Now’s the time when everyone starts sharing their amazing accomplishments, their growing numbers, and their big wins. It’s easy to get sucked into this comparison game and feel not so great about yourself.

Turns out that the business world isn’t that much different from the everyday social media world. Someone’s always better, stronger, faster, younger, more agile, and overall more successful. Or, so it seems. This can take a significant toll on our mental health.

Startup founders are built to doubt themselves. No matter how far you’ve come, you’re always comparing yourself to that large and well-known competitor. And suddenly your achievements don’t seem so grand. So here are a few tips on how to break that unhealthy habit and regain your confidence.

Focus on cold hard facts

This will be different for everyone. But try your best not to compare yourself to others blindly. Analyze your numbers (whichever are the most important to you). And then compare them to your own numbers from last year, from the year prior, from year one of your business. Better yet, calculate that growth percentage. Yes, it’s easy to grow 500% at the beginning because you started with nothing. But still – pat yourself on the back for that.

Bottom line: try to outperform your old self.

Moreover, you could be comparing your fourth year to somebody else’s fourteenth year. And that’s clearly not a fair comparison. So, keep that context in mind.

It’s good to look to others for some aspirational routines, but don’t let that bring you anxiety.

Instead, analyze what went right and led to your success. Break down what could have been better and how you can use that as a learning opportunity. Try to document all of that too, and set reminders to refer back to those notes.

Better yet – try to analyze competitors’ wins and, more importantly, fails. You can probably learn a lot from them too and prevent similar mishaps in the future.

Inspire your team

It’s good to be competitive, always challenge the status quo, and reach for the moon. But…not everyone enjoys that. Some creative thinkers will get demotivated very quickly if they feel like they’re never good enough.

Has this ever happened to you?

• You come home from school with an A- only to hear your mum say: “Oh, I wonder why it’s not an A or an A+”?

• Or maybe you come across a social media profile of someone you knew in high school and conclude that they’re much more successful than you (psst: it’s probably not true).

That’s how your team might feel when you set moving targets for them.

It’s OK if you work best this way. Keep at it! But figure out what your team needs and encourage them in the way that works best for them.

One way to combat this feeling of “not good enough” is to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals. You’ve probably heard this acronym before, and it really does work.

When your goals are SMART, your team can better align on the desired outcome. And then you’ll all know from the beginning what you’re working towards, what success looks like, and what the expectations are.

Improve everyday productivity

Sometimes we get too caught up in our quarterly or even yearly goals (OKRs, KRAs, etc) and lose sight of what’s happening daily. Chances are, you could increase your everyday productivity and see awesome benefits quickly.

Assess how you spend your time on any given day. Is there any wasted time? Once again, don’t beat yourself up. Just set a reasonable expectation for yourself and your team. A never-ending list of items leads to burnout and too many unfinished tasks. So look for balance.

Here are a few productivity tips from Sarah Hum, co-founder at Canny:

• Block off time in your calendar for calls/meetings so the rest of the time can be used for focus
• Prioritize your tasks
• If you’re on the fence about doing something, say no
• Fewer meetings, more async
• Learn how to be good at delegation

Little things like that can lead to very big changes in the long run. Time management is tricky, but it makes all the difference.

Strive for balance, not perfection

Balance is key. If you’re constantly juggling more projects and tasks than you can handle, you’ll eventually burn out. You need to take time to recharge your batteries and enjoy life. 

Remember: your team looks up to you and mimics your work style. If they see that you’re always working after hours and on weekends, they’ll feel obligated to do the same. And that hustle culture can be too much for some people and can lead to people leaving your team.

So encourage a healthy distraction!

At Canny, we have many Slack channels to just chat. We also have random coffee chats every week (a Slack bot pairs us up each Monday). Once every 2 months we have a 90-minute “Team Hangs” call (attendance is always optional!). And we always talk about our weekends and fun things during every call.

These breaks between tasks really help us all unwind and get inspired. Try them out!

Celebrate wins, big and small

You’ve come a long way. No matter where you are right now, you’ve worked hard to reach this level. So did your team. So take a moment to celebrate.

Remember – it’s only natural to feel guilty, “not good enough”, get that imposter syndrome, and everything that comes with it. So acknowledge it. And then put your head down and keep going.

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

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The post How to handle productivity guilt as a SaaS founder first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to handle productivity guilt as a SaaS founder appeared first on Canny Blog.

This is why we’re excited to announce we’re launching new pricing plans! I’ll share our thought process behind these changes.

We didn’t want to just increase our prices across the board.

We wanted to think critically about how we price. We wanted to create plans that would grow as our customers’ needs did.

After doing that, we’ve come up with pricing plans that are:

• accessible to companies of all sizes
• more straightforward
• more predictable.

Let’s look at what’s changing.

  Have a look at our new Pricing page

Introducing Our Free Plan

The biggest change is that our Starter plan, which used to cost $50 per month, is now going to be available for free. 

We’ve retained almost all the functionality of the Starter plan. Plus, we now include unlimited tracked users. Tracked users are anybody who posts, votes, or comments on your Canny boards). Before, Starter plan subscribers included 100 tracked users per month.

The free plan lets any business get started with feedback management and product prioritization.

Our hope is this will help all businesses grow their products in a user-centric fashion.

Goodbye Tracked User Limits

Our plans have always included a set number of tracked users. Extra tracked users were available for a fee. Tracked users were our value metric.

This worked ok, but it introduced unpredictability. What percent of your users are going to leave feedback? What if a major release or outage triggers a surge of feedback? In either case, you could exceed your tracked user limit.

To make our pricing more predictable, we’re removing tracked user limits altogether. All plans, including the Free plan, now include unlimited tracked users.

Simpler Team Management

Each of our plans came with a number of admin seats. Each team member would occupy one seat, and if you needed more seats, you could buy more.

The drawback to this was that it treated all team members the same. Regardless of how they were using Canny, they all counted towards the admin seat limit.

Going forward, we’ll have three roles:

• Owner – anyone who administers the account
• Manager – anyone who uses Canny’s tools to manage feedback, set up boards, manage roadmaps, etc.
• Contributor – anyone who accesses Canny to add feedback, reply to users, etc.

Only owners and managers will count as admin seats. Companies can have an unlimited number of contributors. For more details, check out our help article on admin roles.

Admin roles are available to all customers now. Before, only Business plans included this feature.

This should enable companies to get all the team members they need into Canny. It should also ensure billing is predictable.

So, where does that get us?

These are some substantial changes, so let’s summarize what this looks like.

Here’s a screenshot showing our previous pricing:

And here’s a screenshot from our new pricing:

There are a few main takeaways here:

1. The Starter plan becomes the Free plan
2. The Growth plan increases to $400 / mo
3. Additional fees based on admin seats, not tracked users

This pricing is simpler and more predictable. It should allow companies to develop their user feedback programs at their own pace.

For complete information on each of our plans, please visit our Pricing page.

What Happens Now?

These plans are in effect for new customers as of March 21st, 2022. If you are already a Canny customer, here are some questions you might have:

What happens to my current plan?

These changes mostly impact customers currently on our Starter plan. If you’re on a Growth or Business plan, you’ll stay on the same plan.

We’re notifying all our Starter plan customers which plan their usage qualifies them for. There are two main scenarios you may fall into:

• If you qualify for our Growth plan, we’ll move you to the new Growth plan on April 20th, 2022 with a 25% discount for your first 6 months. You’ll also have the option of moving to the Free plan, but you will lose access to some features and integrations.

• If you qualify for our Free plan, we’ll move you to the new Free plan on April 20th, 2022 and you won’t pay anything going forward. You’ll also have the option of subscribing to the new Growth plan at a 25% discount for your first 6 months.

Can I still have a trial for the Growth and Business plans?

Yes! We still offer 14 day free trials for our Growth plan. For the Business plan, please contact us and we’ll be happy to demo any of its features.

Do customers get any discounts if they want to move to a higher plan?

All customers are eligible for a 25% discount for 6 months if they upgrade to the new Growth plan before April 20th, 2022.

Are discounts for education, healthcare, and early stage companies still available?

Yes! We still offer discounts on Growth and Business plans for these types of companies. Please check out our Pricing page for more information.

