[00:00:00] Elliott Poppel: For us, it was definitely a little more art than science. The things that we were prioritizing when coming up with it were, we wanted it to be an indication that someone was truly trying the product versus the tourist is the word that we use to describe people that we don't want to give credit to. We don't want to count them as a user yet. We did a big product launch, so I knew there were going to be a lot of tourists. There's going to be a lot of people that are like, oh, this is neat. Let me try it out. We're going to install the app and then we're never going to see them again. So the activation milestone we set is we need to see you at least two days, and we need you to do events on those two days.

[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:53] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:01:06] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:18] Andrew Michael: Hey, Elliott. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:19] Elliott Poppel: Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:21] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Elliott is the CEO and founder of General Collaboration, one inbox for all your work conversations. Prior to founding General Collaboration, Elliott was a manager of product manager at Meta, a VC and startup founder. So my first question for you Elliott is, how much of your inspiration for General Collaboration came from your time working at Meta?

[00:01:45] Elliott Poppel: A lot of it actually. So in my time at Meta, I was there for five years total. And I joined basically because I didn't have another startup idea at the time. One of my investors from a previous startup actually left his VC fund and joined Meta full-time. Got a big job running Facebook Messenger and he said, come on over, the water's fine. You're going to learn a ton here. That's what I went in with this very open to anything, learn as much as I can mindset.

[00:02:09] Elliott Poppel: I worked on a bunch of things there, but for General Collaboration story, I had joined Building 8, which was this Skunk Works hardware lab that Facebook used to have back when, like Google Home Hubs and Alexa devices. And that was like, kind of all the rage and coming onto the scene. And we wound up going to market, Facebook wound up going to market with this device called Portal. It's a video calling appliance that sat on a kitchen counter or in your family room so you could call your family and loved ones and video chat with them.

[00:02:35] Elliott Poppel: And the product never did that well in market. But the moment the pandemic happened, became a huge part of how we responded to working from home. I got pulled off of Portal and was asked to start this, we called it Future of Work, but really it was like, oh crap, how do we all work from home? And it was problems around how do we adopt Portal and leverage that while people are setting up their new home offices to things like virtual whiteboarding and what apps you're going to use there or there's a point in time where you used to have to fly from Singapore to pick up your laptop in Menlo Park if you're going to join the company.

[00:03:08] Elliott Poppel: When I was playing around in that space of Future of Work, productivity, collaboration, what are the problems that Facebook needs to solve to adapt to the changing work situation. That's when the idea for General Collaboration started to jump out to me and eventually got enough conviction to quit my job and go full time on it.

[00:03:24] Andrew Michael: Go full time. Very nice. Yeah, I think the Portal products, it was definitely an interesting one. I definitely considered buying it at some point as well, just because I have little kids as well. I have a son and my parents were living in South Africa at the time. So I was like, oh, this is a nice device to have around. But it never really had any other utility or like push for me to want to purchase it. Other than that, how did that product go? We talked a little bit about this briefly in the beginning, but like–

[00:03:52] Elliott Poppel: Yeah, it was interesting. It had a cult following and not a big enough one. So eventually, Facebook has now shut down the product line entirely. The origin story was that, you know, Mark, rather the whole company recognized that, you know, as strong and powerful of a company as Facebook was. Facebook had really missed the boat on mobile. And if you can remember back, Facebook had tried to build its own mobile phone and it failed and that left us in a position we were completely beholden to Apple and to Google and specifically Android for our app stores for our distribution. And Mark didn't wanna make that same mistake twice.

[00:04:31] Elliott Poppel: So that's what Building 8 was, was this Skunk Works lab to build hardware devices and figure out, what is the next form factor going to be? And at the very least, can we have a horse in the race so that we can go to the negotiating table with something? We had a bunch of, when I joined, I was one of four founding product managers and I was responsible for calling and collaboration, which wasn't necessarily a thing on all of them, but we wound up picking one of those devices and going to market with it. And lo and behold, it was this calling appliance.

