I’m Marie, co-founder of FYI and Product Habits, AMA 🔥

@marie_prokopets So helpful! Thanks for responding. And these crystal names! "tourmalated" and "labradorite"...amazing. I can't wait to check these out. 😁

@vijay_goel Coming from a big company perspective, I think a mistake some celebrities with a smaller audience make is comparing themselves to incredibly famous celebrities and expecting the same level of support/deal terms. I've seen people become really high maintenance and think that a company is willing to put up with drama and poor behaviors. That gives the company a bad taste, and that company might not renew contracts, they won't be supportive of those people in the future, and they might choose to decrease spend on the project. That's not to say that personalities shouldn't have requests and negotiate, but at the same time if they are working with companies they have to realize that they are working with people first and foremost, and people will either support you or they will try to stop supporting you. Some of the most successful smaller influencers are humble, kind and a complete pleasure to work with.

@smgrieser Check out my answer to Vikas Jha on how Hiten and I met and decided to be co-founders. Earlier on, we used to collaborate a lot and own things together. Now, we've split up who owns what. One of us owns something and the other one jumps in as help or feedback is needed. Hiten owns sales/BD and growth, and I own product and content. I own leading certain types of marketing initiatives and he owns others.

@harris_bryan Check out my answer to Vikas Jha. It was a set of synchronicities and was a very unexpected turn in my life.

@akhil_swaminathan We care about daily retention and increasing those rates amongst early users of a new product or feature. If retention isn't there, then that likely means you aren't really solving the problem for people yet. So, you should be both focused on solving the problem, and understanding how you can keep getting people to come back to your product to solve that problem.

@hnshah @jeff_whitlock Here are just a few. Mistake 1) they focus more on how much information they need for it to be "statistically significant" instead of just hearing from as many customers as they can (through interviews, surveys, user tests). do research first, then do even more, then do even more. Mistake 2) not doing user tests. even the 5 second homepage user tests. user tests on designs, your website, and on competitors are super valuable. Mistake 3) not diversifying the information they are looking at - for example, if you just make decisions based on user tests you are missing out on insights from customer interviews that would complement what you learned and help round it out. Mistake 4) not finding out why customers left. there's so much to learn by just sending a quick email to people who churned to find out why. Mistake 5) not doing thorough analysis of what was learned. if you don't summarize customer interviews / surveys in an unbiased way, did they really happen?

@antcoz When we first started research for FYI, we had made a mistake with another product called Draftsend that had no legs. We hadn't done true unbiased research - our research consisted of customer interviews to help with UI and telling customers about the product and asking them what they would do with it. It was so so wrong. After we were already far down the path with Draftsend, suddenly we realized our complete and utter folly and realized, shit, we have to prove this whole thing out. As we started interviews with people about the document space, we realized the problem we were working on solving before was so minuscule that honestly it wasn't really a problem. But we kept going. Kept learning, in spite of our massive mistake. Didn't lose hope. That's when we had the a-ha moment. Every single person we spoke with said that finding documents was their number one challenge. And that's how FYI was born. Through mistakes and perseverance.

@raksha_chandra There are a number of methods we use: - We built an email list called Product Habits and we found people to interview and use FYI early on from that email list. Another company that has done this well is Journal - https://blog.usejournal.com/ - We ask people we know for interviews, but we're of course careful to include a mix of people we don't know well so we don't get biased results. Often though our friends / people we know are most critical so we don't have to worry too much here. - We do cold outreach. This is time consuming and it takes some experimenting to find out where to source people and how to get the interview opt in rates higher. - We use Twitter, LinkedIn also works. This can work for any communities too, for example specialized Slack groups you are a part of. - We do user tests on early flows and fake marketing pages and fake Product Hunt launches.