If I don’t want to pay more can I move to the Free plan?

Yes, you’re free to move to the Free plan. Please keep in mind that the Free plan does not include all the features of the Growth and Business plans. It also only includes one integration. You can see the feature breakdown on our Pricing page. 

What’s the advantage to the Growth or Business plan versus the Free plan?

The Free plan has everything you need to get up and running. The Growth and Business plans are great for teams looking for more power.

The Free plan only includes one integration whereas other plans include unlimited integrations. More integrations like Jira and HubSpot support more complex workflows. More advanced features like segmentation and private boards support more use cases.  

For a complete look at each plan’s features, please check out our Pricing page.

What if my company is on an annual plan?

Your plan will continue at your current pricing until your renewal date. Upon renewal, your plan will be switched to the new Growth annual plan.

What levels of support are available?

Our aim is to support customers on all our plans. Free plan customers will be able to use live chat and we’ll aim to respond within 24 hours. Growth and Business plan customers have access to priority live chat.

Looking forward

While pricing changes are tricky, these plans make Canny more accessible. This also makes pricing more predictable for our customers as their needs grow.

Our new pricing page is now live, so if you’d like to learn more about what each plan offers, be sure to check it out. And, if you have any questions about our plans, please get in touch!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

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The post Announcing our new pricing plans (including our Free plan!) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Announcing our new pricing plans (including our Free plan!) appeared first on Canny Blog.

What’s more interesting to us is that behind the scenes, a big part of our growth is due to us moving upmarket.

By upmarket, I’m referring to us selling to bigger and bigger companies. This coincides with bigger and bigger deals. You might recognize a few of the logos we have on our homepage.

We started out selling primarily to small startups. This made a lot of sense while our product was in its infancy. 

As a bootstrapped company with founders specializing in building product, we knew we could build something great. We just had to focus on which features were absolutely necessary.

Since launching our MVP (minimum viable product), we’ve grown the team and expanded the product. As we’re able to offer more functionality and cover more use cases, we can also charge more. 

As Patrick from Price Intelligently mentions, around 30%+ of your revenue should be expansion revenue. While this is a guideline, we understand that effectively monetizing our existing customer base is crucial.

We wanted to share what we’ve kept in mind as we make this move upmarket. I’ll also include recommendations for you if your team is making this move as well.

Continually updating how we market ourselves

The way we market ourselves directly affects what kind of companies will sign up for a Canny trial. We’ve made adjustments and improvements in a few areas:

Homepage

As soon as someone hits our homepage, we need to communicate within seconds that they’re in the right place. We want people who see this page to qualify/disqualify themselves.

We didn’t do a single overhaul of our homepage. It’s all been baby steps, like:

1. Adjusting our language to be clearer and communicate who the product is for. We show what problems we solve and how we solve them.
2. Making it look “professional.” We’re selling B2B SaaS software. So, we designed our homepage to be very straightforward and utilitarian. We removed these cute doodles that made us feel more “startupy.” We wanted our homepage to feel like we are a great solution for big businesses.
3. As we’ve closed bigger and more recognizable customers, we’ve rotated in their logos. This social proof goes a long way for a potential buyer to gain trust and build intrigue. Even better, we aim to have case studies for all of our logos.
4. Encouraging people to book a demo. Larger companies often want a demo of the product. 

Case studies

Putting together customer stories is a lot of effort but it’s very worthwhile. New prospects can read how similar companies are using our software in their own words. 

Of course we sell ourselves, but when others do it for us, it’s much more effective. Case studies are also a great sales tool.

Some of our customers have been happy to provide a case study. With others, we include doing a case study built into their contract. 

We aim to feature customers in a variety of roles, and across different industries.

That way, it’s likely a prospect can find a study relevant to them.

Pricing

Around 20% of people go directly from our homepage to our pricing page. If someone looks at our pricing page and none of the plans seem right for them, they won’t start a trial.

Since the start, we’ve made our buying process self-service and very low touch. We’ve never had a free plan, so from the day we launched, we were charging for the Canny product. 

With our very stripped down MVP, we implemented a 14-day trial (no credit card required upfront), and let people upgrade themselves. 

This worked very well for us and self-serve is still the backbone of our company. I go pretty deep into each of our early pricing changes in this blog post.

As a part of moving upmarket, we’ve set up a custom “Business” plan. This means that packaging and pricing is different per customer. 

Some of our features are only available on the Business plan. This allows us to custom-fit our product to the customer. 

They feel like they’re getting what they need, while we feel like we’re pricing fairly.

Recommendation

Step into the shoes of your ideal customer and evaluate your main landing pages. Better yet, ask ideal customers what they think about your landing pages. 

These pages are your first impression and you want to make sure you get it right. Social proof (logos, case studies, testimonials, etc.) is always great for SaaS.

Figuring out customer support and success

According to ProfitWell, our churn is 50% lower than other SaaS companies of our size.

One of the big pros of moving upmarket is that churn is lower. Contracts are usually annual. and SaaS products, if implemented successfully, become quite sticky.

That said, churn is inevitable, so we go above and beyond to ensure we churn as little as possible.

Onboarding

It’s crucial that we successfully onboard a new customer. We need to make sure they take the steps necessary to get value out of our product.

Ultimately, getting no value equals churn. So how do we manage a successful onboarding?

During the sales process, we get a solid understanding of what they’re trying to achieve. From there we can figure out: Who needs to be involved? What processes need to be put in place?

It’s our job to identify what the best workflows are for our users. We keep our help center up to date to make sure they have the resources they need to set everything up.

For each customer, we know which features they should be using and if they’re using them. Success to us looks like a customer who is getting feedback and utilizing that feedback.

This process can be a lot of effort so I want to mention that we only do this for bigger accounts. We have a great self-serve onboarding process in place for smaller teams. 

Post-onboarding

Once we’ve put new customers on a path to success, we make sure to schedule regular reviews. We go over their activity in Canny and highlight noteworthy usage. 

This is primarily to make sure that they’re continuing to get value out of our product. If they’re not, we figure out what the blockers are and tackle those.

It’s also a chance for us to make sure that they are aware of new features. Adding value over time improves their experience and will make them less likely to churn.

Expanding their usage also gives us leverage to increase their pricing come renewal.

The customer support side is fairly simple. We just make sure that our bigger customers get priority responses.

Recommendation

Figure out a good cadence to do reviews with your biggest customers. It’s a great way to know ahead of time if a customer is a candidate for churn or expansion. 

It’s also a great time to get the feedback you need to make your product even better for them.

Expanding our product

Working with bigger customers means bigger demands. We often get large feature requests to close deals. We are treading carefully here. 

I’ve written about saying no to big customers. Unless a request is popular amongst existing customers or we’re very excited about it as a team, we won’t build it.

What we’ve really appreciated is that we’ve grown as our customers grow. We’ve been able to see how their needs change over time. 

As teams get more customers, more feedback, and become more complex internally, their needs change. Many of the features we’ve released in the last year have been a result of that insight.

Of course, we use Canny ourselves. We can easily slice our feedback to see what our top paying customers are asking for. We also look at what potential customers are asking for. 

We can see how much revenue impact building a specific feature would have. Sales plays a big part in helping product understand what teams upmarket are looking for.

Using our roadmapping feature, we can see where a feature might fit in our roadmap. We look at if we have the time and resources to build a feature.

We prioritize based on our goal metrics and weigh features against each other. I’ve written about how we prioritize here.

For every new feature, there’s a consideration of which pricing tier it will be available for. We’re at the stage where almost all of our features are going into our Growth or Business plans. 

As people see more value in the higher tiers, they can easily upgrade to access more value. A good amount of our increased ARPU has come from people expanding their own usage.

As our product becomes more advanced, our design team makes sure we maintain good UX. We’re very selective about which features we decide to support. 

The last thing we want is to build toggles for every customization people ask for. As the feedback experts, our product needs to be prescriptive and opinionated. 

This is a great way we can ensure our customers find success with Canny.

Recommendation

Keep a close eye on feedback from existing and potential customers. Companies upmarket will tell you what problems they’re running into. 

