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Lindsey DeFalco

AMA: Crossbeam VP of Product, Lindsey DeFalco on Building 0-1 Products

November 15, 2023 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. How do you know if you have validated the problem space enough to start dedicating engineering resources to building out the product?

    Lindsey DeFalco
    Lindsey DeFalco

    Crossbeam VP of Product • 2y

    This is heavily dependent on the type of product you are building, but you can get very far with high fidelity designs and manually "hacking" things together. I worked at a company where we "generated" (hand created) an analytics report for a customer (who was actually paying us) once a month. It took an insane amount of time to create (20+ hours) but the feedback on both how to sell, and how to build our product from that experience were invaluable. Start light: with high-fidelity designs and c ...Read More

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  2. Under what circumstances is it worthwhile to pursue a 0-1 product that can be easily duplicated by a large competitor?

    Often times, early product start out as features. My worry is that a competitor would just copy us and then wipe us out.

    Lindsey DeFalco
    Lindsey DeFalco

    Crossbeam VP of Product • 2y

    The two biggest things to ask are: "would they?" and "could they?". This is both a question of strategy and tactics - of both you, and the competitor. My first startup was a directly competitive product with multiple established players in the space, so this was a topic from day one. My second startup is a "first of its kind" product with no direct competitors initially, but we have asked ourselves this same question a few times about large, tangential incumbents as we've built our company. The ...Read More

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  3. I subscribe to the Ried Hoffman quote - “If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late.” How do you actually live this out in a larger company where there is internal anxiety?

    Lindsey DeFalco
    Lindsey DeFalco

    Crossbeam VP of Product • 2y

    #1: Trust. You have to earn it. It's all fun and games when there is "nothing to lose" and you're a small scrappy startup. But once you have paying customers, usage targets to hit, churn numbers to report on, and revenue numbers to hit, it starts to feel harder to launch. I've been through this transition as a startup turns into a real company and have found having the following things in place really helps: Trust from the rest of the org that you are THE expert on your customers. I was fortunat ...Read More

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  4. How do you go about brainstorming the right solutions in terms of coming up with user experience to address the validated problems to be solved for users

    How and where do you get inspiration to determine how and what types of user experience to be built and fleshing this our in your user stories while writing PRD

    Lindsey DeFalco
    Lindsey DeFalco

    Crossbeam VP of Product • 2y

    Ah, brainstorming: it sounds so simple, but it can be so hard to do well. I've tried many different approaches over the years, and have found different ones successful depending on the company size, co-location of folks, etc. I'll go over my favorites, but first I want to touch on a few important pre-requisites to the brainstorming itself. Attendees Representatives from teams that will be working on the problem: in startups, this is likely almost everyone on product, design, engineering. At larg ...Read More

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