00:00:00 Enzo: I think the realization was that, again, we looked into your poor users and it was super clear that people that were using June the most were the B2B SaaS. They were like going into company profiles all the time, trying to understand how a single company was doing. They could check like 20 times a day, 20 different companies in June, right? And when you get this kind of behavior, you really start to wonder like, okay, what are they trying to achieve? Should this be done by an analytics product? Is it our purpose to do that? Or should, you know, should we tell them to do it in a customer success tool? Like, and so over time we started to think like, yeah, that's actually what analytics should be about. Like give you an aggregated number on something, whether it's a company or user or a group of users. We've leaned into that direction and end positioning

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00:00:49 VO: How do you build a habit-forming products?  How do you… Don't just guns for revenue in the door?

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00:00:56 Andrew: 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.

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00:01:08 VO: How do you build a habit forming products ? 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 bootstrap. Profitable and growing. 

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00:01:22 Andrew: 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.

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 00:01:33 Andrew: Hey, Enzo, welcome to the show. 

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00:01:35 Enzo: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me man. 

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00:01:38 Andrew: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Enzo is the CEO and founder of June, the only product analytics tool that gives you automated generated reports focused on companies. Enzo started his career in finance at Vincent and BNP Paribas before venturing on his own to found atmospherics. Following his first startup. Enzo went on to serve as a product manager at the likes of N26 Orlando and Intercom before diving back into it again at Enzo. Sorry, at Enzo, in June. So my first question for Enzo is, what has been the biggest learning from your time at atmospherics? Taking you way back now? 

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00:2:13 Enzo: Ooh, yes. Okay. That's a long time ago. That was my first entrepreneurial experience when I was in college. Yeah, that lasted for like six months. But the biggest learning was that if you try to solve a big problem or problem that doesn't exist, you can try as hard as you want and you will not get anywhere. And back then we were three co-founders. The third co-founder came up with the problem that he has seen in his previous experiences. He was more senior than us and then we tried to solve that problem. But the truth is that that wasn't really a problem and we didn't know. Yeah. And so yeah, we pushed hard but it didn't work, basically.

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00:02:53 Andrew: Didn't work. Did you do any research back then? Or did you just dove into like, “This is a problem. We believe in it. Let's go for it”?

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00:03:00 So yeah, so that's the thing. I also tried to do some research using The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and another mistake I did is that basically I used the manual and I was very scholar. Like I used just, you know, the canvas where you fill the canvas one after another and you pile them up. 

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00:03:16 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:03:16 Enzo: And the thing is, I also got lost into the methodology. Yeah. And now I'm very skeptical to spending too much time on methodologies. I'd rather learn things by doing them. So another mistake, two mistakes already.

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00:03:30 Andrew: No, it's great. Like, I think I'm asking these questions over because like I'm nodding my head. Yes. I did those things as well. Like in the early days, I remember like my, one of the first startups we did, like, we actually, ironically it was like a startup competition just went with like a few friends for the weekend and we're just messing about and we didn't even know what we wanted to do. And then there was a competition. 

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00:03:50 Andrew: You had to pick like three words from a bucket and then come up with a business idea. And then like, I think our three words we got was like clean, fast and fun. So this was like, and then we randomly came up with the idea that you could wear a bracelet and then wash and you earn points and you have fun and you made a gamified like chores or whatever.

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00:04:08 Andrew:  And we ended up coming second in the competition. So we took that as like, “Oh, this is a great idea”. People love it. And then our research was just terrible. We were just saying like, if you ordered, like one of the main questions was like, if you had to clean and you earned points and you won prizes, would you enjoy cleaning more? And like 99 people out of a hundred said yes cuz like, who wouldn't say yes, to like getting something for doing something I don't like, whatever. And just like everything was really bad the way we structured questions and everything. But I think, like you say, if you don't go through the experiences, you don't have the learnings. You don't have the scars to take it with you.

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00:04:45 Enzo: Yeah. We didn't even get that far. I think the interview questions we had were bad and biased, but 

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00:04:50 Andrew: Yeah, 

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00:04:50 Enzo: We got lost even before that, like trying to just put together too many pieces of the puzzle. 

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00:04:55 Andrew: Yeah.

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00:04:55 Enzo: And uh, and we didn't even drill down into the, you know, the discovery 

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00:04:50 Andrew: Discovery. 

