The document summarizes discussions and findings from 5 days of work by Alan Gou and George Liu on developing a new software product. Over the 5 days, they conducted customer interviews, refined their target customer segments, developed an initial cost structure and revenue model, and identified key pain points their product could address such as coordinating experiments across teams and ensuring results are not forgotten. Their main hypotheses that were confirmed include that the "Pirate Funnel" is widely used, customers always want to move testing and optimization faster, and there are pain points in current marketing workflows.

1. Alan Gou and George Liu
13 interviews done yesterday
48 total Interviews
Day 5

2. Who we are
Alan Gou
- B.S. in Computer Science
- Built distributed systems at Jet
- Executive recruiting committee
at HLAB
- Instructor at ScriptEd
George Liu
- B.A. in Economics
- Launched the HubSpot CRM
- Built the growth team for Adobe
Muse from scratch
- Partner at Dorm Room Fund

3. Day 1
Building on personal experience

4. Day 1
Motivation
- Alan is a stickler for processes
and has dived deep into tools
such as Trello and Asana
- George has worked in growth
roles at 4 different companies and
seen consistent pains that can be
productized
Solution?
- We build software that helps
companies manage their growth
strategy
- Sell it to marketers and product
managers
- It’ll be a million times better than
what they do right now

5. The Pirate Funnel
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral
Get people to where you’re
going to sell them stuff
Keep them coming back
Get them to engage with your
product
Ask them for money
Ask to promote to friends

6. Cost Structure
Website hosting
Customer acquisition costs
Revenue Streams
Freemium subscription tiers (unlimited members, upgrade for
additional features)
Key Partners
Stripe
Zendesk/Intercom
Heroku/Firebase
Github
Key Activities
Software development
Customer development
Find scalable acquisition
channel
Strong feedback loop
Key Resources
Sales + Marketing
Designers
Developers
Intellectual Property
Value Proposition
A simple, centralized
workflow to help growth
marketing teams run
better experiments
faster
Customer
Relationships
Forum/blog dedicated to
marketing methods and
best practices
Personalized support at
first
Channels
ProductHunt/Others
Strong referral program
Inbound marketing
Evaluation by test runs
Subscriptions
Customer Segments
High-growth SMEs that
are managing
marketing/growth
campaigns
Marketing consultancies
that run such campaigns
or experiments for large
clients
Potential to branch out
to product teams in the
future

7. Our Hunches
We lose track of all our experiments
It’s in a big, messy spreadsheet — we’re only
human after all
We can’t prioritize in this chaos
Tasks and results are scattered everywhere, and
these tools don’t even let you assign priorities
We forget about our own findings
They get stuck in the backlog and we can’t find
them or don’t notice
We hate our task management tools
It’s slow and cumbersome, whereas I’m agile, and
three months later I still feel confused using it
Everything is messy and disorganized

8. What did we find?
We talked to people at…
and more!
And they said...
Stuff really is hard to keep track of,
especially across teams
When you’re too small, you don’t use
any extra tools because you’re just two
people with a desk
Some have trouble prioritizing — only
scaling up to Jira gives you choices

9. Day 2
Putting our design thinking caps on and
validating our value props

10. Cost Structure
Highly scalable low-fixed cost business. Main costs:
- Website hosting
- Human capital
- Customer acquisition
Revenue Streams
Team-based freemium subscription tiers
- Unlimited members
- Upgrade for additional features ($5/user/month)
- API integrations, cosmetics, permissioning
Key Partners
Payments processing
Stripe
Customer interaction
Zendesk
Intercom
Analytics
Mixpanel
Google Analytics
Technical
Heroku
Firebase
Github
Key Activities
Feature development
Agile engineering
Strong feedback loop
Customer development
Scalable acquisition
channel
Key Resources
Growth
Sales
Marketing
Product
Designers
Developers
Value Proposition
Systemized Teamwork
Track experiments
across teams
Discuss projects and
tasks in organized way
Fast and Easy-to-use
Good responsive design
No feature overload
Better workflow fit but
still have customizability
Increased Productivity
Summarize key results
Better able to prioritize
Aggregation
Seamless bundling of
workflow and chat
Customer Relations
Community
Forum for marketing
methods and practices
Individual
Support page/FAQ
Personalized support
Channels
Outbound
PH/HN/GH
Facebook ads
Direct sales
Inbound
Strong referral program
Content marketing
Viral waitlist
Customer Segments
Marketing Teams
SMEs that want to grow
users and run
experiments
Product Teams
SMEs that use agile
engineering methods
Cross-functional Teams
Multiple teams, such as
product and marketing,
must coordinate
activities

