to extend the trial if they reached out and asked.
But we were spending a lot of time extending trials and we thought, why can't we make this self serve?
We also knew that we could now see that people who did certain actions were more likely to be successful, they were more likely to pay for it and like the product.
So how could we combine these two things, incentivize them to do key actions within the app by giving them more trial time.
So we took that 14 day trial time and we cut it in half again.
We made it a seven day trial.
But when you start your free trial at this point in time, you end up, it welcomes you and says, great, tell us the name of your product and, and we'll give you one day for free.
Extra.
And they tell us the name of the product and voila.
They can actually see the number at the top of the page change.
You've now got eight days.
And at that point in time the user goes, great, what else can I do?
And we show them how to add an idea to get an extra couple days or how to set up an integration.
Do something more tricky like set up a JIRA integration which would unlock an extra four days.
You could even give this your credit card before your trial expired in order to unlock an set of days as well.
So we had this little complete the steps section that they could go to and they could go down the list and complete all their steps and what they were doing.
We'd chosen these steps very, very carefully based on these are the things that we thought would teach the person about how to use broadband.
It was important that they saw how to use the roadmap, how to use the idea section, how to add feedback from your customers, how to use make a Persona or add a design.
So we had sort of key actions around those.
But then we also knew that some of them would make them more successful.
We knew that people who set up integrations with other tools were more likely to have this thing stick and work.
So we set up drivers like that and we also set up drivers that were entirely self serving, except for giving the customers some free time, which was asking for their credit card early.
It was kind of the last step going.
You've now done everything there is to do in prodpad.
You've got yourself almost 30 days here.
Unlock the last few days of free trial time by putting down your credit card.
It already looks like you're on board and using it.
And we had quite a lot of people following that call to action to add their credit card.
And we knew that people who added their credit card were generally very, very few people reneged at that point in time.
They're good to go and they become a paying customer some days later.
Omer (33:02.670)
I'm trying to think of other products that I've seen something like that and there isn't a whole lot out there.
I mean you can kind of look at maybe like The Dropbox type example where you know they'll give you some more storage if you share or tell other people about it or something like that.
But the whole gamification thing is not that common in SaaS products.
But when you think about it, in the psychology behind it and why you see that kind of stuff so much in video games is because there's.
Obviously you're giving them the incentive in terms of more time, but there is just this natural desire to kind of complete the process, to get to 100% to finish this thing.
Janna Bastow (33:49.050)
Yes, absolutely.
And I hate using the word gamify, but it was pulling on some of those, so some of those strings.
And also, you're right, it wasn't entirely unique either.
It was drawn upon things that I've been seeing like Dropbox giving free storage or Slack was genius with giving free credits.
But we didn't have storage.
We don't charge for that and we don't have the concept of credits.
And that would have been pretty complicated to build in.
But we did have trial time, which people we thought people were finding valuable because they kept asking for it.
So we decided to use that.
There's only one other company that I'd seen prior who actually allowed you to extend your trial by doing something, and that was a company called Uxpin.
And they're actually a prod pad customer as well.
And in Uxpin, when you sign up, you can tweet or I think do a LinkedIn or Facebook post.
You can share it socially, refer people to it in order to unlock trial time.
Now, we didn't make that one of our drivers because at the time we figured actually people aren't going to tweet about things unless they really, really truly love it.
And we're still trying to win them over.
Right.
Why don't we show them how to use the app that's more important to them and to us than trying to get them to tell their friends about it yet.
But we haven't written that off as a potential addition to the product is, you know, once you've done everything, why not go tell your friends?
Why not help us spread the word?
Omer (35:10.600)
Yeah, no, I think it's really smart because you're kind of incentivizing people to do what they need to do anyway to kind of learn how to use the product and kind of giving them like a step by step way to do that is going to kind of give them more time.
But at the same time they're probably not going to need that time because they're doing all the things they need to do to start using the product, right?
Janna Bastow (35:34.810)
Well, yeah, exactly.
We kind of joked at one point and so I'm saying, well, the joke's on them, right?
They now know how to use Prodpad and we haven't had to demo it to them because we also knew anybody who got a demo and saw how to use everything just became more likely to be successful.