[00:05:02] Elliott Poppel: So my role became pretty important for that. It was interesting. It was as a startup guy, seeing like how Facebook does startups was a wild experience. I was just catching up with a friend and we were talking about like, go-to-market strategy in context of my startup and his startup. And he was also a member of the Portal team. And we were joking about how, when we were launching Portal, we did... I live in New York.

[00:05:28] Elliott Poppel: We did a huge buyout over the holidays of this building that we built this, like, Portal activation thing. We had… Kim Kardashian and Alex Rodriguez were doing spots for us. One year we had… We licensed the entire Muppets franchise for commercials and it's like apples to oranges, go to market strategy. But even despite all the resources in the world, Portal never did well in, market. It was a calling appliance.

[00:05:54] Elliott Poppel: It also carried the burden, the weight of Facebook's brand is a heck of a lot cooler now than it was, I don't know, a year ago. Zuck is a lot cooler now than he was a year ago. When we went to market with that, the last company, myself included, everyone felt the same way. The last company in the world that you would trust to put an always on camera and microphone in your family room recording your children was Facebook. So we were in a rough position from the start.

[00:06:21] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's incredible the turnaround they've actually done in such a short space of time with the rebranding and rebranding of Zuck as well as Zuck 2.0. But yeah, I think also like in my mind as well, like it felt like it was meant to be also a competitor to like the Alexas or to the Google Homes. But was that ever like the intention or was just really like, let's get started with calling and then see from there.

[00:06:42] Elliott Poppel: When we were starting off, it was meant to be more of a direct competitor. And you've seen now, if you think about how all those things have evolved, like Alexa, the operating system and like the chat interface, the AI interface has continued to grow and evolve beyond the physical hardware devices, Facebook or Meta rather has, like certainly grown in crazy ways in terms of what we're able to do with AI now, and the company is leaps and bounds versus where we were.

[00:07:12] Elliott Poppel: When we were going to market with Portal, we had intended to have our own assistant on the device, and we actually wound up pulling our assistant off, or rather downscoping our assistant quite a bit, and striking a partnership with Amazon to bring Alexa on the device. It was competitive, but it was like the best of enemies. To the point of the purpose of us being in that space. Zuck wanted a seat at the table.  

[00:07:36] Elliott Poppel: And by getting Alexa on our devices, we certainly had a seat at the table. We got YouTube on our devices that got us a seat in the table with Google. That whole industry certainly hasn't rather that like that space of Internet of Things connected devices certainly isn't as hot as it was. I don't know, five Christmases ago, and that's what everybody was buying each other. But it probably served its purpose as far as what we set out in terms of the Building 8 mission, not necessarily the Portal mission, but the Building 8 mission.

[00:08:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think the space also hasn't evolved as well, the rate of change of everything else around it. And I think if we look at these assistants and stuff, there's just so much more advanced tech today, like in ChatGPTs and Gemini and Claudes, compared to what we're getting now with our Home Assistant. And I think it's a matter of time before it catches up, but I can also see that's why the excitement isn't there just because you're experiencing all this magic everywhere else around you and you're not experiencing it on those devices and what's happening at home.

[00:08:34] Andrew Michael: So I'm excited to see what's going to happen because I'm actually also building a house now and trying to like nerd out and all these little devices and how to automate as much as possible. But I'm like, quite disappointed or let down that like, we don't have like a… something that's connecting already to, like a ChatGPT interface or anything like that, but yeah. Nice. So obviously, like a ton of learnings.

[00:08:54] Andrew Michael: Obviously one is that your go-to-market strategy is completely different at a Facebook versus your startup today. You learned quite a bit as well, like you say, like the inspiration came as well from that time of, like trying to figure out the Future of Work at Meta and scrambling on their end. Tell us a little bit about, like the product itself, what it is you do, and then maybe we can jump into your go-to-market strategy as well, how that compares and contrasts to Facebook.

