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Unsolicited Feedback — Technology
Unsolicited Feedback

Tired of interview podcasts? Us too. That’s why we created Unsolicited Feedback – the podcast that should have come out 5 years ago, but we’re making it anyway. In this podcast, Brian Balfour (Reforge, HubSpot), Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack) and friends provide unfiltered feedback on the products they actually use, along with key product lessons.

Essentially, we’re taking the conversations that happen between experts at invite-only happy-hours and delivering them to the podcast platform of your choice.

Although no one asked for their opinions, they’re sharing them. It’s like eating Goodles when you want Kraft Mac n Cheese, or Olipop when you want Pepsi – it feels wrong, yet so right.

Each week, they analyze recent announcements, features, and releases across product and growth. The hosts make predictions about where Threads and Twitter will be in a year, and analyze unparalleled growth loops at LinkedIn. They give respect where it’s due, but also deliver tear-downs when the writing’s on the wall. Sorry, not sorry!

Latest Episodes:

Adam Fishman (Product Advisor) talks Figma for Devs, Zoom’s COVID product strategy, and Twitter's Creator Payouts Sep 14, 2023

Show notes

This week, we have special guest Adam Fishman, original proclaimed Growth Daddy (defined as a father and a growth expert), a Reforge mainstay, and formerly of Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods.

Today he and our hosts are discussing Figma for Dev, Zoom’s COVID strategy, and Twitter’s Creator Payouts.

🎨→ ⌨️ Figma for Dev from Unsolicited Feedback

Figma for Dev offers deep lessons and the experts agree it’s a brilliant move.

💰 Figma unlocked unparalleled PLG through their unconventional pricing strategy: Most tools price per seat, but Figma realized that this creates unnecessary friction because when you pay per seat, there’s often approvals that need to happen to add someone. At Figma, anyone who is not editing does not incur any charges.

🚀 Now, they want to capture revenue from the audience that’s already in their funnel: In every project, there are 5-15x more engineers than designers, greatly increasing the TAM if companies now opt to pay for seats for their engineers who are already used to the platform.

🎯 Focus is the name of the game here as Figma takes a step into the Dev audience: Figma could have built a wide range of features for engineering. Figma chose to focus on the part of engineering that is closest to design.

📹 Zoom’s COVID Product Strategy:

Zoom delivers a Growth Daddy Cage Match between Fishman and Balfour, with Mosavat as the mediator.

Background: Zoom has recently launched several new products, including Zoom Apps, Zoom Events, and Zoom Video Engagement Center.

Round 1:

🐟 Fishman asks, "Is this just a spaghetti at the wall strategy? Who are they building for?"
🔎 But, Balfour commends the Product Velocity of the engineering team. Very impressive!
🔑 Mosavat errs toward Fishman in round one, pulling in a Mike Spicer quote from Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike tweeted that the right strategy is to take a series of sequential bets, not a bunch of bets across a bunch of different things because you learn more each time. Fareed feels like none of these are sequential bets.

Round 2:

🐟 Fishman zooms in on clips and basically makes the argument that it lacks all of the pizzazz and UGC magic that makes Loom successful. So combined spaghetti strategy + half-baked products, Fishman is not feeling much love for Zoom right now but challenges Balfour to prove him wrong.
🔎 Balfour decides to take the pro-zoom case! He feels this might just be the Microsoft strategy (which notably has been a successful company). Build 80% of the market and bundle it. Their strengths are tech and their sales machine. That is a winning bet. Bundle and sell when you have great tech and sales.
🐟 Fishman wonders if they are big enough to pull that off.
🔑 Mosavat sides with Fishman here. Microsoft has a billion people using 365, and by the way, is Zoom's biggest competitor with Teams. It's a bad strategy to fight Goliath with the same strategy Goliath is using. "If you don't have a navy, don't go to a sea battle."

