DeepSummary
Noah Kagan interviews David Kelly, who oversees the Appsumo Originals team, about the development and launch of their latest product, Breezdoc, a Docusign alternative. They discuss the framework used to decide which products to build, the process of building and launching Breezdoc from ideation to beta testing and marketing efforts, and how they incorporate user feedback to improve the product over time.
Key points covered include the 'RICE' framework for evaluating potential products, keeping the initial team small to avoid too many opinions, launching an MVP quickly to start getting user feedback, and focusing on metrics like signups and buyers to gauge success. David emphasizes the importance of staying focused on the target audience and not getting sidetracked by requests outside that scope.
Looking ahead, David says the priority for now is making Breezdoc, Tidycal and Sendfox really great products based on continued user feedback and improvements, rather than launching new products immediately. He advises prospective founders to start by validating ideas through conversations and potentially pre-selling to prospective customers.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Use a framework like 'RICE' (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to evaluate potential new product ideas objectively.
- Start with a small, focused team to develop an MVP quickly and avoid overcomplexity from too many opinions.
- Launch an MVP fast to start getting user feedback instead of overengineering upfront.
- Be rigorous about defining your target user persona and avoid feature creep from requests outside that core focus.
- Carefully track and optimize key metrics like user signups and conversions to buyers when launching a new product.
- Balance prioritizing user-requested improvements with fixing key usability issues that degrade product quality.
- Have a disciplined process to determine marketing channels and allocate budgets based on projected ROI modeling.
- For entrepreneurs with limited resources, validate demand by pre-selling before overinvesting in development.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “We're hyper, hyper focused on bringing customers into Appsumo via the originals brand and originals business.“ by Speaker A (David Kelly)
- “We're really trying to understand, roughly speaking, how many marketing channels and what marketing channels do we need to do to hit or accomplish our goal. And from there we can iterate and figure out the marketing spreadsheet over time.“ by Speaker A (David Kelly)
- “The point of us building these products fast is that our team costs x amount every single month and week. So if I'm paying our team $70,000 a month, let's say which ballpark is the area it's at, I want to make sure that we're getting ROI for our time spent.“ by Speaker A (David Kelly)
- “What we're trying to do is we're trying to be very clear because we do have limited resources and we do have limited time with our team. And every project we work on, we're actively making a decision not to work on another project.“ by Speaker A (David Kelly)
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Episode Information
Noah Kagan Presents
Noah Kagan
7/3/24
BreezeDoc, is a Docusign alternative that we just launched. If you hate paying a monthly subscription just to get documents signed, go to BreezeDoc.com and get a lifetime deal, pay one low price and use it forever.
In this week's episode, I'm chatting with our very own David Kelly, who oversees our Originals Team releases at AppSumo. We’re going into the belly of the beast to see the guts and glory of developing a product we're incredibly proud of, BreezeDoc.
David and I discuss the challenges we faced, the strategies we employed, and the excitement of bringing BreezeDoc to life.
In this episode, you’ll enjoy 3 BIG things:
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The obstacles faced during the creation of a competitive product.
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What a difference incorporating user feedback into the user interface can make
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How to make a product stand out from the rest
All these plus a bunch more ear nuggets along the way.
If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more about our favorite tools at Appsumo go back a few weeks ago where we show you all the tools we use to run a $100 million company that’s episode 358 in this feed