[00:09:22] Elliott Poppel: Sure, so at that point of that like Future of Work effort and adapting to working from home, one of the problems that became really clear to me was that without us realizing it, we had wound up in this renaissance of apps, where earlier in my career, I just used these three Microsoft apps. And then a few years later, Google made their knockoff versions of those same three apps. And now I'm working on teams that use at least half a dozen, if not dozens, of applications on an everyday basis.

[00:09:51] Elliott Poppel: Each specialist, especially on a product team, has their own purpose-built tools that allow them to do the best work that they can possibly do. But when we come together to do projects, to do teamwork, now we're jumping from silo to silo. We have fragments of conversation spread all over the place. That was where the idea for General Collaboration was born. And the idea was, at least in the technical speak, can we build this meta collaboration layer that sits on top of and across all these tools and makes it so that I can talk about a project and talk about the work rather than being forced to talk about an individual unit of the work that's stuck in each of these siloed parts?

[00:10:26] Elliott Poppel: What that looks like in practice is for starters, we aggregate comments. We take all the comments and conversations in these apps. So these are apps like Google Docs and Figma and Notion and Linear and Jira and Airtable. And what we do is we take those comments and we figure out what needs your attention. We recognize who's mentioning you, who's asking you a question. What are conversations that are relevant to your work that you need to see? And what is less relevant that you don't need to see?

[00:10:52] Elliott Poppel: And make it super easy to respond, make it super easy to get to this, we call it comment zero state, but it's this sort of superhuman-esque inbox zero state where you're truly able to get a handle on everything going on across all of your apps and get to a point where all of your teammates are unblocked. They have the information they need to do whatever they need to do next. On top of that, we layer some superpowers. So like, one that I use the most is we make it easy to see what other people are doing around. You get notified about comments that you wouldn't see otherwise.

[00:11:23] Elliott Poppel: So for example, let's say that one of the engineers on the team and a designer are going at it in a Figma comment. It's something that I haven't been mentioned. This isn't a doc that I'm the owner of. I wouldn't see this otherwise, but if that conversation goes in a direction that GC identifies, this might be important to me, I'll get nudged on that and say, hey, Elliott, you might want to check this out. It gives me this opportunity to jump in and share my opinion or make sure things don't go off the rails. We don't scope creep or whatever the issue is.

[00:11:51] Elliott Poppel: On the flip side, obviously, this isn't the case now with me running the company. But if I were an individual contributor product manager at a larger company, I'd be able to see what my manager or my manager's manager, talking about. Kind of be able to see like, where's the puck going so I can skate there and have more impact. So we built this Meta collaboration layer, this cross app collaboration layer to connect all your apps.

[00:12:14] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think it's like one of those things that is for me, these little red dots create so much anxiety in all these different apps and like figuring out where all the notifications are coming from and who's saying, and while you were talking, I was actually curious, like, who actually first came up with the idea to add a little red dots as a notification thing. And it turns out it's Chris Marcellino and Justin Santamaria from Apple.

[00:12:40] A; They filed a patent for it. And it was a way to raise awareness. Like trying to bring context to things you need to pay attention to. It's crazy because like that's, single, like little action transcends into all the different products that we have today. And like I definitely see the need for the product because like I spend my mornings then like checking out Slack and I have like a myriad of notifications there, then I'm going into Notion, then I'm going into like, I just say Figma and other places.

[00:13:09] Andrew Michael: And you end up spending, like half the day just, like replying to comments in different places and trying to catch up with the day before you actually start your work day. So usually how's it going? Like where you at?

[00:13:23] Elliott Poppel: So we've been building GC for a little over two years now, and we built it in a very thoughtful way, I'll say, which is my third startup. So I'm coming into this like very eyes wide open, probably more like glass half empty than glass half full because I've been there before. And I'm not naive to the challenge of this. And with General Collaboration, I knew going in that one, this was gonna be very nuanced to build from a technical standpoint, because we're integrating all these apps that don't necessarily wanna be integrated.

