How to find product/market fit before you start building — Sprig’s Ryan Glasgow

 Well, thanks again for joining us, Ryan, I'm really excited about this conversation.

 thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me on the podcast. 

 Um, so I thought one place we could start is, is by talking about the absolute earliest stages of the user leap journey, I think kind of the six months leading up to starting a company is, is some of the most interesting time and the least understood or open-sourced in, in technology.

And so maybe we could go back and you can talk about the founding story before you kind of built the first version of the product. And then maybe a little bit about how you thought about building the early version of the product. Obviously, what you're working on is, is a big multi-year vision and multi-year build.

And so we'd love to learn more about how you unpacked, where you wanted to go over 10 years into kind of the first 10 weeks of product building.

 taking a step back on my career. The first four companies that I joined, it was really, you know, pre-product and a lot of them, they didn't have company names. They were writing their first lines of code or had not even written any code yet. And it was often coming in as front end, engineer designer, product manager, really helping these companies get off the ground.

 And all four of those went on to be acquired. One of those was verb that when tech crunch disrupt and was acquired by Snapchat, but I wanted a different experience after that. And so I joined Weebly as the first product manager. And help scale that company from around 40 people to around 300, over a three-year period.

And I really wanted to experience that hyper-growth phase of what it's like to, grow a company and really see that hyper-growth and work with a larger user base. Having previously only worked in that zero to one space and, uh, Weebly, I really did gravitate towards a lot of the zero to one initiatives and bringing a lot of the new products and features to market.

And after three years at Weebly, they were going through a pivot to e-commerce and, you know, asked me to lead the development of the new e-commerce product line. And that was going to be the core of the company, which is now square, uh e-commerce today. And, you know, I was burnt out, I needed a break. And so I took a year off to travel and part of the goal was to really explore.

You know, maybe areas that I didn't quite know 

And So, when I started. Really look at the shift from the downloadable files that are on our computers, to the cloud-based documents, saw an interesting trend in the market and started to really explore that space. And when I first tried Figma it really clicked on me. If a downloadable designed file can now be fully cloud-based that this is a pattern worth, really exploring.

And I started to experiment in that space but I saw that, um, if first of all, I wasn't going to be a great business because saving people time is often, uh, not a great business. And I got a little bit stuck getting that company off the ground and realized that it wasn't working and came across a book called outcome-driven innovation by Anthony Olwick.

And it really broke down the process of. Thinking through the outcomes that customers are looking to solve. And it really dawned on me of just how powerful surveys are, because it was really using the survey based approach to bring innovative new products to market without even writing a line of code.

And I thought that was such a powerful concept and ended up being powerful in two ways. One, because I realized how powerful surveys could be, but two, it helped me really uncover and think more clearly about an even bigger opportunity than cloud-based collaboration, which was really helping other companies better understand their customers through research and surveys as a technique 

 so where did you go from there? You kind of had, had an aha moment in reading the book and you thought, oh, maybe there's a new opportunity for a new type of product in the category. And then what happened?

 What I noticed is that this could be a new technique for other companies to think more clearly about their own customers. And when I looked at the outcomes that a digital product development team is looking for in a qualitative research solution and really defined those outcomes and talk to other product managers and founders, what are you looking for in a qualitative research solution and, you know, outcomes like, low efforts to create surveys, you know, low to no efforts for analyzing all the data, a systematic way to reach out to customers.

Without having to go to my database And when I looked at the outcomes that the product management and research and designers that I was talking to, what they're looking for in the market found that the two dimensions are really rating those outcomes of satisfaction and importance.

These are all really important outcomes to these teams, but they are highly unsatisfied with the existing tools on the market So this was a market that's underserved. And if I can deliver on this set of outcomes that are important to this audience of product managers, designers, and researchers, and I can deliver a product that they are highly satisfied with these outcomes based on what I've built, then.

