Our third guest at Unsolicited Feedback is none other than Ravi Mehta - previously the CPO at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, and VP of Product at Tripadvisor. Now, he's the co-founder and CEO of Outpace, and Ravi is not afraid to swipe left as they 🧳 Analyze the migration from Jira to Linear, including the conditions that triggered Ravi’s switch (starts at 1:32) 🔥 Discuss Airtable's move to conquer the up-market (starts at 27:43) 🔮 Offer some hindsight Unity probably would have appreciated heading into their pricing change this week(starts at 50:41) These discussions will uncover the secrets behind switching costs and the eternal question of whether to serve a niche or go for mass appeal. Jira Gets Bit by a Nasty Bug [Filing System] Linear has just announced their latest fundraising, and experts are discussing their momentum. The question arises: How has Linear managed to attract customers away from Jira, considering Jira's powerful capabilities? Ravi explains that there are two main reasons for his dramatic shift: 🤯 Jira has become too complex. It is powerful, but complicated, and perhaps has fallen into a power user trap 🤯 🐞 Jira has neglected to focus on making the bug filing process seamless, whereas Linear has successfully addressed this issue. 🐞 Fareed mentions that "the people who benefit the most from project management tools are project managers. However, for the engineers, designers, and bug filers—the ones doing the actual work—the end user experience is poor." 🤔 "If the planning process places all the responsibility on persona X, but the value goes to persona Y, failure is inevitable if the experience is bad for persona X." 💡 Then, the discussion turns to the significant topic at hand: 🔍🗣️ People Overestimate the Magnitude of Switching Costs. 💼 Conditions that enable someone to come into a market and disrupt the incumbent without significant innovation include: Low switching costs 🔄 Solving a very significant problem. ❗ Hatred for the incumbent. Simply being better than X is not enough if X is not that bad. 😕 Serving a sub-persona that is both high value and vocal. 🙌 Is it possible to avoid the power user trap? 🪄💥 Either you can focus on the power user, but risk alienating new customers (e.g., Salesforce). Or you choose to remain simple but accept that some customers will outgrow the product (e.g., HubSpot). The latter option is more challenging, and the trio express concerns that Airtable may be the next victim as they move up-market, away from their Product-Led Growth (PLG) roots. Who else is in danger? ❗⚠️ 🎨 Ravi believes Figma is at risk and for Figma Super-fans Fareed & Brian, jaws hit the floor. Ravi defends his stance saying, it seems to focus too much on new products and features for technical users, neglecting the non-technical users. 🎨 💬 In another surprising hot take, Fareed suggests Slack is also in danger due to communication overload. Although it is not entirely Slack's fault, the product has not effectively addressed this issue. 💬 🌐 Brian mentions Zoom. Why? They are adding a ton of new features and products. At the same time have not developed the strength of consumer grade design and user experience. The combo leads to the product feeling overly complex and frustration starting to take hold Can We Hit Control-Z on Unity’s Surprise Pricing Shift? 😮🎮 For those who are not aware, Unity announced a series of new pricing changes that will take effect in 3 months. The most significant change is that they will now charge per installation. It’s clear Unity is in a real pickle at the moment 🥒, but where did they go wrong and what can we learn from it? 1) 🤔 Didn’t think about their customers’ business models. 2) 😵 It’s COMPLICATED. 3) 🔒 They broke trust. 4) ❌ It’s not aligned to the value that Unity is helping them create. 5) 👎 No Win-Win or Give and Take here. Let's hope Unity can find a way to respawn ASAP! 🤞🕹️

🚀 Check out the latest episode of Unsolicited Feedback! 🎧 In our third installment, we're joined by the legendary Casey Winters, Reforge program partner and prolific growth expert. 🌟 In this episode, we: 🔮 Revisit our predictions for where Twitter and Threads will be in 1 year (starts at 1:21) 🔍 Uncover a hidden gem in HubSpot’s latest product release (starts at 14:26) 💡 Discuss the viability of the creator economy (starts at 44:17) 🏬 Understand Casey’s perspective on the future of marketplaces (starts at 1:07:41) Tune in now to get the inside scoop on these topics and more! 🎙️🔥 HubSpot’s latest release HubSpot's annual inbound conference serves as a platform for announcing new product releases, with a particular focus on AI-driven solutions. However, Brian argues that the true standout is not the anticipated AI-driven solutions, but rather a hidden gem that seems to be overshadowed - the Commerce Hub. 👀 🛒 The Commerce Hub is HubSpot's latest product offering, which aims to integrate payments, billing, and subscriptions into their ecosystem. The experts believe that the Commerce Hub could be a game-changer for HubSpot for several reasons: 💰 It presents an opportunity for HubSpot to replicate the success of companies like Shopify, which generate a significant portion of their revenue from transaction fees and merchant solutions. 💼 HubSpot's SMB focus makes them uniquely equipped to release this offering. Unlike Salesforce's enterprise clients, SMB customers prefer simplicity and having everything under one roof. 🔝 HubSpot's focus on cross-selling and expanding their product suite within their mid-market customer base has been a key driver of their growth, following a successful B2B product expansion playbook. But, Casey shares a reservation that betting against Shopify is a dangerous game. Only time will tell. 