[00:13:54] Elliott Poppel: We're effectively, like the way email is a protocol and I can choose to use Superhuman or Gmail or Spark or whatever, comments are not a protocol. We have forced it into being a protocol for the purposes of General Collaboration. That was hard to do and we knew it was gonna be. The other thing that I knew was gonna be hard was our user experience, where, and we're talking about this problem that we both have.

[00:14:13] Elliott Poppel: The answer to I have too many apps is not, here's another app. That's going to be terrible. So we've actually built six different major versions and a lot of smaller iterations between, of GC and route to the version that we launched. We only publicly launched a little over a month ago. And up until that point, we had done alphas, betas, a couple hundred users on each of these to really try to dial in one, those integrations and being able to get the information that we needed, but probably even more importantly was, what's the right experience where this feels like it empowers me to use the other apps, it builds on habits that I already have, it makes me better at those rather than being just another thing to check.

[00:14:54] Elliott Poppel: As far as how things are today, so we launched, like I said, a little over a month ago. So far so good, it's an early traction. And like I said, as a third time founder, I'm not ready to print the championship banner yet and celebrate too much, but we've seen, I'd say, really promising signs of early product market fit. Where I'm focused right now most is the top of the funnel. What can we do to get people to our website? What can we do to get people from our website to activating in the product?

[00:15:23] Elliott Poppel: Because this is a byproduct of all that earlier testing and all those different betas that we ran. Once we get you into the product, we have pretty solid retention, pretty solid engagement. So my focus has really been how do I get more people to reach that activation milestone and less so on the product itself as those people might frame it.

[00:15:41] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think the first time, second time, third time found the thing as well. Like, sometimes I wonder if it's like a blessing or a curse. And I think I saw the other day it was like, I think it was Brian Halligan like from HubSpots might be getting this wrong, but he sort of mentioned like the, out of the billion dollar, 12 billion dollar companies that he looked at. Only two of them were founded by second or third time founders. The 10 were created by first time founders.

[00:16:09] Elliott Poppel: Oh, that's interesting.

[00:16:10] Andrew Michael: It is. And I wonder if it's this concept, no, it's not, it must've been more than a billion, but there, this concept is the… like, naivety, I think. And the unknown as well, like you do more and you try things. And I think, like maybe being too conservative on the end with the experience, like it ends up hindering your ability to progress. This is something I definitely, like pondered, like, as myself, like a… consider ourselves to be a founder and like thinking about doing something next is like, is this experience a disadvantage in some ways? And like, how do I avoid, like my experience from hindering myself and actually leveraging it? It's… How do you think about it?

[00:16:51] Elliott Poppel: You know, I think it's a double edged sword. I think that, like putting the actual, like day to day operations of the startup aside. I think the biggest difference between who I am as a founder now and who I was as a founder earlier is when I was founding my first startup, I think it was 22, 23 years old, I was this snot-nosed kid. Once we raised enough money to have an office, that office was my apartment as well as other employees' apartments. We were able to pay ourselves next to nothing and burn the candle at both ends.

[00:17:17] Elliott Poppel: That advantage that you get, you can be wrong twice as often if you have that many more shots on goal. Where now I've got a four and a half month old at home, I've got a house and a mortgage to pay. I need to be a lot more thoughtful and intentional with what shots on goal that I make because I get to make a heck of a lot fewer of them. So that's probably... If I'm thinking about that stat that you shared, it's probably a factor of one. You do have to be a little bit more conservative, a little more thoughtful. You get less attempts at getting it right.