To move upmarket successfully, you’ll want to tackle the most relevant of these problems.

Figuring out sales

For years, we focused on making Canny a strong inbound engine. Kayla joined Canny earlier this year to head up sales. 

We’re still very much figuring out how to use sales to close large inbound deals and make outbound sales.

So far, what works for us is offering bigger teams personalized demos. Really understanding what problem prospects are looking to solve is key. 

We need to be realistic about if Canny is the right solution for them. It’s in nobody’s best interest to sell something that isn’t a good fit.

The sales process for larger companies is much more complicated. Oftentimes, we need to go through security reviews, legal reviews, and so on. 

There is more policy and paperwork which can add a significant amount of overhead to a deal. We’ve been burned before and have since learned how to protect ourselves better.

At this time, we’re not taking sales metrics too seriously. We want to see what works before turning it into a numbers game.

Recommendation

Ask all the questions you need upfront. You need to have a clear idea of what you’re agreeing to or you’ll waste a lot of time.

Understand what a prospect will need from you and price accordingly. Be very clear about what they’re getting in the quote. 

That way, if changes need to be made, the adjustment in pricing makes sense. You don’t want your prospect to feel you are backing out of a promise.

What’s next?

We have a long way to go and a lot more to learn. We’re finding success slowly moving upmarket and will continue on that path.

If we were venture-backed, we might be compelled to focus on big companies. However, we love our bootstrapped roots and want to support early-stage companies. We won’t be giving up providing Canny to small businesses.

To do that successfully, we have always put an emphasis on design. Canny should be a great user experience whether you’re on our Starter or Business plans.

Additionally, new pricing is something we’ve wanted to tackle for a long time. A pricing change is something that could change the trajectory of our business. 

That said, we want to be very mindful of this change and how it impacts everyone (current customers, our sales team, our support team, and so on).

If you are a past, current, or future customer, we thank you for being part of our journey! We learning a lot and hope to share more down the road.

Onwards to the next million!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post How we’re moving our SaaS upmarket to enterprise sales first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How we’re moving our SaaS upmarket to enterprise sales appeared first on Canny Blog.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. Competition for great talent is fierce.

Our small, bootstrapped startup is going up against tech giants for rockstar people. In some ways, they can offer a lot more than us.

Sometimes, it seems almost impossible for us to win. Andrew and I fell for it too by joining Facebook straight out of school. The allure is definitely there.

However, there are several things about Canny that give us an edge over large corps. They are valuable enough that we’ve built up a team of awesome people. All these people could have easily joined a big company.

We asked each of them why they decided to join Canny instead. Here are the main reasons they mentioned. If these qualities resonate with you and your lifestyle, we want to hear from you. Our open positions are listed on our careers page.

Work remotely

We built Canny as a remote company since day one. We knew we didn’t want an office. Neither of us resonated with having a traditional go-into-the-office desk job again. We also didn’t want to be limited to hiring in a specific area.

Working remotely means more flexibility for our whole team.

Canny gave me the freedom and the support to move to a different country.

Ramiro

Work where you want

I used to commute 1.5 hours to and from work. If you like working from home, work from home. I like working from coffee shops sometimes.

Remote work means you can work from where you feel most productive that day. Save that commute time and spend it on more important things. 

Goodbye rush hour traffic, hello sweatpants. 

Work when you want

Not everyone is at their peak productivity from 9am to 5pm. Other than during meetings, your time is yours. If you would rather work at night than during the day, that’s your prerogative.

There are some days when I wake up at 5am and do all my work by noon, and then there are days where I hit the snooze button until 1pm and do my best work at midnight.

Elen

Many people have kids and errands to take care of. Remote work means you take back ownership of your schedule. If you need to go walk the dog, go for it!

At Canny, I’m trusted. I’m trusted to get my work done, to pick the tools I need, to work in the way I work best. I don’t feel ‘managed.’ I feel led.

Jacques

People often talk about time as their most valuable resource. What would you do with more time?

As an engineer, a big selling point is that engineering time is used efficiently. We’re building a tool that listens to customer feedback, so we actually build things that our customers want.

 

And, with a more efficient schedule, I can invest more time into other interests. I’m proud to be involved with Canny’s mission, but I’m also proud of my own interests in relationship building, music production and software.

Dan

Benefits aside, remote work isn’t for everyone. You need to be highly self-motivated and in complete control of your productivity. If you have that, remote work can be glorious.

It was not an option for me to join a non-remote company. The reason for that is simple—working from home gives me the flexibility I need to be at my most productive.

Elen

Team retreats

Our team is currently spread across the world.

While we love working remotely, we also make it a point to see each other in person. A former coworker of Elen’s once said, “Relationships are built in person, and maintained online,” and we take that to heart. 

Our team retreats are for team bonding. We try to get together twice a year. We pick a destination and all fly over to hang out for a week—all expenses paid. Our retreats so far have been to Lisbon, Split, Prague, Denver, and Barcelona.

Here’s a video showing some highlights of our adventures in Spain:

During the day, we work. We prioritize the things we need to discuss with others. We’ve also done a hackathon which is a fun way to get everyone involved with the same thing.

Retreats pack a year’s worth of social interaction into a week. They bring the team together more than everyday office interactions ever could.

Eric

By night, we play. It’s amazing how much you gain from just hanging out in person. We explore the city together by checking out local spots and eating local food. We’ve conquered escape rooms and have gone on day trips via scooter.

I’ve come back from every single one of them with literal jaw cramps from laughing too much.

Elen

Good things happen when you have great people all together in a new city. It’s by meeting in person that we really see how well we get along and learn about each other outside of work. Our retreats have definitely brought us closer.

Company trajectory

Of course, we can’t ignore the financial side of things. Joining a startup is a risk. You want to make sure you’re placing your bet on a winning team.

The first thing that caught my eye was the very small team versus what they’d accomplished already. Four employees? Yet completely bootstrapped, profitable, and steadily growing? Clearly the people behind the product had to be incredibly smart, hard working, and devoted. Sign me up.

Elen

We launched just over four years ago, and we’re making $1.8m per year in annual recurring revenue, 20% of which is profit. What’s more, we’re growing 80 to 100% annually.

All of our offers come with equity. Since we don’t have investors, we give more to the people actually working on Canny. We want everyone on the team to feel ownership over what we’re putting our hearts into everyday. By giving you a piece of the pie, you are more motivated to make it the best it can be.

Venture-backed startups are also an option. A risk with venture-backed companies is your equity could be worthless due to liquidation preference. If a VC-backed company sells for $100m, you could get $0. If Canny sells for $100m, you will get whatever % you own. We believe this is fair, and how startups should work.

Some venture-backed startups also can’t offer a stable salary. Sometimes, they need to rely on another round of funding to continue paying everyone. That is a tricky situation and one we wouldn’t like to be in.

Canny is bootstrapped, profitable, and growing. That means we make enough money to cover our operating costs every month. We answer to nobody but ourselves and our customers. We are in full control of the money we spend and the product that we’re building.

I love working at Canny because I have the freedom to do my work and be creative about it. I get direction when I ask, but have autonomy to do my work.

I love that we are bootstrapped and can make decisions that are best for our customers without having to report to a board. I love how everyone is always so excited and positive. 

Kayla

Startup experience

At the beginning of my career, I thought working at Facebook would prepare me for starting my own company. The truth is, nothing will really prepare you for that except for working at a startup.

If you want to start your own company someday, joining a startup is advantageous. Startups do things differently than large enterprises. People wear more hats so you’re involved in more things.

As Canny grows, I get to face new and interesting technical challenges. This means that as the company grows, I grow with it. And I love it.

 Ramiro

Large companies have their product offerings figured out. As a startup, we’re still experimenting with a lot of things. It’s more about taking risks than making small optimizations. You have the opportunity to learn what it means to build a valuable product from the ground up.

Being bootstrapped allows us to focus 100% on customer feedback—no VC or “higher up” pressure. I’d like to create my own product someday and working at Canny has taught me a lot about how to build a valuable product.

Dan

At Canny, you also have the chance to try things outside your expertise. At large companies, they have dedicated people for every specialized role. If you’re an engineer who wants to write, why not?

