Before You Grow

You should look into improving your Single User Utility.

Here are some links to get started:

http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-syste...

http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-in...

http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-op...

There are also countless examples of successful two-sided marketplaces who started out by "nurturing" (aka faking) one side of the market until they reached their critical mass.

The enterprise sales process isn't what it used to be. Before, you had to get an audience with the CIO (or whoever controlled the department budget) to have a chance.

The shift has been that employees and individual teams now have a lot of say in what tools they use -- sometimes without the higher-ups knowing about it until it's seen a good amount of adoption amongst internal teams. SaaS with instant access and 0 deploy times makes this possible.

Another shift is that employees will now carry their championed products with them from one company to another. In an area like Silicon Valley where job hopping is common, the social/word-of-mouth effects on enterprise software is significant.

Slack has already been mentioned and is a prime example of both.

With our own "enterprise" product, we're seeing the same -- adoption from teams and employees that eventually can become something more. But, this can only happen if you're resonating with some group of users that love your product.

I really wish we could see some metrics on products people 'love'.

I'm working on a product that is seeing great growth (free atm), and what appears to me to be good customer engagement.

When I break things, users email and let us know, time on site is good, etc. etc. At what point do you go, yup, this is something people love.

Of course, I'm still making product improvements and figuring out what people will pay for.

This is good advice but on a practical level isn't clearly compatible with other advice like "fix the plane while it's flying".

Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then companies accepted to YC should already have a product people love and be ready to hack growth over the next 3 months. This clearly is not the case (eg Airbnb joined YC after about a year not 1000 days).

If YC is not only about growth but also about helping companies at much earlier stage still working on the product people love stage, that would seem to be a challenge. What do YC speakers talk about? Growth or Product? It's like putting kids learning Algebra in the same class as those ready for Calculus, not easy at all. Maybe there should be two types of YC sessions then? One for early startups still working on product, another YC for startups working on growth...

Every founder I have ever met wants their product to be loved, but unfortunately they need time and money to figure this out. Other issues: it's hard to know when to walk away pre-product and pitching VCs without growth doesn't seem to work. So founders raise money by showing early "growth" without PML (product/market love), then they go back to work on the product and when PML doesn't materialize in the first couple months they start to get nervous and switch resources back to growth hacking their mediocre product so they can be ready to raise money again and have another chance.

Obviously this is all very complicated, full of exceptions to rules. In reality product and growth have to be going on at once - but the timelines and resources and challenges to do product and growth at the same time should be part of the advice.

If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something. So that's step one.

Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem.

This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.