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00:04:51 Enzo: Our idea was really bad. We wanted to build a Spotify for brick and mortars. Like it sounds as ridiculous as the, as the IDs and the words got into this startup contest. Right? 

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00:05:13 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:05:13 Enzo: But that was the actual project. Like let's bring, you know, a SaaS: inside the shops. 

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00:05:18 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:05:18 Enzo: So they can, you know, respect the brand identity with music. Like, and you know, what was the main, one of the, another blocker we found is that basically using internet in shops, it's really a problem because they use the bandwidth of the internet to-

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00:05:36 Enzo: Yeah. 

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00:05:36 Enzo: You know, update the stocks and update, you know, the employee's agendas and things like that. And they really don't want you to saturate the channels. So, you know

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00:05:45 Andrew:  yeah. 

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00:05:45 Enzo: So, you know. 

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00:05:46 Andrew: Yeah.

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00:05:48 Enzo: It was not even feasible. That's how bad back then the discovery was.

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00:05:50 Andrew:  Yeah. I think obviously things change with the intended and stuff get better, but Yeah. Nice. So obviously, a lot of learnings along the way. I mentioned as well you joined companies like N26 Zalando and Intercom and what was your time at like, these are like three pretty iconic companies I think when it comes to SaaS: and e-commerce as well. in particular, I'm interested as well, like maybe in the contrast and like what would you say was like one learning that you maybe took away from Zalando and one learning you took away from Intercom that you're bringing now That end to June?

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00:06:22 Enzo: Yeah, so there were very different experiences. You're totally right. I think the first thing was maybe the, you know, the expertise in data that actually turned out to be, you know, June at some point. So yeah, in all the companies I work for, I had the same problem with data. They had different tools and different stacks and different ways of exploring data, but every time there was a friction or something too complex for me to really, you know, be satisfied. 

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00:06:48 Enzo: So that's, that's one thing I would say, figure out that after multiple experiences that the problem isn't solved. In my first job, I thought my first company N26, the first company I worked for as a product person, I thought they had the wrong tooling. Right? And then in my second experience I thought the same. I was like, okay, that's two companies now and they're really doing really well, but for some reason they didn't get it right on the data side.

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00:07:17 Enzo:  Right. And then when I joined Intercom, which I, you know, compare sometime to like the Champions League of product management just because I think they're really, really great. And I also faced the same problem with the data tools. I thought like, okay, so that's not specific to the companies I work for. It's actually the space which has a problem. And so that was the tipping point and that's about when my co-founder and  we decided to left in Intercom to start the company that's for the, you know, domain expertise.

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00:07:44 Enzo: Now about the skills. I think what I learned at Intercom, sorry, at Zalando is a huge company. Back then there were 5,000 people in tech. And so every time you want to touch something, you would wanna build something in your product. You are touching a lot of microservices, a lot of, you're stepping on other product teams' toes literally.

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00:08:04 Enzo: And so you really have to learn how to influence people. And you know, that was the main learning. Like I would, you know, if I wanted my team to do something, I would've to take the bus, go in another building, find a PM in charge of another feature, and understand, you know, how the APIs work, come back, share the stuff with my engineer and then we could build the thing. Right. And then of course trying to align the roadmaps, which was really, really hard. That's the biggest learning at Zalando and that's actually one of the reasons why I recommend a lot of people to go through a huge company to get this skill.

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00:08:37 Andrew: Yeah.

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00:08:39 Enzo: At Intercom. Yeah. At Intercom, the main learning is really to be, you know, first use, first principles to start from the problem. I think Intercom is great at, you know, always trying to understand really, really hard what is happening in people's life so that they want to use their product. So they're big fans of, you know, like the job to be done framework and you know, problem statement and things like that. You can't get anything prioritized at Intercom if you don't go through that exercise, which is I think a very honest intellectually speaking exercise. 

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00:09:13 Andrew: Yeah.

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00:09:13 Enzo: And which also prevents you from doing the mistake I did in my first company, which is to solve a problem that doesn't exist. So that's something that's, you know, has been at the root of our company killer since then. And it's very hard to do it. Like you can read as many books as you want about jobs to be done. If you are not forced to adopt this framework in your day-to-day, it's very, very hard to understand how it works in practice.

