I get this question a lot: What should I focus on when I’m the first CS hire in a early stage startup? My answer: it depends.
I'm on my third pre-Series A startup, and I've experienced very different realities.
I joined Claap two months before our Product Hunt launch. At that time, all users had a mandatory onboarding call before getting access to the product. But we wanted to be Product-led Growth so my mission was clear: how can we do this at scale?
I started reaching out to as many users as I could to gain insight into their primary use cases, challenges related to our product, and overall user journeys. I also reviewed internal analyses around activation rate, usage frequency, and persona segmentation. And spoke to the founders to understand activation blockers: what’s preventing perfect-fit customers from using Claap?
Our research helped us redesign our 1:M approach: emails we send when someone joins, blog posts about how people can use our product, surveys to get feedback, and so on.
Typeform was a very different story. I joined after the launch of our paid plans. Our challenge was to reduce churn, as we had a large user base that would come in, use the product for a single purpose, and then move on. So our primary focus was to understand why customers were leaving.
We launched NPS surveys and targeted churn surveys to gather feedback. Based on the results, we launched customer education programs to make users aware of the various use cases we could support related to their first one.
So, to answer the first question: review the data, talk to your customers and team and identify the biggest problem. Prioritize what you can impact directly, and only then what needs a cross-team effort with product, marketing, and sales.
🎙️ Other things on my mind this week
1. Airtable lessons from Zoelle Egner
The episode of Lenny Rachitsky' Podcast with Zoelle Egner (ex-Airtable where she joined as employee 11th) is full of practical advice for early-stage CS teams.
2. Find inspiration wherever you can
We crave motivation, to be inspired, to believe we are here for something bigger and better. And we can find it in the most unusual places.
3. Diversify your sources of purpose and community
If our job is our sole source of community and identity, and we lose that job, we can find ourselves in an existential crisis.