We can take more risks. We can iterate on things quickly and easily backtrack in the worst case. We don’t have any investors to please. Your potential for impact at a startup is much higher.

We hear about people’s distaste for company politics all the time. People stepping over you to climb the ladder. Having to go through endless numbers of people to get approval for projects. You name it. At Canny, everything is a simple conversation so most of our time is dedicated to execution.

We’re looking for people who like to try new things. They can adapt to new problems and environments. They also take initiative and speak up when we could be doing something better. At an established corporation, you’re a cog in the machine. At a startup, you’re building the machine.

There are a lot of great challenges to overcome and great problems to solve. I don’t do mundane stuff, and I learn something new every single day. The learning opportunities and the level of satisfaction I get from what I do is super high.

Mert

We’re looking for people who are excited to join a small team. They want to have a big impact on where we go as a company.

Our team

Last but definitely not least, our team. Our product is nothing without the stellar team behind it. Our success depends on how well this team works together.

Hiring was a huge step for us. I’ll be honest, I was nervous in the beginning. The thought of trusting other people (basically strangers) with our company was crazy.

Turns out, we must be great judges of brains and character because we love our team! We managed to find and convince highly qualified people from all over the world to join our growing startup.

The team is amazing. I feel like I’m working with some of the smartest people in the world. They always help me out when I’m stuck or need some backup. Everybody puts in effort to help their teammates when it is necessary.

 Mert

As a remote team, it’s even more important that we invest time in our inter-team relationships. We know about each other’s families, hobbies, and quirks. We speak up when things need to be said, good or bad.

I find it incredible that even though we’re all very different people, we gel with each other like nobody’s business. I feel like there’s an alignment between us that reaches beyond just work.

Elen

The people at Canny are what make it a joy to work here. I don’t just have colleagues, I have actual friends!

 Jacques

Need I say more?

I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’ll end off here. If you like what you’ve read, let us know. We’re always looking to add more rockstar people to the team.

Check out our open roles on our careers page. If you have any questions, send us a message. We’d love to hear from you.

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Why work at Canny first appeared on Canny Blog.

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It’s hard because there are many factors to consider — other priorities, product strategy fit, customer needs, internal stakeholder input, metrics, goals, and more. Prioritization is a huge balancing act and why many people consider it more of an art than a science.

It’s important because resources are always limited. Building a great product relies on delivering the most value as soon as possible. Given a backlog of features, the best product teams can identify the most impactful ones to build.

So, if it’s so hard and important, how do you prioritize features? 

Let’s look at that in more detail. We’ll also share an example — how we prioritize features here at Canny. 

Table of Contents

What is feature prioritization?

At a high-level, product feature prioritization is the process of deciding which features should be developed first. 

There are a lot of ways to do that, and it can get really technical.

You ultimately evaluate the potential impact and value each feature offers, and weigh that against what it would take to build it. 

Impact could include factors like revenue potential, customer feedback, market demand, fit with strategic vision, etc. Resources most commonly are staff time and money required.  

By applying a feature prioritization framework to all your ideas, you’ll build a ranked and prioritized list of features that guide your product development process. Essentially, this gives you a product backlog. All of your ideas are ranked and you can focus on building the most important and impactful features first.

A product team typically plans their product roadmap by pulling ideas from the top of the list. 

While that’s the gist of feature prioritization, there are several different frameworks commonly used in product management.

Let’s look at them now.

Popular feature prioritization frameworks

There are several different prioritization frameworks that product managers commonly use.

At Canny, we use the weighted scoring method. We find it the most straightforward and easy to use. It does the job – helps us quickly see which projects are the most impactful.

In basic terms, it helps with opportunity scoring –  calculating the score by dividing the potential impact by the required effort.

We’ll look at how we do this more in the next section. 

That’s just one framework, though. Here’s a quick look at some other popular ones.

RICE

This model looks at 4 factors: reach, impact, confidence, and effort. You multiply reach, impact, and confidence together. Then, divide them by the estimated effort. This gives you a score to work with.

Impact/Effort Matrix

In this model, you have a 2X2 grid with impact on one axis, and effort on the other. This gives you four quadrants – low-effort & low-impact, low-effort & high-impact, high-effort & low-impact, and high-effort & high-impact. You place each idea on the grid, and you can quickly see what the biggest opportunities are.

Feasibility, desirability and viability scorecard

This model looks at if the feature is something users want (desirability), if it’s likely to succeed (viability), and if it’s actually possible to build (feasibility). You score ideas based on each factor, and those with higher total scores are the ones you should pursue.

MoSCoW method

This prioritization framework categorizes ideas in four groups: must have, should have, could have, will not have. That lets your team focus on the most critical features first, moving onto less critical ones when you’re able to. You’ll still need to score these ideas with a different model, but MoSCoW helps you understand an idea’s importance from there.

Cost of delay

This framework tries to place a value on each idea. You first estimate what the expected revenue from the idea is in a given time (say, monthly), and then multiply that by the time it will take to ship the feature. This lets you know how expensive waiting to ship the feature is. If the number is high, you’ll want to prioritize it. If the number is low, it’s unlikely your company will see a revenue impact and you might want to deprioritize it.

Kano model

This is a way of figuring out what features are most likely to satisfy customers, and weighing that against the investment to build the feature. It helps companies figure out which specific feature is most important to their customers, so they can make sure to build the right features in their product.

You can learn more about these frameworks in our detailed guide on prioritization frameworks.

This is just a sampling of prioritization frameworks, and there are a lot more that you can explore. Product prioritization needs to make sense for your team, so make sure you choose one that suits your team’s needs and provides relevant opportunity scoring. 

How we prioritize features at Canny

There are so many different ways teams can approach prioritization. At Canny, we previously used a spreadsheet to prioritize. We were able to quickly and easily score and rank projects.

Where a spreadsheet fell short was:

1. Not integrating well with the rest of our stack (eg. user feedback, customer satisfaction, project management, etc.)
2. Data is static while real-world data is always changing (eg. potential revenue, reach, etc.) so spreadsheets quickly become stale

After doing a bunch of research, we learned many teams were feeling similarly. Since Canny is already a home for user feedback, prioritization was a natural extension. Our team set out to build a feature request solution that aims to work for a variety of approaches.

We now use our own prioritization feature to prioritize.

How we prioritize: general overview

Our team does planning on a quarterly basis. To start, we put together a list of around thirty items that we should consider working on. Thirty works for us so far based on how big our product team is.  

These items are a combination of:

1. Big company initiatives
   Where do we see Canny headed? Are there big bets we want to take?
2. Popular customer requests
   Our customers use Canny to solve a problem for them. They will give us feedback if that isn’t the case. With popular requests, we consider the problem at the source of the feedback. From there, we come up with a solution that may or may not be exactly what the request asked for.
3. User experience improvements
   We care a lot about product quality. This means reserving time to improve existing experiences and building features that improve UX. A lot of these are quick wins.

Once we have thirty items pulled from the larger backlog, we use a weighted scoring method. At its simplest, the formula is impact divided by effort.

Frameworks like RICE build on top of that basic formula. Weighted scoring gives us an objective final score for each potential project. 

Understanding impact

Every quarter, we reconsider what our key metrics are. They’re usually business indicators like ARPU or product indicators like admin sessions. These metrics align with non-product company efforts as well. The important thing is that they’re all measurable so we can see the lift quarter to quarter across the whole team.

We aim to have around three key metrics each quarter. From there, we set a “type” and assign weights depending on importance for each metric.

We prefer using stars for impact scoring. They’re very easy to assign and still output a granular-enough score. Canny squares stars so, behind the scenes, the values are exponential. If you’re curious about the score formula, we break it down here .

We also have a “priority” column using the checkbox type. This means we’re manually bumping the priority of a feature. We usually bump things that we’ve promised to customers, projects that other features depend on, or simply things we really want to do.

Prioritization in Canny is flexible so you can adjust weights or add/remove factors anytime.

With the formula all ready to go, we’re ready to prioritize product features.

Scoring thirty items is a quick task. We make our best guess at impact and score each item relative to each other. From there, we can loop in engineering to talk about effort scores.