[00:17:49] Elliott Poppel: And I also think that that number is probably skewed by... It's a little crazier to found a startup as you get later into life or as you get to like, you know, for me, this was a huge career decision. Yeah. Like walking away. I had a great job at Facebook. Like what the hell was I thinking? There are definitely days that I wake up and I'm like, why did I do this again? I'd, you know, great salary, great benefits, great healthcare.

[00:18:11] Andrew Michael: I see the survivorship bias argument is like people have gone through it once or twice. Like a lot of people aren't crazy enough to go and do it again. Like they don't, they're not what is a masochist, I guess, is to put yourself through–

[00:18:22] Elliott Poppel: Yeah, I don't know what that says about me.

[00:18:25] Andrew Michael: Through the pain again. Yeah. No, like I believe that about myself. So nice. And so you're focusing now on top of the funnel. I think this is an interesting thing to dive into a little bit. It's like you mentioned you're seeing, like some early signs of product market fits. Like what are these signs that you're seeing? Like how do you like, get the sense of feeling that you're onto something?

[00:18:46] Elliott Poppel: Yeah. So the numbers that have been most excited was… So I took our daily active users and our weekly active users and looked at what percentage of people that hit different milestones became daily active or weekly active. And what has me most excited is that, as it stands right now, 24% of people who have tried GC, and we define that as doing one high intent event in the product, 24% become a daily active user, and 50% become a weekly active user.

[00:19:17] Elliott Poppel: And when we get people to our activation milestones, so instead of just one trying event, we count activation as you have to have done three events over two days. We don't want tourists who are just playing around one day, they need to come back and play around again. 40% of people who have activated become daily active users and 85% of people who have become activated become weekly active users. So I'm feeling pretty good about like, okay, if I get you to that, if I get you to try it, if I get you to activate, I can hold on to you.

[00:19:45] Elliott Poppel: Now, that said, I did already share it. We only launched a month ago. So this data is based on, as we record this, it's November 13th, we launched on October 8th. So small sample size. But what that tells me is I do not need to be spending time right now iterating on the product itself. My problem is what do I do higher in the funnel to get people to try the product, to activate on the product?

[00:20:06] Andrew Michael: Why did you start here as a focus?

[00:20:08] Elliott Poppel: On the activation and the trying. I didn't, like, set out to start here as a focus. It was more just… And then maybe this is like the first time founder versus third time founder. We'd had our dashboards in place and I knew what parts of the funnel would be paying attention to. I knew that I wanted to be intentional about having an activation milestone. And once the data came through, it was clear that like, oh, this is like broken, broken, broken. Great. Okay, I need to fix these things that are higher in the funnel.

[00:20:36] Andrew Michael: Yeah. No, I think definitely that's the second time founder coming through or third time founder coming through there. So talk us through that a little bit then as well. Like you mentioned the inactivation metric. How did you go about defining that from your product perspective? Talk us through a little bit of the details around what that means and how somebody else could do it.

[00:20:56] Elliott Poppel: For us, it was definitely a little more art than science. The things that we were prioritizing when coming up with it were, we wanted it to be an indication that someone was truly trying the product versus the tourist is the word that we use to describe people that we don't want to give credit to, we don't want to count them as a user yet. We did a big product launch. So I knew there were going to be a lot of tourists. There's going to be a lot of people that are like, Oh, this is neat. Let me try it out. We're going to install the app and then we're never going to see them again.

[00:21:22] Elliott Poppel: So the activation milestone we said is we need to see you, at least two days and we need you to do events on those two days. And if it's one day, then you're probably just checking us out and [deleting] us and never coming back again. The choice to say two days versus three days was just a shot in the dark. The choice to say three events over two days versus four or five was just a shot in the dark.

[00:21:41] Elliott Poppel: I think it gives us at least directionally a good understanding of what activation looks like and we can fine tune that as we learn more. But at least for now, it's enough for me to know this looks like it's working. It's definitely not perfect, but it's directionally accurate.