Final Round:

🔎 Balfour suggests that strategy and execution should be separated.
🐟 Fishman disagrees, arguing that execution cannot be separated from strategy. If Figma had attempted that strategy and produced subpar products, they would have been criticized as well.
🔑 Mosavat identifies Zoom's original sin as the lack of presence or identity outside of meetings. Fareed often quits Zoom between meetings.
🔑 Fareed's lesson is to lean into what Zoom does well. However, ultimately he agrees with Balfour that Zoom is still a great business. It has the following benefits:

📉 Low acquisition cost
💻 Low R&D cost
💰 Great margins
💸 Profitable at IPO
💰 Hadn't raised much money

COVID may have created some challenges, but these five core elements remain strong.

For more analysis, the opportunity to hear Brian Balfour rap, and to hear what the trio had to say about Twitter's Creator Payouts, listen to the full episode. Like what you're hearing? Please give us a review and a subscribe.

Unsolicited Feedback on Twitter/X's Outpouring of Product Changes and the Impact of YouTube Shorts on Its Core Business. Sep 10, 2023

Show notes

📢 Hey everyone! Welcome to Unsolicited Feedback! In our debut episode, co-hosts Brian Balfour and Fareed Mosavat discuss Twitter's creator monetization and enterprise verification offerings, as well as internal fears at YouTube that their YouTube Shorts feature will cannibalize their core longer-form content.

🐤 Let's start with Twitter/X (we’re still getting used to the new name…): 🐤

🔍 Twitter's recent releases include the Creator Monetization Offering and Enterprise Verification Offering.

👍 You cannot think your way out of a revenue gap. You have to ship your way out of it. Twitter used to be stagnant from a product perspective. Now, they are taking swings at filling revenue gaps. It is okay if some of these swings inevitably fail.

👎 However, experts have reservations about these offerings:

It seems that while Twitter was fighting Threads and its own inertia, LinkedIn ate Twitter's lunch - at least in the tech community. Why? Creator Monetization may have alienated creators who treat social as a business. Businesses need predictability, and Twitter's strategy has been anything but predictable. LinkedIn’s incentives are aligned with creator incentives and their product roadmaps remain predictable.
As Fareed says, "Cheaper but worse rarely wins. Free, but worse can win." Enterprise Verification is a filler feature, not a leader, and may not offer enough value for users to justify paying for it. Fareed notes that a leader feature is something that people pay for. It is the thing that attracts them to the paid product. Fillers are usually other things that increase the value of that product for you. For example, for Slack, message history is the leader feature, and advanced search and huddles are fillers. For Twitter, the ability to list jobs for a company is a filler, not a leader, and filler features when the same concept is a leader feature at a competitor is hard to charge for. Brian notes that this is why Hubspot made their CRM free, knowing it was a filler feature that wouldn't compete with Salesforce's leader feature CRM.

🩳 Now on to YouTube Shorts: 🩳

🐌 Internal friction errs toward the status quo. 🐌 If user behavior is flowing in a different direction, your time and energy are best spent understanding the new direction and moving yourself toward it.
🤷‍♂️ The YouTube Shorts hasn't made clear the problem it solves. 🤷‍♂️ It's easy to draw surface-level parallels between YouTube Shorts and Instagram Stories, but it's unclear the real problem that Shorts solves for YouTube. Stories solved a real problem for Instagram. It created a way to post without needing to achieve perfection.
✨ New product lines breathe new life into growth strategy. ✨ Ravi Mehta introduced the framework of Creation, Consumption, and Conversations for content and social platforms. You can try to optimize this as much as possible for your existing product, but eventually, your progress will plateau. Brian thinks YouTube figured this out with their core product. Both their move to premium with YouTube TV and their introduction of Shorts create completely new sets of loops to play with.
🪛 It will take time for YouTube creators to understand how to use Shorts. But when it happens, it stands to be powerful. 🪛 Right now, Shorts seems to be like copycat content from TikTok & Reels, rather than things YouTube creators make themselves. However, over time, Fareed expects the legacy YouTube creators to adapt to the new incentives created by Shorts.

Join the conversation on Slack & LinkedIn HERE and subscribe to the podcast to hear more Unsolicited Feedback from Brian Balfour, Fareed Mosavat, and upcoming guests like Casey Winters, Elena Verna, Joff Redfern, Andrew Chen, Ravi Mehta, Adam Fishman, and many more.

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