Determining your impact factors

We’ve discussed some of the factors we use to determine what impact a potential feature could have. They work for us, but it’s important you know what factors will have impact for your business. 

Here are some common impact factors:

1. Potential revenue – the associated deal value, ARR or MRR, based on customers interested in the new feature
2. Popularity – how many user votes does the idea have?
3. Churn impact – can it help drive customer satisfaction, boost net promoter score, reduce churn, etc?
4. Customer segment – is the feature really important to a particular customer segment?
5. Competitive landscape – does this feature make our product more competitive? 

These are just examples. Make sure you’re prioritizing features that have the most impact on the metrics that matter to you. 

Understanding effort

For effort, we use a 1-10 scale which maps to:

1: 1 hour

2: 2 hours

3: 4 hours

4: 1 day (8 hours)

5: 2 days (16 hours)

6: 1 week (40 hours)

7: 2 weeks (80 hours)

8: 1 month (160 hours)

9: 2 months (320 hours)

Canny’s prioritization feature also supports assigning effort with Fibonacci numbers. Many agile teams and teams who use Jira story points are familiar with this.

These time estimates include both engineering and design time. We try to over-estimate here because things almost always take longer than we think.

To do this accurately, it’s important for us to understand scope. We usually have a very good idea of what this should be just by looking at our Canny posts. Customers often chime in to elaborate on their use case or problem they’re facing.

If we need more information, we add a comment to the post requesting insights from people who have voted . Additionally, since we have a list of people interested in the feature, we can reach out to them directly. This is very handy compared to annoying people with a wide email blast.

Once both effort and impact are in, we have the final score.

Using the score

After scoring every item on our roadmap, we have something that looks like this.

From here, we’re off to execution mode and work our way down the list.

That said, we still make some room for flexibility here. We try to balance our team’s preferences and strengths.

Our engineers are free to pick projects near the top of the list that sound most appealing to them. They might be looking for a project that will challenge them technically or just looking for a quick, fun project.

Everything we score is important, but there is flexibility in the order we build things. If a feature is high up on the list, we’ll get to it eventually!

Focus on impact

We think our method of prioritizing can work well for companies of all sizes. Small companies can do just like we have with a new roadmap per sprint, month, or quarter. Bigger companies should have product teams broken up into smaller groups, each operating like a small company with their own roadmap.

We’re making sure to introduce integrations that make prioritization a more streamlined step in product development. We want to make sure relevant information is constantly updating to help with decision making.

Priorities are ever-changing and a prioritization tool should support that.

We try to reserve most of our time on execution and make planning quick. We built Canny’s prioritization functionality to be a simple way to understand what priorities should be. The ultimate goal is to focus on impact.

We always enjoy hearing how other teams prioritize features, so I hope this was helpful. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what works for your team. Reach out to me on Twitter @SarahHum or leave us a comment here!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post How to manage feature prioritization + how we do it at Canny! first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to manage feature prioritization + how we do it at Canny! appeared first on Canny Blog.

We’ve shared a bunch of learning lessons over there, so check it out if you haven’t already. Also see our reviews of year one, two, and three.

Here are highlights from this year:

• Over $1.4m in annual recurring revenue
  I still remember the days we were making no money, so this boggles my mind.
• 9-person team (hiring for 10!)
  We added more stellar people to the team and we’re still all remote.
• 0 retreats
  More of a lowlight but we’re so looking forward to when we can safely travel again.
• Raised $0
  Still no plans to change this! 

For this review, I want to share some big themes from the last year. We also get questions through Twitter and Indie Hackers so I’ll try to weave those in as well.

Obviously, this past year was a weird one. Andrew and I ended our nomad journey and moved back to Toronto just a few months before things went down. 

Days after we published our year 3 review, schools closed, and restaurants went delivery-only. This wouldn’t be a year in review without talking about the pandemic.

Navigating the pandemic

In March 2020, our team was planning our fifth retreat which would be in Mexico City. 

Bri, Jake, and Jacques had just joined the team, so we were extra excited. COVID cases were starting to climb but it wasn’t clear yet how serious it was. 

As things started getting worse, Andrew and I had to make the tough choice of postponing the retreat. The trip wasn’t worth risking our lives over. Looking back, I’m very glad we made that decision.

Business-wise, we had no idea what to expect. I remembered nothing about the 2008 financial crisis. The cancellations started increasing in March, particularly from customers in industries closely impacted by the virus. April ended up being our worst month ever for churn. We kept a list of COVID-related churn and have since won some of them back.

What we did have control over was our cash balance. Being profitable also means that number is growing every month. Even if we lost 50% of our revenue overnight, we’d still have 18 months of runway.

We were fortunate to already be remote so our work lives didn’t change. We knew it would take a serious collapse to take us down.

Luckily, that didn’t happen. Churn returned to normal in May and we actually had some of our best months of growth after that. Due to working remotely, teams are adopting more products that facilitate team collaboration.

By the end of the year, Ned and Ramiro had joined the team. 

Growth was great. Everyone got a raise and money that we would’ve spent on retreats went to the team via bonuses. 

Overall, we’re very lucky to be in an industry that hasn’t been hit especially hard. We’re thankful we have our health and are able to continue operating mostly as usual.

Takeaway: In times of uncertainty, profitability and having a significant runway meant everything. Nobody worried about losing their job. We stayed heads down and powered through.

Founder time split

What Andrew and I spend time doing has changed over the years.

As makers, the early years was a lot of execution: building and designing Canny the product.

Over time, we’ve been doing more and more management. Planning, reviewing work, giving feedback, delegation, people management, and more.

To make room for all that, we’ve had to get good at a few things:

Delegation

If someone else can do a task, we put it on their radar. This was challenging because we were so used to doing small tasks here and there. That said, every little thing adds up.

Delegation has been a struggle for me and I avoided it for a long time.

I didn’t want to be the kind of co-founder who lays back while his team does all the hard work. But at some level, you’re just overloaded and you need help.

I was surprised to find that people actually didn’t mind at all. If anything, they wanted to help.

– Andrew

Andrew’s initial attitude was that he should cover technical support to shield the rest of the team. We now have a support rotation where every engineer (Andrew included) does support for a week.

Suffice to say, trusting our team is a must. It’s their responsibility to decide what they should work on based on impact. They set goals and work to hit them. From there, we have tight feedback loops with our weekly one-on-ones and monthly reviews.

In the past, I knew every single thing that was happening at Canny. Now, I hear about things that I had no idea were happening. It’s a beautiful thing.

Scoping things down

We were pretty good at this already. We’re always focused on shipping MVPs and are conscious of scope creep.

For every added functionality, we ask ourselves:

• Is this required for the feature to work/solve our customers’ problem?
• Is this a really common use case or more of an edge case?
• Is there a workaround?

It’s almost always possible to add functionality afterward. It’s much worse to build something only to rip it out later.

Increasing efficiency

Sometimes there are things we could’ve done in the past to save us compounding time in the future. 

Some examples of this:

• In engineering, investing more time in DevOps so we have faster builds, deploys, etc.
• In support, writing help articles and saved replies
• In marketing, setting up more advanced analytics to inform future marketing efforts

Lastly, we’re always keeping an eye on growing gaps in the business. Those are opportunities to bring in more experts.

Takeaway: It’s the small things that really add up and become very disruptive. Especially if they cause a lot of context switching.

Eliminating the small things was crucial to us maintaining our sanity and having a clear mind to think high level.

Starting to do sales

For the first few years, we were an inbound machine. Inbound marketing, to a self-serve trial, to conversion. Every once in a while Andrew and I would do demos. Once Jacques joined us in Customer Success, he took over demoing to smaller prospects while I handled bigger ones.

As Canny matured as a product, we had growing interest from bigger companies. All of them demanded more complex sales cycles. Eventually, I was doing a lot of inbound sales. 

A large part of my week was following up with people and doing demos. It was a good problem to have, but it was becoming clear that we should have a dedicated person on sales.

So, we put up our first sales listing. This person would be taking over inbound and spinning up outbound sales for the first time. We were looking for someone we could imagine selling to us. Someone with no ego and who would be a great culture-fit.

