I'm Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team - Ask me anything!

It's been super interesting. Right now, about 6 months after launching the monthly subscription model ($65/mo per manager), we're doing about 50% the monthly revenue we used to do with our one-time pricing model ($100 per person, one-time, for life). We're on pace to catch up + surpass what we were doing with our one-time pricing model by end of year.

Perhaps most notably, our new monthly subscription model has definitely made acquisition much easier – our conversion rate is at least 5X what we used to do when we were on one-time pricing.

However, LTV will be interesting to watch. We had an average LTV of $1,900 with the one-time pricing model, so I'm curious to learn how our new pricing model will stack up in that regard. Because we're only six months in, it's too early to tell on that front.

Short answer: By shipping it :-)

Longer (not so snarky!) answer: We did a few things prior to the ultimate test of validation of shipping KYT...

We launched The Watercooler, our online community for managers, in late 2017 with the idea that (1) it might be madly useful to folks and (2) we may discover a market need that we haven't and others haven't solved yet (i.e., new managers who want to become better). We quickly got to over 1,000 members in less than a year, with thousands of conversation threads, from folks all over the world. And that's when the lightbulb first went off of "Hmm, is the market different from what we thought it was?".

I then started writing blog posts, specifically around the biggest challenges that new managers face (vs. CEOs, which was our original audience) – and started consistently seeing higher traffic and shares on those pieces.

I then started writing and publishing guides, based on survey data, on topics like "Guide to One-on-One Meetings" and a "Guide to Building Trust" – and started selling them. The sales numbers from those experiments surpassed our original expectations and further validated for us that new managers are hungry for knowledge/education around those topics and willing to pay for it. We eventually ended up rolling those guides into the KYT product itself, because they proved to be so valuable for people.

We also conducted a bunch of interviews with current customers and new managers who we imagined might be our "ideal customer" for KYT. Their responses were formative for us validating our initial impressions of the market and thinking through how our new product, KYT, could best serve them.

All that being said, I've always been of the belief that you really never know if something is going to work unless you do it. You can do all the user interviews, market analysis, etc. But the ultimate test of validation is: Will people pay you for your product?

So, shipping KYT itself, and having people pay for it has been the truest test of validation for us.

I so appreciate this question. Though, I might disagree with the framing of it :-)

I don't see maximizing impact with a more healthy balanced work + personal life as being at opposite ends of the spectrum or a binary choice to be made. In fact, I see choosing to have a slower, healthier work + personal life as in fact potentially furthering your ability to make an impact in the way you most desire.

I can only speak for myself, of course. And for myself, when I reflect on my life, I've noticed that the times when I've been able to create the deepest impact are when I myself have found a relaxed state of focus. (That is, when people have changed their behavior + improved their work lives because of my writing, speaking, or using our product.) I'm not pushing too hard, and I'm not in a frenetic state of "must do everything and be at 100 at all times."

Also "less impact" to me doesn't equate to helping less people. Say you dramatically change the life of one or two people. That arguably could have more impact than slightly influencing the lives of 1MM people. Broad and shallow doesn't necessarily mean more meaningful.

Ultimately, I think the most important questions to ask when you consider what kind of problem you want to solve and how you want to solve it, is (1) What does meaningful impact look like to you? (2) In what environment and personal state (mental, emotional, physiological) do you personally feel able to deliver that impact?

To your point, each person's answer will be different. But I think asking those questions to find your own answer is key.

We built the new product, Know Your Team, in about seven months. It was just myself (writing all content + copy + product methodology) and our CTO Daniel Lopes (designing + coding... everything). It took a lot less time in that we had the foundation of our previous product, Know Your Company, to build off from. We knew we had to ship it before the end of the year (2018), so gave ourselves, the seven months and essentially forced ourselves to feel like it was ready by that time :-)

Thanks for the kind words!

The biggest clues for us to refocus the product were...

(1) Our online community for leaders took off. We’d launched our Watercooler community in October 2017, to help managers learn from each other. More than 200 people signed up for it in the first month. (Today we have well over 1,000 members.)

(2) Our writing about leadership took off. The writing I’d been doing on our blog increased our organic traffic by 3X in a month’s time. It would go on to increase by 20X over the next six months.

(3) Our software sales went down. Our sales, however, did not increase. Not 20X. Not 3X. In fact, sales were fairly flat in 2017, if not dropping during some months.

In retrospect, the clues were quite obvious 🙈

In the beginning, when we first spun-out of Basecamp, they were very generous with letting us write on our their blog, Signal v. Noise.

Other than that, we very much had to build up our own audience, ourselves.