And so, yeah, in a way, we were using it as a way to help them, point them through and give an excuse to have a really good walkthrough system to show them all the functionality without being one of those annoying pop ups that says, let us take you on a tour.
Next, next, next.
Right.
We didn't want to do that sort of thing.
So this, this particular project had a really good impact on our trial time and we actually ended up doing a couple more things as well that affected that, that final number.
Omer (36:21.440)
Yeah, yeah.
So so far we've got you cut the trial time down from 30 days to 7 days.
Then for the lack of a better word, we'll still keep saying, you know, gamified the onboarding to give people more time for the free trial if they took the steps to actually go in and start setting up the product.
And so what else did you do beyond that?
Janna Bastow (36:43.780)
So the other one was again, we took a look at how people acted in their first 30 seconds, their first 30 minutes, their first 30 days of onboarding.
And one of the things we realized is that when you signed up for Prodpad, you got an email saying welcome to Prodpad.
And it just sort of generated and sent it to you the moment that you signed up.
And, you know, we realized that that was a missed opportunity.
And a lot of apps do this.
They just send a generic email saying, welcome to so and so app.
Here's how to do it, here's how to use it.
And then they might follow up another few days later saying, hey, how's your trial going?
They might follow up a week later saying, don't forget to do X or here's how to do.
Yeah, that sort of thing.
Instead, what we started doing was when somebody would sign up, we would trigger them into a workflow using a tool called drip, getdrip.com and instead of sending them an email immediately, we would wait 10 minutes.
There's no rush because we wanted to, hopefully in those 10 minutes, they were still using prodpad.
So we'd wait 10 minutes and then we would check, did they actually use the app?
Did they complete any of these key actions, did they complete all of the key actions?
If they didn't complete any of the key actions, then they were hugely unlikely to move on to the next step.
Anything we sent them at this point in time previously would have been completely lost on them.
So we sent a message that was.
We tested this message a bunch of different ways and the final message basically came out as, hey, that was weird.
Is everything okay?
Like, you sign up for prodpad, you stuck around for 30 seconds and then you disappeared.
Is everything fine?
Can we help with anything?
And the response rate on this email was amazing.
Tons of people would reply back to it.
Some people with great excuses saying, hey, I couldn't, you know, I was busy.
Or, you know, I was just testing it out, or, you know, turns out this wasn't for me.
Other people would come back in and say, hey, thanks for following up.
Yeah, I got a little bit lost here.
I want to come back.
If you.
Unless he said something.
And then they would come back in.
So we actually today consistently have about 25 to 30% of people react and come back into the flow after this email.
So these are people who are otherwise lost and now are gained back into the flow.
On the other side, if somebody comes in and does everything right, they've already completed all the key actions, they see the steps to collect all their time, and they've collected it all.
We don't want to send them an email to 10 minutes later that says, did you know you can add ideas to prodpad?
Because at that point in time, they've already imported a whole list, they're off and running.
So we call that Persona Super Sally.
Right?
She's the one who's done everything.
So instead of sending her some generic email, we're like, hey, you're awesome.
Did you also know that there's this super secret, cool functionality that you might not have noticed, and we tell them something about the Chrome extension that we have or something else that they might not have touched.
And then if you did, you know, this action and this action, but not this one, then the email you get is, hey, good job on doing X and Y, here's what to do next.
If they did the other actions, we'd have a different email.
So based on your actions, there was actually a series of different onboarding emails that would happen.
And each time before we sent the next one, we would check going, did they do this thing or not?
Let's change the emails based on what they've actually been doing rather than then just signing them up.
For some straight one size fits all onboarding flow.
And that had a great effect on our free trial to paid conversion rate as well.
Omer (40:08.760)
Awesome.
Yeah, I love that one email.
What was the subject line you talked about that was weird or whatever.
Janna Bastow (40:16.680)
Wait, that was weird.
It even says in there, did you get eaten by a bear?
And some people, some people will reply back and just have a great laugh with it.
Right.
We've made some, some friends out of our customers based on this.
Right.
You get some really friendly replies out of it.
Omer (40:31.900)
Awesome.
Yeah.
And for.
Rob Walling, who's the founder of Drip, was a guest on the show back on episode 45 where we talked about the story of how he started out with Drip, which is now being acquired by LeadPages.
But yeah, so you know, if you're listening and you want to check out the story of Drip, you can go and check out episode 45.