Just like with other roles, we had sales candidates do an assignment. We sent them a demo recording of mine and had them give me feedback. We wanted to see if they really knew their stuff and if they could be critical.

Ned joined us in August 2020 and hit the ground running. For the next few months, he worked on becoming a Canny expert, getting our processes in place, and setting goals. Meanwhile, I ramped down on sales which freed me up significantly.

Takeaway: Unlocking sales can be huge for any company. That said, it takes a lot of time and patience to get right. 

For an initial sales hire, look for someone who knows the fundamentals but isn’t afraid to try (and fail at) new approaches. From there, it’s just about testing and iterating on what’s working.

Hiring legal counsel

Another big gap for us was legal. 

In general, we try to do a lot of ops-related things ourselves. We got by for a while by drafting our own terms and reviewing contracts. However, legal is harder to skirt around and doing something wrong could have serious consequences. We eventually started to feel in over our heads.

Unlike sales, we didn’t have enough work for a full-time lawyer. We ended up contracting counsel to help us level up. It was important that we handled bigger customers professionally. This also gave us peace of mind since we no longer wonder if we did something wrong.

Takeaway: Being scrappy is great, but we also need to be reasonable and aware of risks. At some point, it makes sense to bite the bullet and bring in professionals. 

Everything is a business expense anyway. We just need to make sure we’re still profitable on top of these expenses.

Quality time

We’ve always valued getting to know our teammates beyond work. That’s why we invested a lot into going on team retreats. 

Of course, as travel didn’t happen last year, we made do with online team hangouts. 

I think we’ve done a really good job with keeping up our culture.

Especially, considering we haven’t been able to have any retreats and have more than doubled the team.

Stuff like this can be super un-motivating and hard on people. We pay very close attention to how team members are doing and feeling, and making sure we still get some quality time.

– Elen

After surveying the team, we decided our sweet spot is scheduling a team hangout every ~6 weeks. Our team especially enjoys playing games together. 

Also, making food together:

We’re excited to teach each other new things, too. Ramiro can pick a pair of handcuffs with a bobby pin and there’s fierce competition over who can cook the best steak. Can’t wait to do an in-person taste test and settle the debate once and for all! 

Something we do daily is our Question of the Day (#QOTD) Slack channel. It’s a great, lightweight way for us to connect. The more gifs and emoji reacts, the better.

Having the #QOTD channel has helped me get to know everyone better. I think it’s a helpful resource for building cohesion.

– Jacques

Takeaway: Making sure your team is happy doesn’t have to be a huge effort. Find time to laugh together and learn about each other.

Personal time and personal goals

Working at a startup doesn’t mean putting in 80-hour weeks. We have very reasonable expectations around workload. Which means, we all have time for a life outside of work. 

It’s become even more critical for us to find enjoyment after work now that we’re spending so much more time at home.

For Andrew and me, life after work consists of:

• Personal hobbies
• (Some) exercising
• Our dog

Last September, Andrew and I adopted a dog from Korea.

It’s been a big change to take care of someone other than ourselves. While she is a lot of work, it’s been great to have built-in breaks throughout our day. We got very lucky with a quiet, patient, well-behaved pup.

It’s also very rewarding to teach her new things. So far, she knows sit, down, stand, leave it, wave, paws up, middle, pretty, spin, play dead, bow, crawl, pray, get in, back, place, heel, loop, roll over, cover, and cross. 

The team did some pretty cool personal stuff last year:

• Jacques: Lost 50lbs and started learning his sixth language.
• Jake: Launched his first public side project.
• Elen: Became an official member of the search/rescue team and volunteer at the fire/rescue department in Estonia.
• Bri: Packed up all her belongings and moved across the country to Austin, Texas, by herself.
• Andrew: Ranked in the top 1% of players in Rocket League.
• Dan: Hit his goal to be under 200lbs and learned 20ish songs on guitar.
• Ramiro: Spent a lot of time with his girlfriend and got back to guitar playing.
• Ned: Got back into coaching strength and conditioning on the side.
• Sarah: Completed over 100 illustrations and hit 75k followers.

Takeaway: Burnout is real. It helps to find fulfillment/passion outside of work.

Year 5

I can’t believe we’re going into year five.

I’m so grateful to the stellar team that we have. They make my job easy by taking initiative and stepping up to challenges. Ned has taken sales off my mind, leaving me with space to do what I’m actually good at. Bri has taken over my dream of having a Canny podcast (stay tuned). Sometimes, the engineering team doesn’t even need mockups from me!

I love being able to do so much with a small team. It really pushes us to stay scrappy and be critical about what we spend our time on.

The thing about a 6% monthly growth goal is it gets 6% harder to hit every month. Year five will be about covering some new use cases to expand our core offering. Having a great product will always be our strength. Our challenge is to solve complex problems with clean, elegant solutions.

Year four was a weird one for reasons outside our control but we made it memorable anyway. I’m excited to go through another great year with this gang.

Onwards to year five!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Year four in review: overcoming the unexpected first appeared on Canny Blog.

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Essentially what we did is moved from a restricted-width layout to a full-width layout. 

I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s been an intimidating product update change to make.

From day one, our customers have expressed how much they like Canny for its simplicity and ease of use. With 2.0, we’re trading some simplicity for power.

Having more screen real estate means our customers can see more and do more. We want to pack more power into Canny and the old layout was constricting. 

That said, balancing simplicity and power will always be important to us. That’s why we’ve made incremental changes and we’ve been testing 2.0 for about 8 months.

How we slow-released Canny 2.0

I worked at Facebook where the smallest change could confuse and frustrate millions of users. I knew we’d want to make sure existing customers had plenty of time to get familiar with 2.0.

So, we rolled out 2.0 in phases:

1. Explicit opt-in for the 2.0 beta
We added a button in the account dropdown to opt-in to 2.0.

Some people found the button and tried 2.0. About a month after, we emailed people letting them know about the beta. 

This was the longest phase, lasting about 6 months. We got a lot of feedback and implemented improvements. People always had the option to go back to 1.0.

2. Auto opt-in for new customers
New customers wouldn’t be exposed to 1.0. We wanted to make sure newly onboarded users had a good experience with 2.0.

3. Forced opt-in for existing customers
At this point, we were quite happy with 2.0. We switched people who had never tried 2.0 or had opted-out previously into the beta.

Everyone still had the option to switch back to 1.0—under 10% did.

4. Deprecating 1.0
1.0 served us well but it’s time for Canny’s next phase. We’re closing the chapter on 1.0 so we can fully focus on the new Canny.

What actually changed

I wanted to highlight some significant changes that come with Canny 2.0.

Feedback view

We merged the post list view with the posts themselves. It’s now represented more like an inbox where you can easily switch between posts. 

Post views are the most active in Canny so we wanted to make navigating around zippier. 

With this change, we were also able to include:

• Searching across all boards 
• Exporting all posts based on select filters
• Filtering posts by date range
• Saved and sticky filters

Voters modal

We moved the voters list from a separate page to a lightweight modal. 

The voters modal supports:

• Showing the MRR impact of a feature
• Segmenting voters

Users

Similar to the feedback view, we merged the user list with their profile pages. You can easily select the user you want and view their feedback on the same page.

We also merged in searching for companies/accounts. Searching and selecting a company will show feedback across all the users in that company.

Changelog

Previously, you had to toggle back and forth between markdown and the public preview while drafting changelog entries. Now, you can see the preview as you draft.

Mobile

The 1.0 mobile view was not usable. The 2.0 mobile view is!

Feedback and accepting tradeoffs

As I mentioned, during our 2.0 beta phase, we got a bunch of feedback. 

A lot of it was negative. Most often, we heard that people were overwhelmed by how much information was on screen. 

To combat this negative feedback, we:

1. Added the ability to collapse a sidebar
2. Adjusted the layout to introduce more white space
3. Muted features that could be less prominent

More functionality often means more complexity. We accepted some tradeoffs and did our best to simplify. Overall, we’re trying to make using Canny easier.

We know we’re not going to please everyone—especially people who were used to 1.0. But, these kinds of changes take time to get comfortable with. 

Over time, we also got a bunch of positive feedback:

It’s never easy to make big changes to a product, but we wanted to make decisions that would help Canny continue to grow as a product going forward.

