AMA: Homebase VP Product, Sharad Goel on Building 0-1 Products

It depends on the product outcomes you are looking to drive based on your company goals. For e.g. if your NPS is really low then understand what is causing that NPS to be low and prioritize those. If your customers are churning then figure out why and prioritize that. If you have a lot of great capabilities but you are not making money then figure out whether you need to invest in repackaging and pricing. Every company has come combination of customer growth, retention, and monetization investment. The key is to align with your leadership on the goals to be hit for each of those and then creating a product roadmap that helps you deliver those. Outside of these you will always have things to improve quality (via bugs).

If this is a brand new product (i.e no existing product in market) you can go the TAM route: * Do a total addressable market (TAM) analysis - you can either use public sources or pay for private sources to understand the market size. Make sure you understand the specific segments in your TAM. * Determine what market share you already have from that TAM. * Determine how much additional market share you expect to have and in how much time. * Based on your average sales price (ASP) you can then determine what revenue you plan to make. If you have an existing product in the market and you are about to launch a new product that is an attach to that existing product then you can build an attach forecast model based on early learnings and talking to customers. There will be a lot of assumptions baked in in these forecasts. That's ok. Base your assumptions on data you have access to - for e.g. you may find a few blogs/articles online that say that in your domain customer sign-up > activation rate is 10-15%. Create a conservative model with 10% and an optimistic model with 15%. Then you can use this to align with your leadership. You can also be super conservative by saying your conversion will be 5% since you are early and haven't optimized the conversion funnel. Lastly, align with your leadership on what does ideal look like to them - for e.g. if they want to raise Series A in 18 months then they may need to get to $xM in revenue in that time period. Or if you are an established company then every new product is an opportunity cost - your leadership may say that you need to get to xM customers in 3 years or $xM in 3 years and you need to work backwards on can you get there.

This is based on a few things: * Your strategy - are your customers going with integrated solutions? If yes your hand may be forced * Market needs - sometimes the opportunity has a timing and you need to ride that curve otherwise you will be left behind * Your existing product maturity curve - how much investment do you need to make in your existing product to grow it at the pace you want * Your internal capabilities - do you have the people/cash flow to invest in this Assuming you are past your 1st product (and you feel you have a good handle on it), my general recommendation is to have a resource allocation portfolio where you always have space for new business initiatives. Could be low % to start with but it helps you contain your costs while shielding that team and builds a new muscle.

Ask your leadership/marketing team what gives them anxiety and then attack those points as part of your 1st launch. For e.g. if they are worried about bad PR then ask them how small a group are they comfortable launching to and then stick to a rollout number below that. Over time you will build the muscle.

Talk to your customers. You should have a rhythm where every week/2 weeks you're talking to X customers. This will help you continuously evolve and solidify your understanding of the problems to solve.