Product Habits - How to thrive in an unknowable future

How Coronavirus Has Impacted Remote Work

Overnight, people and companies have been forced into remote work with little-to-no preparation. To understand how people are really feeling about remote work in the age of COVID-19, the FYI team decided to survey 180 people about their satisfaction with remote work in this new climate. In the process, we got some clarity on how companies can help make working remotely a better experience for employees. Here's what we learned.

A Static Business Is a Healthy Business

Over 100,000 companies pay for Basecamp, and nearly everyone pays roughly the same amount. This is intentional—co-founder Jason Fried believes you should never let any one (or small group) of customers overpay you because you inevitably end up catering to them, often at the detriment of your other customers. When you instead focus on a broader customer base with evenly distributed revenue, you end up insulating your business from risk. Right now, many companies aren't insulated. This perspective might just change how you structure your startup moving forward.

How to Thrive in an Unknowable Future

Derek Sivers wrote this in 2016, and it is more relevant than ever today. How do you thrive in an unknowable future? Expect disaster, prepare for the worst, own as little as possible, choose opportunity over loyalty, and avoid planning. This advice may have been anathema to the startup world five years ago, but it certainly seems spot on right now. Do you agree?

COVID-19 Software Industry Statistics

Well, if you'd have asked me at the end of 2019 for my predictions on rising software categories in 2020, I wouldn't have guessed the graph would look like this. Even as a long-time believer in the move to and popularization of remote work, even I didn't think it would happen this fast. I guess that's what a pandemic will do. Check out these category-level insights on telemedicine, web conferencing, antivirus, live chat, remote desktop, and more. 

Wartime Churn Reduction Strategies for SaaS

In the SaaS world, everyone's strategy is suddenly shifting from growth to revenue retention. Companies are cutting spending and churning away from other SaaS offerings, which creates a domino effect. The goal now seems to be customer retention and unit economics in an effort to preserve some cash and runway. Here are five strategies you can employ in the coming weeks built around reducing customer churn and improving revenue retention.

Building a System for Growth

So many things have changed in the past few months, let alone the past decade. Now more than ever, it's evident that "growth" is no longer the job of one person or team. Every part of a business is interconnected and plays a role in a company's growth trajectory. This interconnected framework between marketing strategy, product strategy, and monetization model will help you think about the best way to structure teams, priorities, and decisions to set your company up for success. 

The Planning Process Behind Help Scout's First-Ever Remote Retreat

With only 10 days to plan, the Help Scout team, comprised of over 100 employees in 75+ cities around the world, pulled off their first-ever completely remote team retreat. If you're thinking about planning a virtual company retreat in the next several months (my two cents: you should), here's what worked for them.