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00:09:38 Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. It's super, super powerful. I think jobs to be done when done right. And like you said, if you, you don't know about it, like you're really, really missing out. I think from the beginning, one of the things that always struck me about Intercom is their product marketing always seemed to be spot on. Like I think they probably, I'd say Intercom and Slack are like the two companies that come to mind from a product marketing perspective. 

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00:10:03 Andrew: And it, it's probably like you're saying really following this framework of the jobs to be done, like through the product discovery phase and then getting to by the time you get to launch is really well defined, really good understanding what are the user's jobs, what are they trying to get done, what are their pain points? And like starting from that as opposed to thinking feature first. So going back to first principles. Love it. A hundred

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00:10:23 Enzo: A hundred Percent. We could talk about for hours about how Intercom involves the product marketing. 

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00:10:29 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:10:29 Enzo:In the shaping of a feature. There is something very interesting, maybe I can touch a word on that. 

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00:10:33 Andrew: Yeah, yeah. 

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00:10:33 Enzo: Basically product marketing is not part of the product team at Intercom, but it's almost part of it. And so as you're shaping the roadmap, product marketing gets involved, give feedback what they have seen, what they've heard. And when you're shaping the feature, when you're scoping the feature you're gonna build, product marketing is actually around the table saying, “Hey, you know, I think that if you were to build it that way, maybe I could market it in a better way”. 

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00:10:59 Andrew: Yeah

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00:11:00 Enzo: And this kind of conversations, they're gold because then you might tweak something very tiny that will help, you know, the positioning or the marketing of that feature literally. 

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00:11:10 Andrew:Yeah.

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00:11:10 Enzo: And, and that's I think what you're talking about, what I hear when you said they nailed it.

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00:11:14 Andrew: They nailed it. Yeah. That's, it's awesome to hear as well ‘cause like definitely I think like when it comes to those two companies, the choice, when you arrive on the site, you know exactly what you're getting. Like you receive an email from either of them, like it's always really clear to the points. Like I think they do a fantastic job then. 

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00:11:34 Andrew: So you said obviously like these experiences, these problems also you had is all with access to data at these companies, they turned you to starting June. Give us a little bit of background, like what does you do exactly. I gave a very brief overview, but why do you think what you're building is gonna solve the problem for Enzo at N 26 Zalando, Intercom?

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00:11:54 Enzo: Yeah, so it's not gonna solve the problem for Enzo in all these companies yet, but it will over time. I believe. So quick context. When I was at N 26, we were using a BI tool, so we had to learn SQL. I learned SQL. I became pretty good at it, but never great, right? And then when I left at Intercom, we were using, sorry, at Zalando, we were using Google Analytics. It was very simple, everyone used it, but it's very limiting. 

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00:12:22 Enzo:And the main limitation is you can't differentiate people A versus people B, you can't really identify these people. Right. And this is because Google Analytics is used on so many websites, they can't really go into that, you know, that world. And so, you know, simple streamline plug and play, but limiting, right? And the BI tool was the opposite, very complete.

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00:12:44 Enzo: You could do whatever you want, but a lot of heavy lifting. Right? And then at Intercom we use a tool called Amplitude, which is a product analytics, and again, it was like a BI tool, but for product teams. So you had to explore your data, you had to, you know, you needed the right adversities or questions, somewhere you can look at. 

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00:13:03 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:13:03 Enzo: But then of course the graphs were very tailored to product use cases. So you had a retention graph, a funnel, things like that. But it was taking a lot of, you know, a lot of work and a lot of expertise to get anywhere. So kind of this is kind of like the moment when my co-founder and I started to think about whether they could be a steroid option, something turnkey and powerful. And that's what June is about.

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00:13:27 Enzo: June is a plug and play product analytics for B2B SaaS:. So basically it's automatically analyzes things for you, such as your active users, your features, which one is adapted the most, and so on. And as you said, it's for B2B SaaS:, meaning that basically it doesn't help you understand how many people click on a button, but it helps you understand the health of an account. It helps you pass this information to success teams, sales teams, things like that to make sure that you're activating, retaining accounts and monetizing them. So it's a very different philosophy than traditional prokinetic in a way.