11. Experiment Process
Someone notices Week 1
retention is extremely low
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral
Hypothesis: Users will come
back with email reminders
Coordinate email
emphasis with
product team
PMM
Product
Team
Findings: An email
retention flow increases
retention
The Test
Key Results: Learnings and
next steps forward to
optimize email
Giant Spreadsheet
1
2
34

12. Pain and gains we’ll tackle
Coordinating with
Teams
Product marketing
manager may have to
interact with
- Design team
- Engineering team
- Analytics team
- Support team
- Sales team
2
Moving Experiment
Along
This all needs to
happen fast
- Time is money!
- Fast you finish,
faster you can
tackle other
problems
3
Making Sure You
Remember Results
Results can get lost
- Workflow is a mess
- Waste of effort if
you just forget your
findings or never
act upon them
4

13. A Hypothetical Graveyard
We thought: Brainstorming is a valuable activity
Teams suffer from backlog of ideas and feature requests, not a dearth of them
We thought: Someone has a great workflow we can consult
Even tech giants and superstar companies don’t have their act together
We thought: This is also useful for enterprise, let’s target them
The cost of a sales force and the nature of tooling doesn’t justify it

14. Day 3
Refining our customer segments

15. Cost Structure
Highly scalable low-fixed cost business. Main costs:
- Website hosting
- Human capital
- Customer acquisition
Revenue Streams
Team-based freemium subscription tiers
- Unlimited members
- Upgrade for additional features ($5/user/month)
- API integrations, cosmetics, permissioning
Key Partners
Payments processing
Stripe
Customer interaction
Zendesk
Intercom
Analytics
Mixpanel
Google Analytics
Technical
Heroku
Firebase
Github
Other B2B SaaS
Lead exchanges
Key Activities
Feature development
Agile engineering
Strong feedback loop
Customer development
Scalable acquisition
channel
Key Resources
Growth
Sales
Marketing
Product
Designers
Developers
Value Proposition
Systemized Teamwork
Track experiments
across teams
Discuss projects and
tasks in organized way
Fun!
Fast, simple, easy
Consumerization of IT
Better workflow fit but
still have customizability
Increased Productivity
Filtering for better
prioritization
Aggregation
Seamless bundling of
workflow and chat
Customer Relations
Community
Forum for marketing
methods and practices
Individual
Support page/FAQ
Personalized support
Channels
Outbound
PH/HN/GH
Facebook ads
LinkedIn ads
Direct sales
Inbound
Strong referral program
Content marketing
Viral waitlist
Customer Segments
Growth marketer
At a high-growth
post-series A startup
Marketing manager
At a medium-sized tech
company
Product manager
Optimizing and testing
product features

16. Who is involved in the process?
Marketing/Growth Lead
Optimizes entire funnel
Analytics Team
Tells you what the data means
Product Managers
Manages product development
Engineering Leads
Builds product, keep it running
1
4
2
2
2 4
3
4
Who works with who, and at what stage?
1
Someone notices Week 1
retention is extremely low
1
Coordinate email emphasis
2
The test
3
Systemize learnings in giant
spreadsheet
4

17. The ones we’ll focus on (initially)
Growth Marketers
Relies on the funnel for,
well, their entire job
Marketing Manager
Coordinating with
everyone can be a pain
Product Manager
Has to listen to and
consider everyone
The ones who we won’t
Engineering Lead
Cares more about other
issues (tickets)
Analytics
Product might not add
much value

18. What else did we find?
Death by a million
backlog items
Stuff piles up, and it
becomes hard to sift
through and organize
- Unassigned tasks
- Forgotten results
- Stagnant tickets
- Someone had 1000
tickets sitting in their
backlog!
Some like their tools,
some don’t
Trello is loved by many
— but all use Jira after
certain size
- Trello can’t scale
- Free form is also a curse
- Jira is customizable,
good for large orgs
People care about
speed
The faster you can
experiment and iterate,
the better
- Snowball effect
- Faster you iterate, more
problems you can solve