For the first two years, I was focused first primary on speaking engagements. This was for a few reasons...

(1) You get directly in front of your customers. Fast. Instead of waiting around for potential customers to find us, speaking enabled me to go to where our potential customers already were.

(2) You build trust and credibility with your customer. At its core, selling is about trust. The person who’s buying from you needs to trust you — that you’re an expert, that you’ll deliver on your promise. What better way to establish that trust, especially as a young company, than to have a customer watch you speak.

(3) You hone in on your messaging. This is perhaps the biggest benefit I found in speaking, when we were first marketing the company. You have the most ripe opportunity to test your messaging with a live in-the-flesh audience, and refine your talking points firsthand.

(4) It's different. Speaking is a medium that stands out. You’re able to showcase a bit more of your personality, your emotion, who you are.

Obviously, though, speaking doesn't scale :-) So after the first few years of building a baseline of credibility, initial audience, refinement of our message, we then focused almost exclusively on SEO by writing on our blog.

There are no real "tricks" with the way we approach SEO: I write every single blog post myself, and simply pay attention to key words that are high volume and low competition. Doing that consistently over the past 3 years has put us in the position we are today: We do zero paid marketing, all our customers come from SEO, and our organic traffic grows 5% - 30% each month.

The very first customers came from my personal network. I emailed every single CEO I knew in Chicago and asked to give them a personal demo of the product.

We also definitely had an advantage in that we're a company that was spun-out of Basecamp. As a result, many of our early customers found us by way of our association with them.

After the first year or so, our customers have always ended up finding us. This is due to our focus on content marketing (writing, speaking). Our viewpoint has always been: If we can be helpful + give valuable information to people for free, those folks will seek us out.

The very first original version of Know Your Team was actually a prototype called "Know Your Company" developed by Basecamp (makers of the product management software).

Today's version of Know Your Team, which we started building a little less than a year ago, was built by myself and our CTO Daniel Lopes.

We've always sold the product by way of content marketing: Writing on our blog, and speaking at conferences.

Haha yes! Our CTO Daniel Lopes and I both worked on the illustrations for the entire site :-)

We're only six months in with this new version of Know Your Team, so revenue + profits are a bit premature to share.

In terms of growth, our focus is exceedingly clear: (1) To improve the product itself. The version of KYT we launched six months ago was very much a v1. And after initial traction, it's clear what things we to do to make the product even better . (2) To continue to keep our site traffic + SEO growing and stable. This is how all our customers find us.

Thanks for these wonderful questions! I'll take 'em one at a time...

We have in fact grown our team, since the intro post was published :-) We recently brought on an Operations Manager (to help take things off my plate + support our marketing), and a Senior Engineer (to help take things off our CTO's plate + support engineering). So we have effectively 2X-ed our team size 😂 We finally got to the point where we needed more help and more capacity for what we want to build next. We literally hit a ceiling for what 2 people could physically do, supporting over 15,000+ people in 25 countries who use KYT every day. So we accepted a small $500K investment from Indie.vc – and that's enabled us to make those hires + give us breathing room without putting us in a risky spot as a cash-focused company.

Interestingly, the transition from KYC to KYT hasn't changed our marketing strategy too much in terms of channels. To date, SEO + content marketing has been by far our most effective acquisition channel. We've definitely changed the positioning of the product, itself, now that we're catering to new managers, instead of CEOs. I will say that I think we'll likely experiment with more partnerships as an acquisition channel, after we've spent a little time building KYT 2.0... We know there's a big opportunity, for example, for all the portfolio companies at a PE firm to be having their managers use KYT.

Your third question re: healthy teams is a doozy 😎 The biggest patterns that make-up effective, healthy teams are truly effective leaders. It's why we at KYT are so focused on helping leaders because of how high leverage they are to an entire organization's success. You could probably intuit that, but never is there an exceptional team that does NOT have an exceptional leader. The leader, for better or for worse, is the linchpin. Specifically, what that leader must capable of doing well is three things: (1) Building trust (2) Communicating honestly and (3) Creating context. I written a lot about all three topics on our KYT blog if it's of interest. (That's probably a better resource than me writing 300,000 words as a reply here hehe).

I never had a job at Basecamp – I was only a consultant for them, when I had my consulting practice coaching CEOs + company leaders.

I got introduced to Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, as the he + Basecamp were minority investors in the very first company I started (The Starter League – it's the only company they've ever invested in). I'd left the company though after they invested, so met Jason after the fact. I shared with him what I was working on and that helping leaders become better was my life-long mission, and he hired me on the spot as a consultant.

They've spun out also Highrise I believe, a CRM product. Though, I do think they're sunsetting it.