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00:14:01 Enzo: That's why I think I'm very excited about is I think, you know, couple of years ago, product building was very technical. In the product team you would've mostly technical people like the Google PM, the engineers with a very data-like a very heavy background in engineering and so on. I think now a lot of people are generalists. I was myself a generalist. I come from a business background, as you said, I studied finance. I think a lot of designers did just a bootcamp and  they may be a very good, you know, designers, same with engineers. And so I think this new generation of people need to be equipped with also a new generation of tools that is a lot more fitting their way of thinking and their way of working. 

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00:14:47 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:14:47 Enzo: Since June. 

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00:14:50 Andrew: Yeah, I see that As well. Like, I think definitely like if I look throughout the organization as well, previously where I was at Hotjar, obviously we had all the sophisticated tools out there, but generally like people wanted to see a few specific reports that can easily be sort of plug and play, and then that's your go-to. And then afterwards you can sort of figure out ways to make things more powerful. 

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00:15:10 Andrew: The one thing that I mentioned at the start of the show that I was also really impressed with was like, and intrigued by as well was like the way that you launched June. And I've obviously, I don't think it's secret on the show, but I've been a big fan of segment analytics. I think it provides some really powerful capabilities. And I think originally you launched just purely as a segment integration. Like maybe you can talk us through a little bit about how you launched June and how you think it really helped accelerate your path to market.

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00:15:39 Enzo: Yep, a hundred percent. I'm also big fan of Segment. So in the early days of June, let me take a step into the past. So at the very beginning of June, we did a lot of exploration, a lot of discovery. I think we interviewed 86 people. We had a good understanding of everything that was broken into the analytics space. And one thing that came many times was that tracking things was very complex. 

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00:16:07 Enzo: So actually the first two iterations of June were tracking a way, a better way to track things in your product. And the product was only doing that. We didn't really hit or market or we had a bit of traction but didn't feel we could monetize. And so over time what we ended up doing is building an analytics product. And when we were doing that, we thought it would be kind of like a big bed because there are a lot of data visualization tools in the space.

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00:16:32 Enzo: And so we wanted to be clear that we wanted to try to solve some problems and make sure that we were solving the right problems. So at this moment of time, we were like, okay, let's not build the tracking at all. Let's build the data of these and let's validate our assumption that people have data, but that this sits on it. And so at this moment we're looking into ways to plug into an existing data stream without having to build it. 

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00:16:57 Enzo: And this is about when Segment came out as the leading customer. That's a platform leading, meaning they have the most customers. And so for us to kind of, you know, piggy pack on someone else's customer base, it seems like it was the, the best place we could get started. There were two other reasons why we started with Segment. The first one is because it's quite an expensive product.

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00:17:18 Enzo: We call this, we call it a best in breed product, meaning that people that buy it know it's a bit more expensive, but they want to have something better. And we wanted June to be also the best in breed product, so kind of our ICP were compatible. And the third reason was really just scoping the reason we didn't have much entering resources. We just raised, I think a couple of hundred thousand bucks of proceeds and we couldn't afford to build both the Dynamics product and the tracking product. 

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00:17:45 Enzo: So we started with Segment, this allowed us to build a beta in six months, launch it on the product end and get the first feedback and the first traffic on the product. And then what happened over time is that we expanded to other CDPs, Rudderstack and Freshpaint, which were actually nice enough to build on top of June. So we didn't have to push, put investment into that, which was great. 

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00:18:08 Enzo: And after some time we ended up building all tracking because there was a lot of people coming to June and signing up that didn't have one of the CDP. And so of course we wanted to make sure we could, you know, deliver product to them

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00:18:20 Andrew: Amazon.

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00:18:22 Enzo: So it's something about the product maybe I can rack it up. 

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00:18:27 Andrerw: Yeah, 

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00:18:27 Enzo: It's something about June, which is we always try to scope things as small. You know, like the, we call it the copycat, that's Intercom. It's kind of like this MVP concept. 

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00:18:37 Andrew: Yeah. 

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00:18:37 Enzo: We always try to scope things down as much as we can and launch them and then learn, learn from them

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00:18:40 Andrew: From it. Very cool. Yeah, and definitely I think obviously it's much, much faster, as you said, and much less resources tapping into like half of the components already been solved for you. And you said like, let's see, you're sitting on data who wants to take advantage of that? And then moving from there. 

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00: 18:57 Andrew: The thing as well, I think that's interesting about this is like you said, the positioning of the product, and I noticed as well like it changed over time. So maybe you could let it, what was like the first positioning when you launched that MVP and at Segment and like how has that changed from where you are today?

