A friend recently reached out for some help with her juice delivery business. She's at a similar stage as I am with my business. We're both figuring out our pricing, who we're going after and how the whole thing will come together. We both have something great that we believe in. The problem is that other people don't "get it" yet. So,...

In the late '90s, Subway had a campaign promoting their new range of seven subs with less than six grams of fat. It was a decent campaign. Modestly successful. Then came Jared. Jared weighed 425 pounds. He had a 60-inch waist. He picked his college classes based on whether or not he could fit into the classroom seats. His dad didn't th...

When it comes to marketing, I've always been confused about the 'who'. Conventional internet wisdom says you should target a tight niche. But the reality for most successful products is that they cater to more than one type of person. Think Canva, or Uber, or Freshdesk, or Basecamp...do any of these market to a specific niche? The jobs...

Hey there, Over the past few years, my attention has been centered on growing Chirr App. With Twitter's current instability, my business partner and I felt it was time for something new. We have an MVP for a new project, and we're running closed beta tests at the moment. As the non-technical co-founder, it's my job to market our new pr...

Over the last week, I’ve been hiring writers and putting a content team together. So far I've been working on content by myself. On my best week, I was able to publish 2 posts in a week. That left zero time and attention for anything else. If content marketing is going to become our primary growth channel, I'll need help. I hired sever...

I have this idea for a post I want to write, everything makes sense in my head, then I start writing and sound like a used car salesman. Part of the problem with content marketing is that it can be terribly stiff. When I write for work, my brain switches into business mode, and everything comes out awkward and sales-y. I wrote four blo...

Over this past year, my partner Sasha and I released four major features in Chirr App, our Twitter marketing tool for teams. We also introduced a free trial, invested in paid ads (on search and social), put together a 2-person direct sales team, and started an outreach program to build backlinks. None of it led to much growth. Team mor...

Hey there, My new year's resolution was to up my SEO game and build 100 backlinks to Chirr App. It's been a steep learning curve. I wrote a story about everything I've learned so far. Managed to get it featured as one of the first guest authors for Katlink's new founder stories section: https://katlinks.io/blog/building-100-backlinks I...

There is nothing worse than pouring your soul into creating a Twitter thread that no one reads. You spend ages refining and editing your ideas. You organize all your images, find the best time to publish, and then nothing. This guy tweets about sniffing a slice of bread and gets 350+ retweets. What is the point? Why bother creating sub...

Everyone tells founders to spend more time on their content marketing. But what exactly do you do with that time? One way to approach it is to take a long term view of how you can be useful to the internet. You want to start by finding 5-10 online communities for the kind of people who have the problem your product solves. Next, commit...

Your product is finally ready. You're ready to start marketing and push your product out there. • You post a bunch of links in a few Facebook groups. • Maybe write a launch post for Reddit and Indie hackers. • You're thinking a big Product Hunt launch next. Once you get started, the horror sets in and you realize this whole "marketing"...

Hey there, Thank you for being part of my newsletter. I've started so many newsletters over the last few years and failed to maintain any of them. Every time I start a newsletter it's always been around a specific project. The common thread is that these projects are always about starting or growing small businesses and products. I'm h...

Hey hey, 3 weeks ago I spent about 10 days writing a series of posts that covered everything I know around doing customer interviews. Then I completely forgot to send out the final link of everything tied together in a single. Here is a complete guide to doing customer interviews: https://www.joshpitzalis.com/customer-discovery I cover...

I've found customer research helps me improve product in three ways: It allows me to say no to stuff, it helps me map out the problem space, and it defines useful criteria for a solution. Saying no to stuff It's easy to get lost when you're building features. Grounding yourself in your user's perspective can let you know when you're ba...

When I first read the Mom Test and started doing customer interviews, it became clear that I'd be accumulating lots of notes and recordings of interviews I didn't know what to do with. There were two of us doing interviews at the time. We would do a bunch of interviews and then share takeaways with each other. Whoever was doing the int...

You don’t need to speak to lots of people, nor do you need to speak to them all at once. Two or three people a week is more than enough to start with. Recent customer support wins are always a good place to start. You don’t need a complicated reason to reach out to people that have just had a great experience with customer support. Exp...

I can go long stretches without doing interviews. When I jump back into them I'm always a little rusty. I have a little game I play that helps me get into the groove. I score each conversation with a simple point system. 2 negative points and 2 plus points. Easy to remember while I’m listening. Then I score the recording afterward to s...

The only scripted question I ask is: “ Tell me about why you started using [our product]?” I do customer discovery work in the context of existing products and I only interviewing existing users. Traditionally, discovery work is done before you build a product. There's lots of great writing out there about that sort of discovery work. ...

Over the next week, I'll be writing about customer discovery and how I approach interviewing people to build better products. The goal is to clarify my thinking around the topic and improve my current discovery process. I’ll keep things short, 300 - 400 word posts. At the end of it , I’ll put all the best bits into one big post that yo...

Over the last 28 days, I wrote and shared everything I know about retaining users in software products. Here are all 28 posts, re-organised into useful themes. Shaping your core value proposition • #1 We there yet? • #2 People were solving the problem before you came along • #3 Easy to use and simple to remember • #4 Use case sweet spo...

Figuring out what to work on next is a complicated, multi-stakeholder problem that never goes away. Look online for how to prioritise stuff and you will run into frameworks RICE, ICE and PIE. The problem with these frameworks is that everything ends up being rated a medium. The great ideas were obvious to begin with, and everything els...

The broad strokes to running a product experiment are: 1. Identifying a customer and/or business problem 2. Coming up with a hypothesis for a solution 3. Building the changes under a feature flag 4. Running the experiment 5. Review the results of the test Step 5, reviewing the results, doesn't happen inside your feature flag manager. T...

The problem with a lot of the content around A/B testing on the web is that it only covers landing pages and e-commerce websites. I want to be able to run A/B tests on the words inside the product experience. Tools that test landing pages, like Google Optimize, VWO and Optimizely are client-side tools. They work by placing a cookie in ...

The only way I know how to understand how different users think about your product is to speak to them. You don’t need to speak to lots of people, nor do you need to speak to them all at once. Two or three people a week is all you need. Recent customer success wins are always a good place to start. You don’t need a complicated reason t...

When I begin working with a product my primary focus is understanding how the core value proposition translates to specific actions in the product. Then I map out all the steps that lead to people become habitual users. Once this initial phase of work is complete the next step is to figure out who the super users are. Superusers are th...

If someone successfully uses your product once that doesn’t automatically turn them into a long term user. Behavioural data lets you reverse engineer how often people need to use your app to become long term users. You’ll need two things to do this: behavioural data and long term users. The definition of a long term user is fluid but 6...

Thinking of your onboarding experience as a funnel and using analytics to measure the biggest drop-offs is a useful way to find opportunities for improvement. Building a funnel means going through your onboarding experience and identifying every touchpoint that you need to track. The first thing that happens when you do this is you rea...

In 2018 Basecamp came out with a new kind of to-do list called a hill chart. This is what they look like. Things on the left are being figured out, anything on the right means it's being done. Stuff on the far left is vague and need lots of figuring out while the far right is almost finished. Every time you do some work, you manually m...

The reason I like retention curves is because they pack an incredible amount of information into one image. They tell you if a product has found fit straight out of the gate. When a retention curve draws to zero you have a leaky bucket. When your curve flattens out then you know your users have developed enough of a habit around your p...

A landing page helps people understand what your product does and why someone should care about it. People on the internet have been building landing pages for a while now and they have established a pattern that works. Don't deviate from this pattern unless you have a good reason to. Save the fancy stuff for the rest of your marketing...