That was really the definition of product market fit before I even had to really build the product. And so at that point, you know, it was a, a set of very ambitious outcomes and it took some time to really build and develop that product to achieve those outcomes. But what people will see today with what we've developed with user leap is something that's far different than anything else on the market.

And the technology that we've built is highly unique and differentiated, but it all started by thinking around the outcomes and needs of this market. That's underserved that didn't have a solution that uniquely solved the goals that they were looking for. 

 I'd be interested to understand what gave you the conviction to build a new type of serving product? And you're kind of getting at this by these customer conversations, but, um, I'm interested in going back because as a, as a founder that was iterating on different ideas, I would have imagined that you sort of land on this survey opportunity.

And then you're like, wait, there's literally 10 or 15 monster companies that have been created just in surveys. It's incredibly crowded. I would assume you talked to a bunch of early angels and investors and they were like another surveying tool. And, and obviously what you landed on is, is an insight that was many clicks deeper than we're just going to create a modern serving tool.

And so I'd be interested. Do you have any thoughts about that or insights around landing on that idea and maybe not being concerned that there's 20 companies that, that are doing in some version or some taste of what you're trying.

 It was certainly a concern. Um, but when I did the market segmentation of this specific audience of product managers and really looked at, the needs of a product manager, Saw just this huge opportunity of this underserved market. And this market was growing really fast, product management.

It was one of the fastest growing roles right now. It's becoming increasingly important for a company's success. And I saw all the tools out there and was familiar with those solutions, those traditional survey platforms. And if you look at their own story, many of those companies were started over 20 years ago now.

And what was really innovative about those technologies is bringing that offline survey online. and that was at the time a very key innovation. But when you look at how we have this rise of continuous deployment and development today, and thinking back to my experience as a product manager, Companies like Weebly and Pryor.

I didn't feel like there were any solutions on the market that were built to solve the needs that I had. And through that own experience. And I think any entrepreneur will start a company in many ways to solve, you know, his or her own challenge or pain. And this is exactly one of those stories where thinking back to my times as a product manager, I didn't have a great tool set or platform to really communicate with those customers in that systematic way.

And in the early days, it was difficult to really get that conviction. And when I did the segmentation specifically, I saw that the most underserved, uh, product management market segment was actually with the larger companies. And so when I think back to the first four companies that I helped build that were eventually acquired and were successful.

There was honestly less of a challenge around the qualitative data because you can almost talk to every customer. But when I thought about my experience at Weebly and we ended up with 50 million accounts, by the time I left, I saw this really incredible challenge of gathering and understanding customers at scale.

And so the premise and hypothesis around user leap was that the underserved market is not only in the product management space and that as a product management as a market, but it was even narrower in the high growth to at-scale companies. And let's build a solution that specifically meets those needs, um, up market with these high growth and at scale companies.

And usually from day one was really designed for that specific market and nothing that I. Uncovered and really searched around for was specifically built for that specific market segment. And I think any time you enter a, what many feel is a commoditized or mature space, you really need to think through your differentiation and your product strategy and your market segmentation to really find where that underserved opportunity is.

And you can, and where you can build that highly differentiated product, that uniquely suits that specific customer segment 

 There's a bunch of interesting jumping off points from what you just shared. Ryan, I guess one interesting place to go would be to, to go deeper and better understand how you conducted those early conversations with customers. And I think somebody that's in the surveying and question asking business, you probably did it in a pretty methodical and intentional way.

And so maybe you could take us through some of that early customer discovery, how you thought about figuring out your ICP, which customers to spend time with. And then more importantly, how to spend that time and what to ask. So that you can get the most insight as it relates to who to build who to build for and what to build for that person.

 I started to hypothesize and design with mock-ups and really a lightweight sales stack showing this product. And one of the key learnings that I had early on is to never involve people that you personally know in the customer development process. And I think that folks that have an audience, even a larger audience, you know, an extreme example might be Gary V uh, of reaching out to their own audience to for customer development is often misleading.

