Product Habits - How to become great at sales

Why Most Analytics Efforts Fail

Crystal Widjaja is the former SVP of Growth and Business Intelligence at Gojek, one of the largest super apps in Southeast Asia, which has scaled to more than 5 million orders per day in under five years. As you can imagine, the company has a ridiculous amount of data to parse through and make sense of. One of Crystal's key decisions was creating simple but robust data systems that enabled the company to make thoughtful growth decisions quickly. Check out the playbook on how she did it. 

How Do You Learn Sales?

A new engineering-centric entrepreneur recently posted a question on Hacker News about where to start with learning how to sell. The thread blew up, and I think some of the comments are fascinating and worthy reminders for all entrepreneurs—even those who are seasoned at selling. This was one of my favorites: "Don't 'learn' sales...try to conceptualize yourself as a consultant and not a salesperson." Check out the full thread.

The Power of Frameworks

In Sarah Tavel's words, "A successful framework distills the complex, and in that synthesis, gets to a timeless insight." She's written countless stellar posts about frameworks ranging from how to democratize development to understanding the hype cycle of features. I've read a number of these and I highly recommend browsing through them this week.

Celebrity Collaborations and Brand Marketing

One of the biggest shifts I've seen for startups in the past decade is the reliance on social media to grow and engage an audience. Alongside this change has come the normalization of celebrity endorsements as a viable marketing tactic.

Here's one example: Dancer Charli D'Amelio has 90 million followers on Tik Tok. She partnered with Dunkin' Donuts and the coffee company named a drink after her. The day that drink launched, there was a 57% increase in app downloads. Within five days, Dunkin' sold hundreds of thousands of Charli's signature drink. Now that endorsements are directly impacting bottom lines in this way, it'll be interesting to see how this type of marketing strategy transforms over the next few years. 

How We Used a Simple Survey to Crack the Code on Our Customers

If you've been reading my newsletter for a while, you know how important I think it is to do good customer research. This article captures why it's important—and also why so many companies don't execute research well. This detailed survey breakdown will give you ideas for designing a better one for your own company. Something in here will help you gain a better understanding of who your customers are. 

Three Metrics That Matter to Raise Your Series A

More and more, investors are working backwards, looking at the early metrics from companies with successful IPOs to figure out what the early tells were. Most investors are looking at ARR and ARR growth rates. How much depends on your market and vertical, but it's probably well over $1M. These three shifts are good benchmarks to consider if you're thinking about raising a Series A anytime soon.

Hey Startups, It's Better To Attack a Small Market

I couldn't agree more with this short and sweet reminder from Aaron Levie: It's almost always better to attack a small market growing rapidly over a big market that doesn't want to move. The comments on this tweet are just as thought provoking as the tweet itself. 

Americans Might Never Come Back to the Office

When the pandemic first hit the U.S., virtually all tech companies switched to partial- or full-remote work. Many thought it would just be temporary or an experiment, but with no end in sight, it's rapidly becoming the new norm. Twitter was the first major American company to announce its permanent work-from-home plans, and many others have begun to follow suit. Do you think you'll be working remote indefinitely? And better question: Do you want to?