Hey — It's Nico.

A new change in the content: instead of one story, I'm sharing two resources, analyzed.

The reason: I felt like the story was only helpful to a small percentage of the audience that was in a similar situation to that of the startup.

Here's what I got today:

• 🔥 10+ weekly picks.
• 💰 ​Productboard’s path to PMF​
• 📈 Hackathons as a GTM strategy

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🔥 This Week’s Picks

Ping.gg’s founder discusses burnout and shares his “No Zero Days” approach to staying productive (Link).

Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners list 25 startups likely to become unicorns (Link).

An interview with Tim Schumacher, from saas.group, on how he buys and grows SaaS companies (Link).

AI startup founder is charged with defrauding investors and manipulating financial documents (Link).

Gustaf Alströmer, a group partner at Y Combinator, believes design doesn’t make a pitch deck better (Link).

Techcrunch discusses startups and trends from signups in their Startup Battlefield competition (Link).

Calvin Chenn, a Y Combinator founder, shares his experience pivoting and finding a new idea (Link).

Richard Socher shares his views about AI and his journey building an AI-powered Google competitor (Link).

The stories behind how Tinder, LinkedIn, and Reddit solved their cold start problems (Link).

A teardown of XO’s recent acquisition of Growthbar, an AI writing SaaS (Link).

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💰 Productboard’s Path to PMF​

In 2011, Hubert Palan was VP of Product of a company that suffered from the shiny object syndrome: they couldn’t stay focused long enough to build something great.

Tools like Jira or GitHub weren’t helping the company to have a clearer alignment and understand their customers and their pain points. These tools were too focused on engineers.

That’s when Palan came up with the idea for Productboard. He’d build a project management tool but with what product managers needed: features for customer feedback and pain points.

A decade later, Productboard has become a $1.75B unicorn startup with more than 6,000 customers and 500 employees.

​In an article recently published in First Round Review, Palan shares Productboard’s path to PMF. Here are the main events from the 3 main stages of this journey:

1) Validating the idea:

• From April 2013 to April 2014, Palan and his co-founder conducted +1,000 customer interviews testing 13 different prototypes.
• The first prototype consisted of a 250-page Keynote deck, which they used to do interactive slide walkthroughs.
• Features were first built on Keynote. If people responded positively, they added them to the app.
• Eventually, they came up with a winning prototype: a platform that tied customers’ problems with specific features and allowed product managers to prioritize them.

2) Defining customer segments:

• With the winning prototype, they focused on defining who they were building for.
• To do this, they set out to identify the differences between the people they interviewed who had enthusiastic feedback about the prototype and those who did not.
• Eventually, they came up with an ultra-specific target profile: early-stage startups with one product team building a single B2B product.

3) Beta testing:

• They put up a landing page where visitors could sign up for early access.
• In April 2015, 50 users got access to the beta for free in exchange for feedback.
• By July 2016, they had raised $1.7M, reached 100 paying customers, and grown to $200k in ARR.
• That summer, they got into TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield and shortly after saw a 5,000% increase in trial signups and thousands of dollars in new MRR. They had PMF.

If you've read up to here, can you help me with a click here? It's my way of knowing if people find this kind of content useful.

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📈 A GTM Hack: Hackatons​

When CommandBar was just a one-month-old company, someone working at a Unicorn SaaS company emailed them saying he wanted to try their product during an internal hackathon.

Internal hackathons are events that last 1-5 days where teams of members from different areas of a company are formed and given the goal of solving some problem or building a new project or feature.

The team at the Unicorn implemented CommandBar during the hackathon - and they won! But unfortunately for CommandBar, the Unicorn didn’t end up buying their tool.

However, this showed CommandBar what would later become one of their GTM channels: hackathons.

How it works? You help a team competing in an internal hackathon implement your B2B tool to solve some problem or add some feature.

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Why Hackathons Work

1. Urgency: Hackathons are time-bound, which means the company can’t postpone testing your tool.
2. Diverse teams: Hackathons form teams from different areas. This is ideal if your product requires usage from different areas within a company in order to provide value.
3. Happy prospects: During a hackathon, you can build the specific features required by the company’s team. This generates a close relationship with your potential customer.

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How to Use This

1. Run an email outbound campaign: Oriented to making companies aware that they can try out your tool for their next hackathon.
2. Create a Slack channel: It’s critical to squash bugs/misunderstandings and guide the team’s implementation towards high-value stuff.
3. Shape the buying journey: Ideally, schedule a meeting with an exec of the company the week before the hackathon begins so that the company doesn’t forget about your product later on.
4. Push the most valuable use cases: Focus on implementing features of your product that are going to create the most value for users after the hackathon, not just the flashy/sexy features.
5. Craft the presentation around value: Help the team craft a presentation that showcases ways in which your tool can move metrics like user conversion, user retention or ticket deflection.

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How did I do it today?

• ​🔥 Great​
• ​😒 Meh​
• ​👎 Not interesting​

That's all of this week.

Cheers,

Nico