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00:19:16 Enzo: Yeah, so when we launched the first version on product end, we called it June 1.0, and the positioning was what we call the Instant antics on top of Segment. So the positioning was really heavily about being plug and play and of course that we're on top of Segment. And that was really a seducing value prop because if you have Segment and now there is this product which is dedicated to your tech stack, it's like, you know, it seems like it's gonna be on purpose, and so it should work in a better way, right? 

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00:19:46 Enzo: Which was the case, like we adapted the old product to the spec of segments. That was 1.0.  2.0 was we started to have multiple personalized using June. And so we started, because the product was so simple, we started to get a lot of people attracted to June. And so not only product managers, not only founders, but like customer success, sales, gross marketers.

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00:20:08 Enzo: And so we thought that, and a lot of product led companies, you know, companies were basically the product motion was the center of the company motion. And that's why all these personas were attracted. And for 2.0 when we launched our product positioning was Product Analytics. So we were like, okay, if people are excited about this and we're building for them, let's just position that. 

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00:20:31 Enzo: So the, I think the good thing about this positioning is that a lot of like product and MO companies kind of identify in June and started to sign up for that. The problem is though that product cloud is a very blurry word, and there are many, many ways to do product Cloud. And also I think back then it was a bit of a fancy word. And so it was not like a really strong way to identify.

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00:20:53 Enzo: We also noticed that a lot of, you know, competitors in the space started to use product led, even though their customer, most of their customers were not product led. And so kind of the, you know, the value of that word got diluted. So we wanted to move away from it during 3.0, which we launched, I believe less than a month ago, is the new way to do prokinetics. And then the subtitle is about B2B SaaS:

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 00:21:18 Enzo: So I think with 3.0, what we really realize is that people start using Join as a product. It's one of the pain that they have. So let's call a dog a dog, let's be a bit more ambitious about what's different. What's different is that we're kind of reinventing the way you should do that job. So let's just put it out and say the new way and then build with SaaS that turn out to be our best. I target Segment or ICP and we've built a lot for them. So we also decided to pull it, but not in the headline, which is a bit more inspiring, but rather in the subtitle, which is a bit more descriptive.

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00:21:53 Andrew: And how have you seen sort of these changes, obviously these changes in positioning have come from things like onboarding, learning from new users and things. So at each iteration, like what has been some of the key learnings or maybe some of the usage behaviors that you've seen change as a result of the way you've been positioning the product?

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00:22:13 Enzo: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's probably one of the hardest things. So what we've always been doing is we've always looked into the outliers on our product, the people that use it the most, the hardcore users. And then we've always analyzed these people to understand A, if they were the people we wanted to build for, so if they were like, you know, it was a good reason to build for them, and B, if it was another segment, then who would it be? 

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00:22:39 Enzo And, and then make sure we deliver the value for these people. So I think between 1.0 and 2.0, what we started to do is we started to build more than just for the product issue cases. And then we started to see these kind of poor users, poor companies that were using June for more than prokinetics. And so it was very excited. These people were the poor users because they were like a huge seat extension and they were becoming more often because they had more reasons to come, right?

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00:23:05 Enzo: And kind of the tool was this cockpit for the company to make sure they were, you know, steering in the right direction. So, you know, we were mission critical and many people knew about us and used us, so we thought like, okay, that's the kind of people we want to build for, right? That was the realization between 1.0 and 2.0. 

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00:23:24 Enzo: And between two and three, I think the realization was that again, we looked into your poor users and it was super clear that people that were using June the most were the B2B SaaS:. They were like going into company profiles all the time trying to understand how a single company was doing. They could check like 20 times a day, 20 different companies in June, right? And, and when you get this kind of behavior, you really start to wonder like, okay, what are they trying to achieve?

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00:23:50 Enzo: Should this be done by an analytics product? Is it our purpose to do that? Or should, you know, should we tell them to do it in a customer success tool? Like, and, and so over time we start to think like, yeah, that's actually what analytics should be about. Like give you an aggregating number on something, whether it's a company or user or a group of users. And so we've leaned into that direction and positioning something that maybe 

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00:24:14 Enzo: I want to share that we didn't know when we started on Segment that we would attract a lot of B2B business. And I think it's, I don't know if it's a coincidence or if it's the result of, you know, this early scoping decision we discussed a few minutes ago. Basically because we had so many B2B SaaS:, we started to have a lot of B2B SaaS: feedback.