We've kind of talked about, you know, what you did to kind of.
And so what happened?
So did you hit the 15% once you kind of went through and did you get your conversion rate there?
Janna Bastow (41:13.100)
I'll be honest, we never actually did hit a 15% conversion rate.
The most Elite SaaS products tend to convert at about a 20% rate.
And these are like the slacks and the dropboxes of the world.
A decent one will convert at 3 to 5%.
That's kind of like the industry average.
We started off lower than that and we're now closer to about the 10% mark.
So we haven't actually cracked it and figured out how to get 15%.
We're not quite elite, but we are open to other things that are going to help us hit that number.
Omer (41:43.130)
Hey, 10% is a very, very respectable number.
That's awesome.
Janna Bastow (41:46.900)
Yeah.
What it taught us was that if we just focused our time on it.
Right.
We initially put three months toward this.
It ended up being a four month project and it made a big difference to our numbers and it was one of the things that helped us climb out of this hole.
And since then we've now turned and started our focus on other things.
Like right now we're spending, we're doing a three month focus almost entirely on engagement.
So we're talking about people, people who are further down the line and a wider remit.
Not just the people who signed up immediately, but sort of the everybody else in the company, how do we get them using it, engaging it, and we're working on projects that are going to change that number.
So it served the purpose.
I'm not sure I ever expected us to hit that 15%.
But it's a good, I guess they call it the big, hairy, audacious goal for us to all aim for.
Omer (42:36.760)
So if you could go back to 2010 or 2012 and kind of give your former past self some advice, what would you tell yourself?
What do you wish you had done differently?
Janna Bastow (42:51.640)
It's a really tough one.
I think I would have just told myself to quit my job earlier, you know, done it a year earlier and just moved faster.
I didn't have the guts back then to really take that step.
I think that I thought I needed some magic wand to step out and run my own company.
And turns out you learn everything on the job.
No one knows what they're doing anyways, and that's okay.
Omer (43:16.689)
That is excellent advice.
All right, let's get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Janna Bastow (43:26.620)
Sure.
Omer (43:27.020)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Janna Bastow (43:32.940)
Call bullshit when you see it.
This is something that my old boss said to me just before he made me a junior product manager, before I got my first step into the world that I'm in now.
And it might be an uncomfortable thing to think about.
It might be uncomfortable to step up and say something, but just think of the tech debt that you're saving yourself from down the line.
Omer (43:53.670)
I like that.
I like that a lot.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Janna Bastow (43:59.670)
So there's a couple that I'll recommend here.
One is out already.
It's called Product Leadership and it's by Martin Erickson, who's actually my co founder.
On the Mind.
The product side, Richard Banfield and Nate Walkinshaw.
Product is coming into its own and we're starting to see the rise of the cpo and they've got a lot of.
Of lessons, a lot of stories about product leaders from all different sorts of companies and they put that together into a great book.
And the other one is a bit of a cheeky pitch here because my name's on the COVID I wrote the foreword for this, but it's called Product Roadmaps Relaunched.
It's not out yet, but it is going to be out soon.
And that's by the good folks.
C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan and Michael Connors.
That one is coming out end of November.
Please check that one out, too.
Omer (44:47.470)
Do you know if that one's already listed in Amazon?
Janna Bastow (44:50.190)
It is, yeah.
I can send you the link if you'd like.
Omer (44:52.350)
I can look those up.
But yeah, I mean, we'll put in links of both of those in the show notes.
Janna Bastow (44:58.190)
Great.
Omer (44:58.550)
Okay, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Janna Bastow (45:05.470)
Perseverance and a clear, cool head.
There's always a lot of things that are going to happen, a lot of tough decisions to make, and it's important to have that clear head and just continue going even when it gets tough.
Remember that team happiness is more important than customer happiness.
Omer (45:27.560)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Janna Bastow (45:33.240)
I love tackling my emails on planes when I'm in offline mode.
Being able to swipe them one way and put them into a maybe later thing or write the emails when no one's going to reply and just have them in my outbox ready to go.
I can just absolutely tear through an age old inbox and get down to zero the moment I land.
Omer (45:52.200)
You know, I wish I could do that.