19. Day 4
Figuring out how to sell this and make money

20. Cost Structure
Highly scalable low-fixed cost business. Main costs:
- Website hosting
- Human capital
- Customer acquisition
Revenue Streams
Team-based freemium subscription tiers
- Unlimited members
- Upgrade for additional features ($5/user/month)
- API integrations, cosmetics, permissioning
Key Partners
Payments processing
Stripe
Customer interaction
Zendesk
Intercom
Analytics
Mixpanel
Google Analytics
Technical
Heroku
Firebase
Github
Other B2B SaaS
Lead exchanges
Key Activities
Feature development
Agile engineering
Strong feedback loop
Customer development
Scalable acquisition
channel
Key Resources
Growth
Sales
Marketing
Product
Designers
Developers
Value Proposition
1. Better teamwork
Track experiments
across teams
2. Fun!
Fast, simple, easy
Consumerization of IT
3. Productivity gains
Better prioritization via
filtering and visualization
4. Convenient
Seamless bundling of
workflow, data,
learnings, and chat
5. Scales to needs
Good defaults ease into
powerful customization
Customer Relations
Community
Forum for marketing
methods and practices
Individual
Support page/FAQ
Personalized support
Channels
Outbound
PH/HN/GH
Facebook ads
LinkedIn ads
Direct sales
Inbound
Strong referral program
Content marketing
Viral waitlist
Customer Segments
Growth marketer
At a high-growth
post-series A startup
Value Prop: 1, 2, 4
Marketing manager
At a medium-sized tech
company
Value Prop: 1, 3, 4
Senior PM
At a medium-sized tech
company
Value Prop: 1, 3, 5

21. Getting People to Come
Tech evangelists PMs/PMMs
Tech savvy
Our website
Acquisition
Tech Evangelists
They roam ProductHunt, HackerNews, and reddit
Product Managers and Marketers
We’ll use content marketing to make them come to
us just to read our thoughts
Everyone
Use targeted ads to get them on our website
Referral Program
Require company email to sign up
Start viral loop focus on invitiing teammates

22. Activation — Getting them to use our product
Playground
Come and test it on our
front page
Onboarding
Tailor our intro to your
use case
Migration
Migrate from your
previous tool to ours
Tasks
Team
Avg
User
Power
User

23. Making Money
Early Adopters
PMMs we know Referrals
Content
Early Adopters
PMMs we know
Rest of the teams
at their
companies
Press
Content
Early Adopters
PMMs we know
Initial companies
Product teams
Other companies
Referrals
Larger teams
adopt
Mostly free tierAll free tier

24. Beware the cost cliff
$0/user/month
- Basic features
- Teams of up to
5 people
$5/user/month
- All features
- For teams
greater than 5
$5/user/month
- For every
additional user
past 5
$0/month $30/month $5/month
?!
?
?
Maybe a solution

25. Day 5
Just getting started

26. Cost Structure
Highly scalable low-fixed cost business. Main costs:
- Website hosting
- Human capital
- Customer acquisition
Revenue Streams
Team-based freemium subscription tiers
- 5 members free — avoid cost cliff
- Upgrade for additional features ($5/user/month)
- API integrations, cosmetics, permissioning
Key Partners
Payments processing
Stripe
Customer interaction
Zendesk
Intercom
Analytics
Mixpanel
Google Analytics
Technical
Heroku
Firebase
Github
Other B2B SaaS
Lead exchanges
Key Activities
Feature development
Agile engineering
Strong feedback loop
Customer development
Scalable acquisition
channel
Key Resources
Growth
Marketing
Product
Designers
Developers
Value Proposition
1. Better teamwork
Track experiments
across teams
2. Fun!
Fast, simple, easy
Consumerization of IT
3. Productivity gains
Better prioritization via
filtering and visualization
4. Convenient
Seamless bundling of
workflow, data,
learnings, and chat
5. Scales to needs
Good defaults ease into
powerful customization
Customer Relations
Community
Forum for marketing
methods and practices
Individual
Support page/FAQ
Personalized support
Channels
Outbound
PH/HN/GH
Facebook ads
LinkedIn ads
Inbound
Strong referral program
Content marketing
Viral waitlist
Customer Segments
Growth marketer
At a high-growth
post-series A startup
Value Prop: 1, 2, 4
Marketing manager
At a medium-sized tech
company
Value Prop: 1, 3, 4
Senior PM
At a medium-sized tech
company
Value Prop: 1, 3, 5

27. Our most important confirmed hypotheses
People use the funnel
a lot
Small companies,
medium companies,
large companies
- Acquiring user growth
- Retaining customers
- Generating revenue
- Hands-free virality
- The shoe fits
1
People always want to
move faster
Always thinking about
- How can we improve
this process?
- How can we track things
better?
- How can we prioritize
more effectively?
- How do we improve
without screwing up
what we have?
2
There are a lot of pain
points in marketing
No one has a perfect
workflow (it’s true)
- Disparate applications to
look at related things
- Copy-and-pasting
- Big, clunky spreadsheet
- Stuff gets lost and
forgotten in the cracks
3

28. How we can can succeed
Experiment faster,
centralize results
1
Make it easy for them
to switch to us
2
Scale with their
organizational needs
3
Tasks
Team