We took it slowly—making sure to roll out in phases and listen to users. From there, we iterated based on that feedback. It was important for us to give our existing customers input in the new Canny they’d be using. 

Canny 2.0 also sets us up for some exciting things we have planned this year. We can’t wait to share them with you!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Introducing Canny 2.0: What’s new (and how we slow-released our product update) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Introducing Canny 2.0: What’s new (and how we slow-released our product update) appeared first on Canny Blog.

As a customer support agent, you get customer feedback all the time:

• Sometimes, the functionality customers are looking for doesn’t exist
• Or, a feature is confusing or hard to find
• And, your customers will probably have ideas for new things they’d like to see from your tool

In these times, success and support teams are the glue between customers and the product team.

It’s your responsibility to understand the problem at hand and communicate that to the product team.

This post is a part of a series that highlights how Canny can help various organizations within your business.

Check out the whole series:

• Canny for product management
• Canny for sales

Improved communication between customer-facing and product teams

Without Canny, customer feedback is very ad-hoc.

You may have a Google doc that you use to record customer requests. You may have conversations with a product manager via Slack.

Communicating with product managers is sporadic and/or unseen. Information gets lost and your customers remain unsuccessful.

With Canny, you have an organized, dedicated home for customer requests. Canny is the level playing field where the product team can see the most important requests. They can then use that information to build their roadmaps.

For success and support, it means being able to keep track of your customers and all their requests. You can see the status of each request and either update customers automatically or on a 1-on-1 basis.

Let your customers be the champions

Without Canny, you need to be the champion for customer needs.

It’s difficult to remember and follow up on everything. But not only that: you also need to fight to be heard.

With Canny, you’re putting your customer at the forefront. The product team can see that there are actual customer accounts that requested a feature.

Instead of trying to remember the details of a feature request, you can add customer insights in real time. Vote on Canny posts on their behalf and include any important customer quotes, details, or specifications.

This way, nothing gets lost and product has everything at their fingertips.

If you use Intercom or Zendesk, it’s even easier to keep track of customer requests. We have integrations with both platforms that allow you to log user feedback without leaving the tool.

This way, you can ensure that the product team will see the request, and your customers will be kept in the loop.

Close the feedback loop

There are two ways you can use Canny to track customer feedback:

1. Publicly
   Include Canny within your product so your customers have an accessible place to give feedback themselves.
2. Privately
   Empower your customer-facing teammates to track feedback they get in customer conversations on behalf of customers.

If you use Canny publicly, your customers automatically get updated with status changes:

If you use Canny privately, you’ll want to keep an eye on the roadmap. When posts get marked as complete, you have a list of customers to follow up with.

Closing the feedback loop is a great way to re-engage customers. It also shows them that their feedback is important.

Keep everyone connected—even as you scale

As your company grows, it’s easy for product teams to get more and more detached from customers. The sheer volume of people involved creates complexity and distraction.

This puts your entire company at risk.

Product teams should always have a pulse on your customers. What problems do they face? How can we make their lives easier?

As customer success and support reps, you are the glue between customers and product.

It’s your job to make sure that your product team considers customer feedback when it comes to prioritizing what to build.

Canny is an easy way for you to ensure feedback is communicated at all times, and that there is a strong, organized link between customers and product.

If you want to give Canny a try, sign up today!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Canny for customer success: using Canny on customer support teams first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Canny for customer success: using Canny on customer support teams appeared first on Canny Blog.

Some quick facts:

We launched in March 2017, so it took us just under 3.5 years to get to $1m ARR
We’re bootstrapped, meaning we’ve never taken any money from investors
We’ve never done outbound sales, meaning all of our growth came from inbound channels
At the time of hitting $1m ARR, our team was 7 people (now 9)
Our team is fully remote, distributed across 3 continents, 4 countries, and 7 cities

It feels pretty surreal. When you start a SaaS company, $1m ARR seems impossibly far away. Now that we’re here, it feels very much like a turning point. Like a major chapter has ended, but another one has begun.

It’s a perfect moment to reflect.

What went well? What could have gone better? What have we learned? These are questions that we’ve been pondering over the last month, and I’m excited to share our learnings with you in this post.

Timeline

Here’s what our journey looks like so far:

We decided the best way to break down our learnings is by specific stages, defined by revenue/hiring milestones:

• Building the foundation: $0 ARR
• Zero to one: $0 to $1k ARR
• Launching: $1k to $10k ARR
• Ramen profitability: $10k to $50k ARR
• First hire, first fire: $50k to $100k ARR
• First hire, take two: $100k ARR to $250k ARR
• Double down: $250k ARR to $500k ARR
• Focus up: $500k to $1m ARR
• Beyond $1m ARR

Building the foundation: $0 ARR

I would argue that this is the most important stage to “get right.” This is when you build the foundation for your company.

It’s easiest to change your target audience or the problem you solve in the early days. After you have a product and customers, it can be painful to make these changes.

Here’s how we broke this down:

What problem do you solve?

We help software companies build better products by doing a better job of collecting and understanding user feedback.

Who do you solve it for?

The product team at software companies. Canny works especially well for customer feedback at B2B/SaaS companies, and for tracking internal feedback at larger companies.

How are you different than existing solutions?

Product quality. Our product is designed and built by a team of FAANG-caliber engineers and designers. We know how to build good products.

I’d recommend thinking long and hard about these 3 simple questions. Your answers will significantly impact the rest of your journey.

Lesson learned

Be focused—don’t try to solve every problem for every business. Build an amazing product for a small group of people instead of a mediocre product for everyone.

Your product and messaging will be so much clearer. People will resonate more with what you’re building if you speak directly to them.

After you get a good foothold you can explore adjacent problems and target customers.

Zero to one: $0 to $1k ARR

When you feel good about your foundation, it’s time to build your product and find your first customers.

Andrew’s a software engineer and I’m a product designer, so for us building the product was the easy part. Acquiring customers has always been the challenge.

Here’s how we got our first paying customers:

1. We gave away a free version of a product, a user feedback community.

This wasn’t even Canny yet. I go into the backstory a lot more in this guest article I wrote for Baremetrics.

2. We got lucky and landed an influencer customer from our personal network.

Andrew used to work on the React team at Facebook, a popular web framework. They started using Canny to keep track of feedback for React Native.

3. Out of the thousands of users who left feedback for React, a handful of them ended up using our product to collect user feedback for their own product.

4. We learned that people were willing to pay for a feedback solution.

5. We turned our user feedback community into a user feedback SaaS tool.

I do want to highlight that we got super lucky here. Many SaaS products don’t have a viral channel, or the opportunity to land an influencer user early on.

That said, if you solve a real problem that’s better than existing solutions, you should be able to find your first customers.

We also put effort into:

• Writing and distributing good content on our blog
• Reaching out to product people for feedback
• Implementing a free trial

If you’re struggling with acquiring your first customers, it’s likely due to one of the following problems:

• You aren’t talking to enough people (sheer volume)
• The people you’re talking to don’t have the problem you solve (wrong audience)
• The problem you solve isn’t big enough that it’s worth paying for (wrong problem)
• Your solution isn’t good enough compared to existing solutions (wrong differentiation / weak product)

Lesson learned

As product people, it’s easy to spend 90% of your time building your product. Building a good product is important, but it’s useless if nobody wants to use (and pay for) it.

Prioritize accordingly.

Launching: $1k to $10k ARR

We officially launched Canny in March 2017.

At the time of launch, we had five paying customers from our user feedback community days. Not many, but even these small numbers were a big indicator.

If you have multiple paying customers, you have validated many parts of your business:

• You know that you solve a problem that’s worth paying for
• You probably have a good idea who your target audience is
• You likely know whether your product solves the problem well

In the two months following our launch, we got 50 paying customers, paying on average $20/mo.

Our target audience was software companies, and especially small ones (at this price point). Therefore, Product Hunt was a great place for us to launch, as the majority of their users work in tech.

Lesson learned

Try to validate your product/business before launching by getting a few paying customers. If some people are willing to pay, it’s a great sign that others will too.

By launching before getting customers, you’ll still learn a lot, but you risk not getting paying customers. By validating first, your launch will be more successful.