🤔⏳ Viability of the Creator Economy Hunter Walk's recent article "The only thing which has failed about the creator economy thus far as venture capitalists attempt to get their piece, why there's never been a better time to be a creator," struck a chord with Fareed. 💰 In the article, Walk states that it has never been easier for creators to make $50,000 per year doing what they love. Casey highlights a few key caveats: 🎯 Different segments of creators have different needs, so a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work 🎯 📦 Fulfillment alone is not enough to help creators monetize effectively, or is a venture back-able business 📦 📈 Creators need assistance in driving demand, which many creator economy companies fail to provide 📈 Brian points out the tension between creators' desire for demand and their desire to own their own audience. 🤝 📉 High take rates can lead to creators leaving once they become more successful 📉 Fareed suggests that there are two types of companies in the creator economy: low-margin businesses that prioritize efficiency and high-margin businesses that focus on craftsmanship. ⚖️ Most creator economy startups are low-margin plays, but can you imagine a high-margin creator economy play? ⚖️ Future of Marketplace Businesses We wrap up this episode by getting Casey's bullish perspective on the future of marketplaces: 📲🔄 Good businesses require platform shifts to enable growth opportunities. We haven't had one since the mobile phone era, and we are overdue for a new one. 📲🔄 🏠🍽️ Airbnb and DoorDash may have reached a size where they can serve as platforms for venture-scale businesses. 🏠🍽️ 🧩 All we need are the right ingredients: clear fragmentation of supply and a high frequency of need on the demand side. 🧩 Join us at https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback for more and subscribe to the podcast. We have another episode coming Thursday with Ravi Mehta!!

This week, we have special guest Adam Fishman, original proclaimed Growth Daddy (defined as a father and a growth expert), a Reforge mainstay, and formerly of Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods. Today he and our hosts are discussing Figma for Dev, Zoom’s COVID strategy, and Twitter’s Creator Payouts. 🎨→ ⌨️ Figma for Dev from Unsolicited Feedback Figma for Dev offers deep lessons and the experts agree it’s a brilliant move. 💰 Figma unlocked unparalleled PLG through their unconventional pricing strategy: Most tools price per seat, but Figma realized that this creates unnecessary friction because when you pay per seat, there’s often approvals that need to happen to add someone. At Figma, anyone who is not editing does not incur any charges. 🚀 Now, they want to capture revenue from the audience that’s already in their funnel: In every project, there are 5-15x more engineers than designers, greatly increasing the TAM if companies now opt to pay for seats for their engineers who are already used to the platform. 🎯 Focus is the name of the game here as Figma takes a step into the Dev audience: Figma could have built a wide range of features for engineering. Figma chose to focus on the part of engineering that is closest to design. 📹 Zoom’s COVID Product Strategy: Zoom delivers a Growth Daddy Cage Match between Fishman and Balfour, with Mosavat as the mediator. Background: Zoom has recently launched several new products, including Zoom Apps, Zoom Events, and Zoom Video Engagement Center. Round 1: 🐟 Fishman asks, "Is this just a spaghetti at the wall strategy? Who are they building for?" 🔎 But, Balfour commends the Product Velocity of the engineering team. Very impressive! 🔑 Mosavat errs toward Fishman in round one, pulling in a Mike Spicer quote from Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike tweeted that the right strategy is to take a series of sequential bets, not a bunch of bets across a bunch of different things because you learn more each time. Fareed feels like none of these are sequential bets. Round 2: 🐟 Fishman zooms in on clips and basically makes the argument that it lacks all of the pizzazz and UGC magic that makes Loom successful. So combined spaghetti strategy + half-baked products, Fishman is not feeling much love for Zoom right now but challenges Balfour to prove him wrong. 🔎 Balfour decides to take the pro-zoom case! He feels this might just be the Microsoft strategy (which notably has been a successful company). Build 80% of the market and bundle it. Their strengths are tech and their sales machine. That is a winning bet. Bundle and sell when you have great tech and sales. 🐟 Fishman wonders if they are big enough to pull that off. 🔑 Mosavat sides with Fishman here. Microsoft has a billion people using 365, and by the way, is Zoom's biggest competitor with Teams. It's a bad strategy to fight Goliath with the same strategy Goliath is using. "If you don't have a navy, don't go to a sea battle." Final Round: 🔎 Balfour suggests that strategy and execution should be separated. 🐟 Fishman disagrees, arguing that execution cannot be separated from strategy. If Figma had attempted that strategy and produced subpar products, they would have been criticized as well. 🔑 Mosavat identifies Zoom's original sin as the lack of presence or identity outside of meetings. Fareed often quits Zoom between meetings. 🔑 Fareed's lesson is to lean into what Zoom does well. However, ultimately he agrees with Balfour that Zoom is still a great business. It has the following benefits: 📉 Low acquisition cost 💻 Low R&D cost 💰 Great margins 💸 Profitable at IPO 💰 Hadn't raised much money COVID may have created some challenges, but these five core elements remain strong. For more analysis, the opportunity to hear Brian Balfour rap, and to hear what the trio had to say about Twitter's Creator Payouts, listen to the full episode. Like what you're hearing? Please give us a review and a subscribe.