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00:24:35 Andrew: Yeah

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00:24:35 Enzo: So we built a lot more for them then it attracted a lot more of [crosstalk]

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00:24:38 Enzo:  Exactly.

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00:24:41 Andrew: This is an interesting one as well. Like I think the challenges were like, I think when you also think about who your ideal customer profile is, and especially when you are analyzing usage behavior and seeing who's the most active and who's using your product the most is that you end up building features for them and you end up attracting them. 

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00:24:59 Andrew: And like I think your ideal customers, not necessarily the people that you have today, that probably like what you have is just a representation of who you've been marketing to and the product that you've built, but it may not necessarily be the best market that you're going after as well. And I think that's also like a very hard thing that like through panel studies and things like this, I think that's where you can understand, okay, like those that don't have a bias and understand your product perception, like you can really dig into, but we do tend to go in these loops where we like get stuck on feedback.

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00:25:26 Andrew: We really wanna know. That's why I actually like… I don't know, Rahul Vohra from Superhuman, we had him on the show and I really loved that episode where he talked about like their methodology to figure out, iterate the way to product market fits, which was essentially like they asked a question like, how would you feel if you could no longer use, uh, superhuman? And the second follow up question was, what is the main use case that you used the product for? 

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00:25:50 Andrew: And then if their main use case that they selected aligned with the main use case they were building for, then they followed up on their feedback. Like if they were super happy, there was good, but if those were like, what can we improve? They only segmented their feedback in that way in the sense that they had a good strong hypothesis and they understood what their problems they were trying to solve essentially. And instead of taking the feedback from everyone or taking the feedback from the most active users, they took the feedback from what they believed was gonna be the biggest problem.

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00:26:20 Andrew: I think  there's good and bad to that. Like there's a strong belief  and that's so like sometimes you really need to go with it, but at the same time, a lot of people tell you always listen to your customers, like take their feedback. So it's interesting, like all you've come to this realization as well on your side

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00:26:35 Enzo: His framework is amazing. I think  we're using it a lot actually. We have a sequence with Intercom every two months where we send exactly the questions that, uh, I mean the questions are, they’re not coming from Raul, I believe they come from-

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00:26:49 Andrew: Yeah. The mom test, Patrick?

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 00:26:51 Enzo: No, they're

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 00:26:52 From the books. The mom test.

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 00:26:54 No, the guy who who created [inaudible] channel

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 00:26:58 Yeah.

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 00:27:00 Enzo: [inaudible] Wrote that, but Rahul is great because he systematized the approach exactly the way you described it. 

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00:27:05 Andrew: Yeah.

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00:27:05 Enzo: we use it at Intercom. At June we use it and it's eye opening. It's eye opening. The only thing I'm a bit skeptical about is the 40% threshold. Like June has 40%. I don't think we have the next explosive PNF yet. Right. So-

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00:27:22 Andrew: Yeah

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00:27:23 Enzo: I don't have a lot of experience with this survey, but I would be kind of like, 

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00:27:27 Andrew: Yeah

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00:27:27 Enzo: Be careful. I would take it with a pinch of salt, let's say

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00:27:30 Andrew: To take it. Yeah, I think this is like the general premise as well of the show in the sense that like, you hear these best practices and things to follow, but like we, as you alluded to show, unless you like get started, do things and learn, like you don't really know, like you can't just take the theory for theory. Like you need to tear in the trenches and then figure things out cuz yeah. Yes.

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00:27:50 Enzo: Something maybe I can do, to add out, add on top of that. I think there is always a lagging effect between what you built and when you're gonna position on it and when people are gonna adopt it as the main use case in your product. Right? And we had this great conversation yesterday with my co-founder with a man called [inaudible]. He's one of the guy who wrote a lot about job to be done.

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00:28:14 Andrew: Yeah

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00:28:14 Enzo: He theorized that back then with Clay Christen and things like that. And like he said, like, you know, it takes time to build things, it takes time to package them together and then there will be a lagging effect. It will take time for people to start using these things if they ever find out about them, first of all. And then to adopt them as the main use case, right? 