Consider whether there are any waves you can ride to make your launch bigger. For us, this was Product Hunt itself, which was super popular in 2017.

Ramen profitability: $10k to $50k ARR

Ramen profitability is going to be a slightly different amount for every founding team. It’s however much money you need, on an ongoing basis, for the company and founders to break even.

This milestone is super important because you’ve eliminated one of the greatest risks of your company failing: running out of money. You aren’t dependent on outside capital, and don’t have any specific time pressure.

For us, ramen profitability was at about $50k/yr. Andrew and I are a couple, so our living expenses are cheaper (per person). We were also digital nomads, and Airbnbs in Spain are a lot cheaper than rent in San Francisco.

Growth definitely slowed down 2 months after our launch. Most of the buzz from launching had died off, and we had to learn how to create evergreen content.

The easiest way to acquire customers via inbound is to get in front of them when they’re actively looking for a solution:

• Which search queries would a prospective buyer make? Try to rank organically or via paid advertising for these queries.
• Which web pages would a prospective buyer end up on? Especially if these are on sites like Reddit or Quora, be sure to mention your solution there.
• What information would be particularly useful to the buyer? Explain how your product solves their problem, or how it’s different/better than alternatives.

It took us 6 months to acquire another 50 customers. But, we had raised prices, and these customers were paying $60/mo on average (3x as much). These customers mainly came from Product Hunt, Hacker News, Quora, Google ads, organic search, and through “Powered by Canny” (our viral channel).

We changed our pricing four times that year.

It’s easy and cheap to change your pricing when you’re small. Every time you change it, you get a lot of feedback, and learn a lot. Pricing is not something you set and forget, at any stage.

Lesson learned

At this stage, there are loads of low-hanging fruit in both product and marketing.

Success is all about identifying these tasks, executing on them, and seeing what works.

Talk to your customers to learn what they want in a solution. That will also help inform how you market your product.

First hire, first fire: $50k to $100k ARR

We continued knocking off the low-hanging fruit in product and marketing:

• We built many key features and integrations, some of which we were able to launch on Product Hunt
• We set up paid advertisements and landing pages, focusing heavily on buyer-intent keywords
• We wrote blog posts, some of which were well-received on Hacker News

This stage is really just a grind. It’s fairly obvious what you need to do, you just need to do it. You have to show up every day, figure out what’s going to be impactful, and get it done. Rinse, repeat.

It took us around 3 months to double from $50k ARR to $100k ARR. By then we had around 150 customers.

Around this time we decided we wanted to hire a full-time marketer. Here’s why:

• We knew that marketing was super important to our future growth and success
• Neither of us really enjoyed marketing, and we didn’t have real experience
• We finally had enough profit that we could afford to hire someone

This hire didn’t end up working out, but we’ve been over that already.

Lesson learned

As a founder, try to notice if you’re spending a lot of your time repeatedly doing similar groups of tasks.

This can be a good indicator that hiring someone for this role will be successful. Especially if it’s something you’re not personally an expert on.

First hire, take two: $100k ARR to $250k ARR

We were a bit scarred from our first hire not working out. We didn’t try hiring again for another ~4 months. We continued to invest in product improvements and buyer-intent marketing.

Around August 2018, we had 200 customers and were making $200k ARR. It was still just the two of us.

I remember a distinct feeling from this time that we were drowning in support work. Realistically, we were each spending ~15 hours per week doing support, which was about 30% of our total time/energy. Support was also so random that we’d be going in and out of flow—not good.

What’s more, we weren’t doing a great job at it. We would rush support conversations because we wanted to get back to product/marketing.

So we decided to hire a customer success manager. Their primary role would be to take over support, while also spending time working on our help center, onboarding, and customer success in general.

After reading hundreds of applications and interviewing dozens of folks, we found someone.

This was super successful. This hire unlocked Andrew and me to really focus on growth. They could give our customers their full attention, to ensure they were well taken care of.

Lesson learned

Hire deliberately and carefully as your first people are key players.

Whether they can do the job well is baseline. Continue to pay special attention to whether you can see yourself working together for the long haul.

Double down: $250k ARR to $500k ARR

Hiring for customer success went so well that we were no longer discouraged from hiring. We felt much more confident in our ability to determine whether a candidate was a good fit.

At some point, we were making enough profit that we could afford to hire again.

We decided to hire for two roles:

• Marketing: Basically the same reasons as before. We knew marketing was important to our continued growth and success. We didn’t enjoy doing marketing and weren’t particularly great at it.
• Engineering: We’re always going to be a product team. There were a whole slew of features and integrations that we wanted to build. Having our first full-time engineer would help us grow faster via sheer product velocity.

Up until this time, we could pretty much attribute our success to two things:

• Building a great product.
• Getting it in front of our target audience while they were looking for a solution.

In other words, product and marketing. Hiring for these roles was simply doubling down on what was already working well for us. I don’t think we did this deliberately but, in hindsight, it makes sense.

In January 2019, Dan joined us as our first engineer. Shortly after, Elen joined us as our first marketer. Both are still with us today, almost 2 years later, and have been instrumental to building out the foundation of our company and culture.

Lesson learned

Identify what’s working well for you and continue to invest in that.

When hiring, always do some form of a technical interview/assignment, no matter the role.

• Support: How would you respond to this live chat conversation? Write us a help article.
• Marketing: Do some keyword research, choose a blog post topic, and write an outline and draft.
• Sales: Shadow us on a demo and give us feedback. Put together a brief prospecting plan.

This gives you a chance to get a feel for what it’s like to work with the candidate, and gives you an idea of their skills. One of the biggest indicators for us is ability to take constructive feedback.

Note: You’ll notice these tasks are fairly large. You should pay candidates for their time.

Focus up: $500k to $1m ARR

Prioritization started to get much harder. We had already built a lot of the must-have features and integrations. We were already marketing on a lot of the popular buyer-intent channels.

There was still a long list of product and marketing tasks we could do. But it was less obvious which of these tasks would be the most impactful. It also felt like we didn’t have a specific focus other than getting more customers and revenue.

We decided to focus on maturing the product. “Make Canny work better for big companies” was the main focus of 2020. This is a pretty natural progression for SaaS. You start out selling to startups for cheap, and as you mature the product, it starts to work well for larger orgs at a higher price point.

This focus helped with prioritization too. We broke out our spreadsheet (Airtable), and used a simple impact/effort formula. We felt the popular RICE framework was slightly overkill.

We hired another engineer and marketer, Jake and Bri, to continue to double down on what’s working (they’re both awesome!).

At this point, recruiting was down to a science. From sourcing to screening to interviewing to offer, we had built a solid process.

We built integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Azure Active Directory, and Okta. We refined our product demo, and built out our inbound sales motion for bigger deals. We got our SOC 2 security certification. These were all checkboxes for bigger companies.

A while back I published a post about saying no to big customers and I still stand by what I wrote. We don’t build features for a single company and we make sure there’s a good fit. We’re definitely dipping our toes upstream but we feel good about how we’re doing it.

Lesson learned

At some point, you need a more specific, strategic focus than “make more money.” Especially as the team grows, it’s important that everyone is aligned, and understands how they impact the company’s larger goals. This focus makes it easier to prioritize and measure success.

Beyond $1m ARR

We recently hired another software engineer, Ramiro, and our Head of Sales, Ned. As a product designer, I’m personally super excited to hand off sales to someone who is actually good at it! I’m also excited that we’re doing outbound sales for the first time.

We’re in the process of rolling out Canny 2.0, which is a more mature version of our original product. It’s focused on making workflows in Canny easier but also more powerful.

It’s crazy that two years ago it was just Andrew and I, and now we’re 9 strong. This might sound slow compared to a venture-backed startup, but it feels fast.

I’m very happy that we chose to bootstrap—it’s given us time to learn and grow into each stage. It feels very sustainable, which is something more software companies should strive for.

Our mission is to help software companies build better products. We’ve got a long way to go.

Lesson learned

We’ll let you know!

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post How we built a $1m ARR SaaS startup first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How we built a $1m ARR SaaS startup appeared first on Canny Blog.