[00:21:56] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It doesn't have to be overly complicated from that standpoint. I think this is like one of the challenges when we think about activation metrics, like a lot of times we try to overcomplicate things. And I think it's really just like, did they get the value when they first started and did they come back to get that value again? And like, I think that's like a way of thinking about it. And if you can find that in like the metrics that you mentioned today with like coming back another day and doing two or three events, that's definitely part of it.

[00:22:22] Andrew Michael: Cause I think a lot of times, like when we have these onboarding experiences, that activation metric can often be quite rigged quite easily for just a series of events that you want them to take. And it's not, I think the key point that you mentioned is that they came back the next day and then they did something else again, nothing like that.

[00:22:38] Andrew Michael: Often a step that like startups will miss out and they'll just say, okay, like they did X, Y, Z in the startup and the product and they're activated now because they got to the aha moment or whatever it is, but really like you need to see them coming back and having that consistency. And–

[00:22:51] Elliott Poppel: Yeah. The other thing that we were really intentional about was we've gone through, and of all the events that we log, we've labeled them - is this a… on high intent event, or is this something that low intent that we don't count? And being really, really intentional about saying, what does count towards activation? What does count towards trying the app? Versus, look, there is a vanity version of these metrics that I could make by saying, every time someone opens GC, count it. That's daily active.

[00:23:22] Elliott Poppel: But there are actions that you need to take. We've talked about with what GC does. I want to see you opening comments, replying to comments, doing things that show that you're actually here intentionally and using the product. So being intentional, of what counts and what doesn't count was really important to us. It definitely makes our metrics worse. From a fundraising perspective, I can roll out some BS metrics that make it look a heck of a lot better than it is. But it gives us a much clearer picture of the product. And it's good to have that hygiene from the start.

[00:23:52] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's very helpful because then you say like, just randomly, I think from your product mind, the same way as you'd be like, if somebody comes in and they're replying to a comment or they're clicking on a comment and going out to their tool or service or this, I haven't seen the product, but I'd imagine like these would be two good indicators that they're actually coming in to do the job that the product solves for, which is like being able to get above all these comments and answer to people.

[00:24:12] Andrew Michael: So for me, like those two feel like a no brainer. And if they're doing that on consecutive days, then it's like they're using the product or service. But the nice thing with identifying this then is that's something that you can layer up for the funnel that you mentioned. And how are you thinking about that now when it comes to the way you're onboarding customers or users and getting them to these states?

[00:24:36] Elliott Poppel: So there's some challenges that I'm really a little bit struggling to get my head around. It's a complicated onboarding. It's a complicated product for the user. And taking you a little further back, when we started, we'd originally built GC as a Chrome extension. And that was because we were just trying to build one of these MVPs. We were just doing one of these betas. It was our fastest route to market, but we knew that like the inherent vice of being a Chrome extension is, if you're a designer, you are not using Figma for web, you’re using Figma for desktop. If you're like a real Notion user, you're probably using Notion for desktop, things like that.

[00:25:07] Elliott Poppel: So it was an intentional limitation. Now, launching publicly, we knew that we needed to be a Mac OS app and that's a scary first ask in an onboarding flow is to say, like, hey, you want to download this scary software from strangers on the internet? And if that's not enough already, the next step in the onboarding flow is you need to start signing into your apps. We've quite a few people, like speaking of tourists, quite a few people will sign in with their personal apps, so… or their personal accounts.

[00:25:34] Elliott Poppel: So let's say if you were to sign up for GC today, if we can convince you to download our Mac OS app, the next question you're faced with is, all right, I'm going to sign in my Google Docs. Am I going to sign in with my personal Google Docs or am I going to give these guys the keys to the kingdom and sign in with my work account? We need your work account. You don't have any comments in your personal account. You're not even going to be able to try it. You're going to have this complete null state.