📢 Hey everyone! Welcome to Unsolicited Feedback! In our debut episode, co-hosts Brian Balfour and Fareed Mosavat discuss Twitter's creator monetization and enterprise verification offerings, as well as internal fears at YouTube that their YouTube Shorts feature will cannibalize their core longer-form content. 🐤 Let's start with Twitter/X (we’re still getting used to the new name…): 🐤 🔍 Twitter's recent releases include the Creator Monetization Offering and Enterprise Verification Offering. 👍 You cannot think your way out of a revenue gap. You have to ship your way out of it. Twitter used to be stagnant from a product perspective. Now, they are taking swings at filling revenue gaps. It is okay if some of these swings inevitably fail.  👎 However, experts have reservations about these offerings: It seems that while Twitter was fighting Threads and its own inertia, LinkedIn ate Twitter's lunch - at least in the tech community. Why? Creator Monetization may have alienated creators who treat social as a business. Businesses need predictability, and Twitter's strategy has been anything but predictable. LinkedIn’s incentives are aligned with creator incentives and their product roadmaps remain predictable. As Fareed says, "Cheaper but worse rarely wins. Free, but worse can win." Enterprise Verification is a filler feature, not a leader, and may not offer enough value for users to justify paying for it. Fareed notes that a leader feature is something that people pay for. It is the thing that attracts them to the paid product. Fillers are usually other things that increase the value of that product for you. For example, for Slack, message history is the leader feature, and advanced search and huddles are fillers. For Twitter, the ability to list jobs for a company is a filler, not a leader, and filler features when the same concept is a leader feature at a competitor is hard to charge for. Brian notes that this is why Hubspot made their CRM free, knowing it was a filler feature that wouldn't compete with Salesforce's leader feature CRM. 🩳 Now on to YouTube Shorts: 🩳 🐌 Internal friction errs toward the status quo. 🐌 If user behavior is flowing in a different direction, your time and energy are best spent understanding the new direction and moving yourself toward it. 🤷‍♂️ The YouTube Shorts hasn't made clear the problem it solves. 🤷‍♂️ It's easy to draw surface-level parallels between YouTube Shorts and Instagram Stories, but it's unclear the real problem that Shorts solves for YouTube. Stories solved a real problem for Instagram. It created a way to post without needing to achieve perfection. ✨ New product lines breathe new life into growth strategy. ✨ Ravi Mehta introduced the framework of Creation, Consumption, and Conversations for content and social platforms. You can try to optimize this as much as possible for your existing product, but eventually, your progress will plateau. Brian thinks YouTube figured this out with their core product. Both their move to premium with YouTube TV and their introduction of Shorts create completely new sets of loops to play with. 🪛 It will take time for YouTube creators to understand how to use Shorts. But when it happens, it stands to be powerful. 🪛 Right now, Shorts seems to be like copycat content from TikTok & Reels, rather than things YouTube creators make themselves. However, over time, Fareed expects the legacy YouTube creators to adapt to the new incentives created by Shorts. Join the conversation on Slack & LinkedIn HERE and subscribe to the podcast to hear more Unsolicited Feedback from Brian Balfour, Fareed Mosavat, and upcoming guests like Casey Winters, Elena Verna, Joff Redfern, Andrew Chen, Ravi Mehta, Adam Fishman, and many more.