 And so I actually started to cold email founders and product managers at Y comedy companies. And I had no relationship with them and see if they would respond to my emails. And I was able to get several of them to respond and, you know, take meetings with me. And in the very beginning, I really wanted to test and validate whether.

You know, this was worth working on by seeing of people that I didn't know were willing to spend time with me to help co-create and develop this product. Because if I'm truly solving a pain that they're experiencing, then they will spend time. And what I noticed with B2B is that time is more valuable than money if you're selling to someone because it's the company's money, but it's their individual time.

And they're often very busy, you know, with a lot of different priorities. And so when I started to see who is really willing to spend time with me, and there was a product manager at Hotwire for an example, and he spent probably the course of 12 weeks every week for close to an hour co-creating and providing feedback.

And this is someone that I didn't know at all. And when I started to see who is responding to these cold emails, Taking, you know, following up on those emails and booking time, there a product manager at Intuit as well in the QuickBooks team, very early on in the company's journey, spending time in providing feedback on those mock-ups and that deck that I had created, and it started, I started to really hone in and see, okay, I'm starting to validate that these high growth and at-scale companies are with people that I don't know, this product management segment are willing to spend time and provide feedback.

And they're very interested in the solution because it resonated and it solved a problem that they're experiencing in their lives because the existing solutions to them were in fact broken. 

 Can you talk a little bit about sort of those, what those meetings looked like? You know, you mentioned there were someone at Hotwire that maybe you spoke to a weekly over 12 weeks. How did you structure it and what was going on in those meetings?

 I had a deck and it had the screenshots and the different outcomes and features that I was looking to build. And every week we would have this meeting and it was really just showing the progress around the product direction and the progress that I was making as a product. And, you know, realistically, you know, we did some demos with his team, but we were very early in our journey and we didn't have a security posture.

We didn't have product that could scale and ended up not being someone who turned into a customer. You know, he's now at a different company, but. It ended up being someone who was providing that feedback along the way and saying, Hey, this isn't really resonating for me. This feature that you've designed, or this feature that you're telling me about.

Because if you think back to the beginning, when I thought through the outcome driven innovation, It tells you the outcomes that are important to the audience and the segmentation of where the market is underserved. But then as a product manager or founder, you have to think through how to actually achieve the outcomes that are important to the audience with a high degree of satisfaction.

And so you can't rely on your customers on what to build. They can really only tell you what outcomes they're looking to achieve. And so it was really around the iteration, working with Israeli customer. Testing and sharing and really showing them these mock-ups and this different set of functionality and features.

Um, as on a weekly basis, I was iterating on how to actually solve those outcomes. 

 Do you mind giving us the cliff notes version of this concept of outcome driven innovation and maybe how it's similar to, you know, lean startup ideas or, or other sort of maybe more well-known.

 one of the frameworks that is really popular right now is product market fit. And if you look at the most recent iteration of product market fit with the four question survey, what you'll any, you, you use that to find product market fit. They will actually be often a very painful. For you as a founder and I've seen founders spend years measuring product market fit and building an iterating and measuring product market fit, trying to really understand, you know, how to get there and they get stuck.

And if you take a step back to see the origins of product market fit, it was Sean Ellis who pioneered the framework for product market fit. And he was a marketer who was looking to join startups that already had products that customers loved. And so he used that question of how disappointed would you be to validate whether companies had product market fit?

When I, what I recommend to founders today is using a different framework for discovering product market fit. Because as a founder, if you're only validated and product market fit, it could take you five, 10 years, 20 years of testing a hypothesis. But what, if you could actually understand what your customers are looking for and measure product market fit without actually having to build a product.

And so that was really critical for me. When I came across the origin driven innovation framework and the quick summary there is first really looking at the broader market that you're looking to serve. In this case, it could be people building products, researchers, designers, maybe marketers, product managers, and then asking them what are all the outcomes that are important for a solution that delivers qualitative insights and they'll provide maybe 20, 30, 50 outcomes of what they're looking for.