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00:28:37 Enzo: So I think it's, uh, it's one of the reasons also why you were seeing that for Jude and so many companies. It's because you know what used to be an edge case in your product might be something you're gonna lean into built for and become the main use case, but like six months later, right? And it's totally fine. It's the nature of a product.

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00:28:54 Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with that. It does take time to like, even if you are working on a problem and you build a product, like it's very rare that you're gonna nail it the first time round. Like it takes iterating and uh, tracks like fine tuning that product to get to the point where you're satisfying customers effectively. I see we’re you're running up on time though, so I wanna make sure I have time for two questions asked by guests.

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00:29:17 Andrew: First question. Hypothetical scenario, you join a new company channel, retention's not doing good at this company, CEO comes to you and says, “Hey Enzo, you're in charge, you've gotta fix it. You've got 90 days”. What do you do? Trick is like, you're not gonna tell me I'm gonna go look at the data and figure out the problem. I'm gonna speak to customers there. You're just gonna take a tactic that you've seen work at a previous company and run with that blindly hoping that it works. What would you do?

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00:29:42 Enzo:I will set up an activation team. So I would put like people dedicated to that problem and that team could be up to 50% of the RnD. Like I would go full fully on that 50% of the resources. And honestly without the data and the tactics, because I wouldn't know the industry or I wouldn't have feedback or background, I would probably just throw spaghetti at the wall and see which ones stick. 

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00:30:08 Andrew: Interesting. 

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00:30:08 Enzo: It's a terrible idea, right?

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00:30:10 Andrew: Yeah

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00:30:10 Enzo: But even the context you're giving me, I have no, I have no other choice.

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00:30:13 Andrew: No, I think the focus on activation itself is like the, the main tactic from that perspective. And I think it's something like a lot of commentary people here at Churn Retention, they immediately say like, let me go and speak to people who've just churned and found out why and see what I can fix. But like really the best way to do it is focusing on activation, getting users up to speed. And I think specifically like an early stage startup, because we spend so much time building the product and building features and not enough time focusing on news onboarding and activation and like, those are really the things that make such a huge difference at the end of the day to retention ultimately

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00:30:47 Enzo: A hundred percent I think activation and retention are two sides of the same coin. People retain if they activate right, otherwise they don't stay at all. Not even the first session.

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00:30:57 Andrew: Yeah, it's the first input. Nice. What's one thing that you know today about general retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

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00:31:05 Enzo: That’s to get to great retention, it's progressive. I thought reading articles before starting June that some people had a great retention, some people didn't. And if you have a good one, you have product market fit. If you don't, you need to change things. The truth, and we've seen that with hundreds of customers is that retention starts to be bad and then okay, and then good. And then at some point grades, it goes through layers like 5%, 10, 20, 30, 40, whatever. 

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00:31:39 Enzo: And I've seen many people giving up too early, even though they were heading in the right direction. And I've seen too many people also, uh, sticking to their guns while they should have given up. And I think there is a misconception of retention in that sense in the market and I'm not sure why, but it needs to be fixed.

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00:32:00 Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think at the early stage it's really important to understand that. And I think the challenge as well is because like when you're so early, you have so limited data as well and like, uh, depending on the number of customers that you have, like one or two or three can make a big difference to the actual output metrics. So it's like very, you need to also focus very qualitatively, I think at the early stage to get a good sense and understanding rather than just the numbers alone.

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00:32:24 Enzo: Exactly, exactly. If you like, if you have three customers, but they have very different ICPs and two churn. I mean you maybe have like a hundred percent retention on the right icp, you need to know. That's right. It's very tough. It's very tough.

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 00:32:35 Andrew: Just getting more of those people is gonna solve it.

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00:32:39 Andrew:  Nice. It's been a pleasure seeing you today, Andrew. Is there any other final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with before you drop off today? 

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00:32:45 Enzo: Not really. They can find me online. I'm very, very open to communicate and respond to requests and so on. Like I'm a nervous stage founder. I've been through a lot of questioning too, so yeah, they can reach me out on social media if they want. 

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00:33:00 Andrew: Awesome. We'll definitely make sure to leave any links in the show notes and thanks again for joining. Wish Your best of luck now going forward. 

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00: 33:09 Enzo: Thanks Andrew. Enjoy. likewise man. Thank you. 

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00:33:15 Andrew: Thanks. Cheers.

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00:33:22 Andrew: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew, Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you're 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. 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 at 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.

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