I was having a conversation with somebody else about this the other day that, that the, the times where I've been on a plane where they don't have any WI fi, it's great because I can do that.
Otherwise I waste probably half the time trying to connect to the WI fi.
Janna Bastow (46:09.910)
Well, yeah, exactly.
And flights are great.
They're time to like kind of chill.
So I like to do the, the emails just as I sort of take off and then it invariably puts me to sleep, at which point, you know, I can relax and enjoy the rest of the flight.
Omer (46:23.750)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Janna Bastow (46:29.830)
The extra time.
It's a really tough one because I'm already working on two of my top ideas.
So it's really tough to kind of come up with a fast follower as a backup.
Maybe something B2C, maybe something that had a, you know, direct and good impact in the world.
You know, I'd be probably interested in something around the sciences or robotics or health or you know, maybe even something physical.
You know, crypto.
Crypto seems really profitable these days.
But probably not my bag.
Omer (46:59.370)
There was a guy, I read a story, I don't know if it was in Business Insider, about a guy who I think it was in the Netherlands who had sold his house and all his belongings.
Janna Bastow (47:10.330)
I read about that.
Omer (47:11.610)
And basically he'd bought bitcoins and he was living on a campsite with his family.
Betting on the future.
So it's kind of.
Janna Bastow (47:18.490)
Yeah, well, I mean, I've heard bitcoin's up today.
So wish him all the best with that.
Omer (47:25.210)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Janna Bastow (47:30.020)
Good one.
I don't back down from a good bet or a dare.
It's always led me on interesting adventures.
Like I've ridden a bike from Paris to London as part of a charity once and I didn't own a bike at the time when I signed up.
I've jumped out of a plane for fun and I booked it only the night before.
So, you know, I'm generally pretty good for something a little bit crazy.
Omer (47:55.570)
Wow.
Yeah, you sound a little scary to me actually.
Janna Bastow (48:01.250)
You should check it out, actually.
It's a great group called Tech Bikers.
I was part of the first ride that they did that was Paris to London.
But they've now done a whole bunch of different itineraries and it usually includes about 32.
I think they're up to like 100 people now.
They get together, raise funds and ride bikes.
Including like one guy did it on a. I couldn't complain about my bike riding skills and my, my heavy hybrid bike because one guy did it on one of those fold up bikes.
And I mean, this is a three day ride up and downhill.
So it was pretty intense.
Wow.
Omer (48:31.820)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Janna Bastow (48:37.660)
That's difficult to say.
I guess I could say I'm really changeable.
I mean, I'll go through phases when I have time of picking up something creative, you know, whether it's painting or photography or picking up a guitar again.
I mean, honestly, just being able to relax with a good sci fi book would generally make me pretty happy.
Omer (48:56.260)
Cool.
Okay.
Well, thank you for joining me today, Jana.
It's been a pleasure.
Janna Bastow (49:01.780)
Yeah, thank you.
Omer (49:02.660)
Yeah, I mean, we were planning to have this conversation back in the summer and kind of things didn't quite work out.
And I'm glad we got this back on the schedule and we're able to.
To do this.
If people want to find out more about Prodpad, they can go to prodpad.com and if they want to learn about Mind the product, is that just mindtheproduct.com as well.
Janna Bastow (49:30.230)
You got it.
Yeah.
Mindtheproduct.com Perfect.
Omer (49:32.870)
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Janna Bastow (49:36.630)
Either on Twitter as implybasto.
Find me on LinkedIn.
I'm Janabasto, I'm the only one.
Or just Janaimblybasto.com that's me.
It'll come straight to me.
Omer (49:48.310)
Awesome.
Thank you again.
It's been a pleasure.
Enjoy your evening in Brighton.
Down there in England.
Janna Bastow (49:57.190)
Thank you very much.
Omer (49:59.510)
I miss England.
It's been a long time since I was back there.
And I wish you all the best with Prodpad.
And, you know, maybe we can get you back on sometime to talk more about Mind the Product and just, you know, more about product management and, you know, pick your brain a little bit about that.
Janna Bastow (50:20.530)
That would be absolutely great.
Thank you.
Omer (50:22.210)
Awesome.
Well, I wish you all the best.
Thanks, Jana.
Cheers.
Janna Bastow (50:24.770)
Thanks.
Have a good one.
Bye.