And these are really jobs. What, what are all the dimensions. Uh, a solution and maybe it's insights delivered in 24 hours. It could be something like, not knowing how to create a survey and having those really provided for you. It could be not knowing how to analyze survey data and really having a solution that also does that for you.

And once you get those outcomes, and then it's serving a broader set of customers, usually 200 to let's say 400 and having them measure those outcomes by the, those two dimensions of satisfaction and importance with the solutions they use today. And so if you surveyed a product manager on Typeform today, and it's a high growth company or at scale company, and you say, Hey, what's important to you.

And. You know, what are those outcomes you that are important to you with a qualitative solution? Here are the 20 outcomes rate. Each of those by satisfaction and importance. What you'll likely see with a solution like Typeform is that the important outcomes are they'll rate those as unsatisfied. because it's not meeting her needs as a product manager, because she has a unique set of needs.

And so by using that framework, I think it's a great way for founders, particularly early to actually uncover and find product market fit before they even need to develop that product. 

 And can you maybe talk a little bit about how you figured out in this process, who you were building for in the sense that, was it a designer? Was it a user researcher or was it a product manager when I looked at my experience at Weebly and I talked to other founders and product managers. What I saw was that it was really the product manager who was mostly responsible for the success and failure of the product. And most of the research was being really provided to the product manager to empower her decision-making.

 And when you think around delivering insights directly to the decision makers for companies that don't have a user research team, it really dawned on me. And when I was talking to these at scale companies that had user research teams, that they were looking for, that solution that made that qualitative data much more accessible because at these larger companies and ad experiences, Is that the user research data was very valuable data, but it was often delivered in slide decks.

And anyone in particularly today strongly would prefer data to be delivered in a platform or a product where they Can really explore. And, you know, first round was the seed investor and Looker. I think that's a great example of allowing the decision makers to explore the data that they can then form their own conclusions around and conduct their own analysis.

And so when you think around the segmentation of who to build for, and who's ultimately making those decisions, I found that the product manager was that decision maker who often didn't have that qualitative data and where they were looking for. Again, when we look up the outcomes, a solution that met those outcomes so that they can make more informed product decisions.

 You talked a little bit about. How you sort of ran this process of talking to early customers and looping back over and over again, as you were iterating on what the early version of the product would be. Can you pick up that thread and talk about what you landed on in terms of the first, fully featured version of the product and how you utilize customer feedback to inform that?

Cause I assume you're having a lot of different customer conversations. There's some overlap in some needs. There's other areas that are divergent and you have to pull all of this together into something that you're eventually going to put into someone's hands.

 given that the underserved market was really the at scale and high growth companies I found it to be incredibly important to only work with companies in that market segment, because the hypothesis that I really tested was that these companies with larger user bases, thinking back to my experience at Weebly and talking to other product managers and founders, that was really the underserved market in the qualitative space.

And so when I had those early conversations, I actually kept it to a very small set of customers. And through the wheelie connection was able to start working with Scott. And it worked with the square team and some of the early customers that we had, like plan and thinkable and square. They all had a user base of at least 500,000 users using their product on a monthly basis.

And given that it is difficult and it takes time to build a robust platform for a high growth or at scale company. What I had to do was only develop the piece that I couldn't manually do myself. And so the only, the first vision of user leap was only the STK. It was a piece of code that these companies could add into their product.

And there was a place to log in to view the raw data. There are responses, but everything else was completely manual. By myself and the people at the company. And so if you wanted to launch a survey, you want it to change a survey question. You want it to stop a survey. You wanted to choose where that survey, where it appeared in your product, or you wanted all of that analysis of that data.

I was doing all that myself and the team at. Usually we are all doing that ourselves and customers would say, we want to launch a new survey. We would go into the product and change the code and through the STK that was installed in their product. We would update all the configuration and then it would update.