[00:25:58] Elliott Poppel: Getting someone to give us, think of all those scary Google permissions. We need you to sign into Google. We need you to sign into Figma, to Notion, whatever you use. Each one of those comes with these scary permissions that they're in a page that's not hosted by us. We can't control the language. Google's is the worst. You can't even control. With Google, it's like read, write, edit, delete, throw away. It's insane how they word it. Rightfully so. But getting people through those steps to a point where we start when they visit our website, they download, sign up, and set up, getting you to a point where you're set up and you actually have an account that you can use, where you actually could try us and could activate, that's what's hard for us right now.

[00:26:36] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I don't think it's only that as well, like, as you're talking through my mind is also thinking about legal and security. And like if you're a company and trying to roll these things out, especially like with all the different integrations, and like you say, giving the keys to the kingdom, like you'll be met with a lot of scrutiny as well. I think on that end from privacy. It's funny you mentioned, like you started with the Chrome extension, because that was my first like, thought in mind.

[00:26:59] Andrew Michael: It would be, like, amazing just to have it as like the empty screen when you open up a new Chrome window, and then you have access to it because I've also played around with Chrome extensions before and could see it as being an interesting user experience, but also see how all these different desktop apps then become a limiting factor to be able to work properly and efficiently with them.

[00:27:19] Elliott Poppel: Chrome extensions are also sketchy. We ran into the same issues that we have. There are some cool Chrome extensions out there, but if you go to the Chrome web store, there's a lot of sketchy stuff that it's not a good app store to be hanging out in. So there were pros and cons to us being there.

[00:27:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think, yeah, from a trust perspective as well, like it's a lot harder to get things passed in that domain. Yeah, so I think you definitely, it sounds like, have a challenge when it comes to your setup moments and like integrating with all these tools and services. Maybe what's one thing that surprised you going through this process now and one thing you think you're doing well when it comes to enabling people to get set up faster?

[00:27:58] Elliott Poppel: The thing that surprises me most is we put a lot of effort into making it so GC could be adopted as a single player tool. What I mean by that is that this isn't like Slack where on day one, you need your entire team to sign up or there's no value there. This is like email. This is like Superhuman. We're like, I as an individual can sign up for Superhuman and I don't care what email you use. I have superpowers and you don't and maybe eventually you'll want them too. But we invested a lot in making it so that I can adopt it as an individual.

[00:28:27] Elliott Poppel: We've had so much trouble communicating that. It's a positioning problem. Where it's, people don't think of comments or updates or these notifications like these collaborative features as single player, they inherently seem like something that's team based. So one of the recent changes was in addition to having the ability to sign up as an individual on the website, you have the ability to schedule a demo. And it's the start of what appears to be, like a team or like, B2B sales process.

[00:28:56] Elliott Poppel: And my goal isn't to sell anyone. My goal is to have an escape hatch for if you say like, Oh, no, I need my team to try this. That will get you on that demo and we'll say, well, actually, you can try it right now. Let's set it up together and we can get your teammates on if you like it. That's new. We'd literally only put that in the product late last week. But so far, so good. I think I need to dial in the language there. I will admit I'm nervous that now I'm nervous that by putting that demo button that it's pulling away from people, it could be signing up as an individual.

[00:29:27] Elliott Poppel: But that's been one of the biggest positioning problems. And it's something that I thought was going to be such a… such an asset to us of making a single player from the start. And it's turned out to be such a, just a complicated rat's nest of like, how do people interpret this? How do people feel about using a tool like this?

[00:29:46] Andrew Michael: It definitely is an interesting, like perspective as well, because like in my mind, although I see like the big benefits of like me as an individual, just going in and using it by myself, like I wouldn't see it as a tool that I would go and just purchase for myself with the team. I would see it as something like the ops team would come in and say, hey everyone, you're drowning in all these notifications, not keeping up with what's going on. We're going to get you set up with this tool and now you can have a streamlined approach to it.

[00:30:17] Andrew Michael: So, while I see the points on the single player mode, I also see from a business perspective and actually getting B2B companies purchasing the software, that feels like the natural path that it would take as well.