The STK and what was actually being displayed in their product, but on a weekly and monthly basis, I was building out Dax and analyzing the data for them. They're getting me as their product manager and researcher building Dax saying, Hey, I look through 2000 survey responses and I've analyzed everything for you.

Here's a deck with all the analysis for you. And when I started to really see through all of those manual interventions, what was really working and what was clicking and where the positive feedback was, we started to focus our development efforts on those areas. And so we started to hire a PhD data science team started bring in engineers who had built infrastructure at scale, started to build out custom surveys and changing survey questions and dynamic targeting.

And the Israel features that. At least a year to build because they're incredibly complex to build at scale. But by doing that manually at the beginning, it allowed us to really validate that the product that we're building was solving those outcomes that we had originally set out to solve. 

 that makes a ton of sense. That's very good. Did you, did you ever get concerned that you would fall into the trap? That sort of classic? Oh, that's great. But you're basically a consulting company really haven't proved anything.

 It was certainly a thought in the beginning and some people in the beginning thought, are you a service? Are you a product? But as a product manager, I knew that we could build everything that we are really doing manually. It would just take resources. And that really served as some of the conversations with investors, seeing that we're delivering these really key insights for these customers In unique ways.

And we're starting to really see this product work, but we've only built 5% or 10% of even an MVP for a company of this size. And it's gonna take more resources to really continue to build out this product and to continue on this mission of really serving these product managers and researchers for these at scale and high growth companies.

And I'm the type that will always do things that don't scale, particularly in those zero to one phases. And this was absolutely one of those examples and something that really helped us get to an incredibly strong product foundation that we have today.

 In a lot of these early COVID sort of going back and effectively creating results or reports in Google slides versus in the product. Were there specific questions that you would ask in those meetings that you found particularly illuminating?

 I don't think there are any particular questions or, you know, breakthroughs, but it was really just spending time with them and seeing, you know, next week, you know, help us understand what's working or not working here. I still do this today. I met with one of our largest customers yesterday and asked what are the highs and lows with our product right now.

And I treat customer development as really a one-on-one with a direct report. And any time you're having a one-on-one or your meet with a customer, you just want to ask the hard questions. I asked a customer yesterday, One of our largest customers, right on the call. This is the head of product. Zero to 10.

How satisfied are you with usually, you know, as a company and help me understand what, what we could do to get you to a 10 and, you know, asking product market fit questions to validate right now we're running in product market fit and user leap to validate whether we have product market fit. And the good news is we do have product market fit.

And so I don't think there's any really, you know, innovative questions to ask. Um, but it's really just digging in and asking the tough questions to make sure that that customer really cares and that you're really learning both the positive and the negative more importantly, the negative about what's working with what you've built so far.

 One of my theories around why founders don't spend more time with customers or, or seek critical feedback is that it's an incredibly unpleasant experience. That you know, people criticizing your baby is very unpleasant. And at the same time, that's where a lot of the best insights come from. Is there anything that you do to sort of, uh, manage that discomfort or does it just not bother you?

 I honestly was hesitant in the beginning of my career. And when I first came across the product market fit framework from Sean Ellis, about 12, 13 years ago, I was at the first startup that I had worked at, you?

 know, as that really early stage designer product manager. And, you know, I went to the founders and said, I want to ask this question, this product market fit question.

And they said, no, you know, they were honestly, they didn't want to know whether we had a product market fit. And I thought to me, I'm spending all this time with this company and we don't want to ask the tough questions. And if your team isn't able to ask the tough questions, then why are you there?

Why are you spending all of your time on this product? If you don't even know if it's worth your time. And so I think that you have to lean in to ask those tough questions or otherwise, why are you there? Who are you building for? And if the people that, if you're not willing to ask those tough questions, I honestly think you, you might, you're probably wasting your time and there's a good chance you are wasting your time because you're probably going in the wrong direction.

If that's uncomfortable for you to ask. 

on a related note, uh, you've sort of touched on this in different ways, but when you reflect on your own journey and you look across all the super early founders that you spent time with, Are there consistent mistakes that you think that founders tend to make? Um, maybe specifically around this voyage to product market fit, or maybe it's just building early products.

 I think as founders, everyone really leans into their own intuition far more than they should. And I think that a great outcome for any business or product or a new feature that you're working on is that you invalidate in the very beginning or as soon as possible that it's not worth spending resources and time on.

And so I have worked with founders where there is strong intuition around building a product or a feature and bringing that to market and. There was no real user research process and no difficult, uncomfortable questions were asked very early on. And, you know, again, I think that's just an incredible mistake in disservice to everyone involved, because I recall at one company where the founder had a very strong intuition and inclination around bringing a new feature to market, and it took this team about four people a year and a half full time working on this feature.

And there was no user research that was done. And when we launched it, we actually didn't even launch it. We launched the landing page for the feature and we linked from the homepage to this feature. And no one clicked over to that landing page and no one opted in to even try that feature. And we are weeks away from launching after a year and a half.

And we just tried it. And there are just so many ways to really invalidate by asking those tough questions with actual customers who you hope to serve with those features. And I just think that it's something that we as an industry and as, you know, founders and product managers needs to ask those questions.

 to really understand is this worth spending time on and really validating or invalidating that theory or hypothesis that someone has to bring that product or feature to market. 

 Can you talk a little bit about, the way in which you build products in each one of these phases. Now that you're a much more mature company and you talked with, you talked a lot about what that loop looks like when you're like a three person team talking to customers, doing things that don't scale creating these, these insights and dashboards in Google slides, and then sort of the first version of the product that instantiated those insights in the actual product.

And maybe you could kind of pick that thread up and talk about what that loop looks like now.

 I would say that in many ways, there are a lot of patterns to the early iteration and feedback loop and we use the research process. And for an example is that it's very customer driven and we had a product manager joined a few months ago and I made a promise to her that usually it will be the most customer driven company.

 You will work at, and we have shared slack channels with many of our enterprise customers. And I'm constantly joining customer calls, joining customer success calls, doing skip levels as CEO, meaning directly with those, um, head of products, head of, um, user research and really hearing what's working and not working for them, but the bringing new features to market, 

It still comes back to talking to customers and understanding what they are looking to achieve. And in many ways, once you have a core product that is solving a problem, the best way is to look at the other vendors and products that someone is also using and think about ways that you can uniquely solve them.

And maybe you're not exactly doing what that other vendors doing, but you think around the outcome that your customer is looking to solve and achieve with those other vendors. And think how as a company, can we build something that actually solves that same job or that outcome in a way that's unique and really true to us as a company.

And I think if you look at fig jam, I think that's a great example from Figma, how they're taking this concept of virtual white boarding, and they built a feature around it. And I'm sure they saw a lot of their customers were using Figma for high-fidelity design and prototyping, but that ideation phase in design, they were using other vendors and 

There's a lot of virtual white boarding solutions out there. And they saw that there's such a high attach rate to Figma with other virtual white boarding solutions like Miro or mural that let's think about how we can uniquely solve this outcome of this ideation and discovery process in the design phase so that our designers don't have to switch tools.

And when you look at the the customer jobs flow, there's typically about eight different steps in the customer jobs flow of someone starting an action and completing action. And you can really apply that to any product that you're working on and look at the steps that you're solving today. And then look at the ancillary steps that you're currently not solving and think around how you can build.

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Sprig founder & CEO Ryan Glasgow stops by to share tactics for validating startup ideas, approaching early customer conversations, operationalizing product principles, and teaching yourself founder-led sales.

How to find product/market fit before you start building — Sprig’s Ryan Glasgow

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