[00:30:31] Elliott Poppel: Yeah, and that's what we're headed towards. We're kind of playing the Calendly or the Cal.com playbook where the idea was, give away the tool for individuals for free and then eventually you sell to their team as a way to give admin controls and signal sign-on. There's additional functionality for the users, but it's mostly about that admin level control that people–

[00:30:53] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think it's just a weird one, though is because, like your tool is to enable them to collaborate with their team members easier in the tools where they're collaborating. Whereas like the calendar, like Calendly’s and so forth, like those are true single players. Like this is my calendar and book a time with me. It's not like a two-way thing happening really.

[00:31:14] Andrew Michael: And the same thing with, like Superhuman. There is like this email is like a single player thing. It's been known to be single player for so long, even though there's this communication thing. It was like, as you mentioned, like you're building this protocol and comments and comment is like a, it's like a mutual collaboration between parties. It just feels different.

[00:31:33] Elliott Poppel: Yeah. Yeah. It really, it's truly a feeling. I think that the phrase feels different is perfectly accurate. And it really comes down to positioning and marketing. And how do we describe this? How do we get a user to understand that this is something that they can use by themselves? That's the part of the funnel that we're playing around with most right now.

[00:31:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's an interesting challenge. And often I think like with early stage startups, like, positioning can be one of the most powerful levers for like, improving activation, improving retention, and just like framing your product in another market or going off to different segments can, like, have monumental impacts on the trajectory of the business. And it's often overlooked and like we immediately go back to, product and start iterating on, product. But really like it could just be the way we're communicating about the product.

[00:32:19] Elliott Poppel: I totally agree. It's like one of the things that I've really tried to hammer home with our team is that, if you remember the movie Field of Dreams and them saying, like, if you build it, they will come. That's not true. We're not going to solve this problem by building more product. We need to get people to come and figuring out how do we approach that is what we're spending most of our time.

[00:32:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, distribution is like, king now in this next wave of compute, because anybody can build, product now and it's become so big, so easy to do. Like if you have a Morton distribution. Like I think that's how you stay ahead today.

[00:32:57] Elliott Poppel: For sure.

[00:32:59] Andrew Michael: Now, Elliott, I want to make sure, we're running out of time now. So I want to make sure I ask you a question I ask every guest, what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:33:09] Elliott Poppel: It's a really good question. I think I wish I understood the importance of thinking of things in terms of new user acquisition and the flywheels to grow more users. I think too often earlier in my career, I was always focused on just one of those and didn't think of them as this system of an on-ramp and then this flywheel that could be started. I think now, very thoughtful around, what are the ways that we acquire users, what are the ways that we engage and retain users, but also try to get our users to get more users.

[00:33:41] Elliott Poppel: I think I was really naive to that earlier in my career and spent way too much time focused on, how do I get this one user? How do I get a one, new user acquisition and not thinking of it as an overarching system? And with this startup, it's, we've taken that into account from the start.

[00:33:56] Elliott Poppel: We've, I think, like to that point of what's the difference between a first-time founder and a third-time founder, understanding that distribution is everything, that go-to-market is everything. We built this product with product-led growth in mind with how we would acquire and engage, retain and grow users in mind from the start.

[00:34:13] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Like, obviously, we'll leave whatever we discussed today in the show notes for them to pick up there. But anything you want to drop off today?

[00:34:27] Elliott Poppel: No, I don't think so. Thanks for listening. If you've got any ideas on any of what we're talking about, by no means do I feel like I'm an expert or have all the ideas. There's a lot of fun problems to solve here. Reach out. I'd love to chat to you about them.

[00:34:38] Andrew Michael: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Elliott, and I wish you best of luck now going forward and into the new year.

[00:34:43] Elliott Poppel: Thanks a lot, Andrew. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

[00:34:45] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:34:48] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:35:14] Andrew Michael: If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.