Mat Zalesky

There's been a dramatic shift in the the way solutions are built: The death of MVP and the rise of SLC 🆕 We learnt this the hard way too... 💀MVP - Minimum Viable Product - is no more what the industry wants especially when it comes to B2B SaaS. The old way: 1️⃣ Assumptions were the name of the game & customer dialogue took a back seat 2️⃣ The aim was to test a hypothesis to build on top off 3️⃣ Most businesses are already using multiple SaaS solutions, so the MVP might not fit directly into their workflow 4️⃣ Time was often wasted building unnecessary or good-to-have features 🌱Enter SLC - Simple, Lovable, Complete Solution - the new normal. The new way: 1️⃣ Start building only after having as many customer conversations on the problem 2️⃣ Coding to solve the core problem only, rest is augmented by integrating to SaaS tools or open-source solns 3️⃣ Slots in directly into their workflow & existing tools 4️⃣ Focus on easy to use, lovable solution that prioritizes outcomes & makes their lives easier SLC > MVP 🎯 Have you let go of the old MVP approach and embraced the SLC strategy yet? #Startup #SLC #MVP #Outcomes

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When the CRO industry got moving around 2010, there weren't many roles out there. The first couple of hires we had in the UK covered dev, ux consultancy and analysis. All the little jobs that needed doing were covered between them, and the scope of what's to come wasn't really understood at the time. Nowadays when I talk to friends about joining the world of CRO, it's a lot more interesting. There's professional services, wherever you work, that include UX research, design, development, solutions engineering, analytics, data science, project management and more. There's then "marketing", which includes traditional marketing functions, talking at events, running webinars and podcasts, content creation etc. If you're a vendor, there's a full set of roles from software engineers and data science to sales reps and managers, account management, learning and development/customer success and more. There are people who then run conferences, and all the jobs associated with making those gatherings function. People who work at a higher level, trying to shape business strategy and remind people that data matters. Probably a million other things too. In 2015, when I was "just" managing a dev team, I would tell my mates to come join me as developers. That's all I could see. Nowdays, it's more like "what are you good at? there's probably a dozen things you could do with that skillset".... which I think is pretty damn cool.

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CEOs and Founders obsess about the playbooks for scaling a brand. All over X liking 🧵threads. At the same time, their team is hiring for roles like everyone needs a PA. £24,000 buys you ALOT of automation. I'm not saying there isn't a need for junior roles in design, development, buying, production and merchandising, but let's be honest about how much of their time is spent on very low-value tasks. What is the real quality of the data and reports that admins can pull? How well-prepped are meetings compared to the cost of running them? The CEOs and Founders who are writing the playbook are hiring like Everything needs a system Tech is a function of Operations Revenue per head needs to keep going up Small, agile teams > big, slow-moving teams The worst offenders are old-school retail and luxury fashion brands. The complexity of raw materials and the bill of materials drives a ridiculous escalation in administration. The ones you read about restructuring and get press releases about their innovations are hiring admin assistants like crazy because, as all operators know, nothing properly integrates and flows. People fill the gaps. We call these gaps jobs. Admin Assistant jobs. The worst part is the lack of speed. Slow processes kill your ability to react. Slow decision-making. Slow meetings. Slow commute. Whether your brand is hot or not, these operational costs can't be carried out forever. I've not even got into the meeting-for-meetings-sake culture that exists to support the need for admin and reports. #operations #techstacks

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🔍 How Often Should You Optimize Your Bids? 🤔 We’ve found that updating bids twice a week works well—this keeps things on track without being overwhelming. 🚀 We’re also testing daily automation to see if it can offer even more precision. Our approach? Routine optimizations with bulk files a few times a week, plus daily spot checks to catch any issues manually. This balance ensures we keep your bids sharp and effective. Curious about optimizing your bids? Let’s fine-tune your strategy together! #AmazonAdvertising #PPC #BidManagement

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🔥🌈 Stripe’s customer journey is worth more than $70BN 💸 As a SaaS company heading into Q4, I know what’s keeping you up at night: - Low website traffic - Poor conversion rates - High churn during onboarding - Weak retention and adoption - Struggling to expand users and increase NRR - Stalled growth in profits, users, and MRR Here’s the thing—you don’t need to keep reinventing the wheel. The best in the business, like Stripe, have already cracked the code. And that’s exactly what we focus on at SaaS Design Agency—learning from the best and applying their strategies to help you grow. Today, I’m sharing Stripe’s $70B customer journey with you. 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘁: 1. Like this post. 2. Add & follow me 3. Comment "Stripe"

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Hiding product features. I have to talk about this. A client today asked about reducing new user overwhelm. Most SaaS products have so many features. It's too busy and complicated for new users to figure out. There's so much to process. "What if we hide features from new users to make onboarding simpler and easier?" Less distraction. Less friction. I've worked with a number of product managers who suggested hiding features. I generally disagree. Do NOT hide features. At least not entirely. I could be convinced to simplify your interface for certain user segments, new users being a great example. Lower tier users is another example. But hiding features has more cons than it does pros. My recommendation instead? Group advanced features and put them under advanced menu options or flows, but make it obvious that you've done so. However, making "Advanced options" visible and understandable is not necessarily an easy design task. Why should we not hide features until users advance through your product? Because you'll wind up with too many users (and possibly a broader audience) thinking your product is missing the capabilities you hid. That's bad. Have you hid features before? Why? How did it go? I enjoy working with Product Managers to improve their PLG motions. Reach out if you need help.

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Founders, take timelines on software with a pinch of salt. Whether you’re using an agency, contractors or have an in-house team. Definitely don’t hinge everything on it ! When I was 19, I took over my family’s musical instrument retailer and digitised it. I made a load of mistakes, but also learnt a lot very quickly. I spent too much money on custom code when there were off-the-shelf platforms I could have more readily used. I also trusted the timelines the development agency gave me for the launch of our platform, which was meant to be ready well in time for Christmas. In true fashion, the platform wasn’t ready in time, and we’d bought a load of stock in preparation. We had it all sitting there, and had to resort to platforms like eBay (which the suppliers didnt like us using !). Christmas is the biggest time of the year for most retailers, so it was a big blow. The business was almost gone before I could even give it a good crack. Instead, I had to do a sale in January and sold most of the stock just to survive. Two key bits of learnings here: - Don’t build custom code when there’s off the shelf available (at least not at the very start, and this was 15 years ago - that's even more the case today). - Don’t hinge everything on development timelines. It’s really hard for development teams to estimate delivery, so it's vital to have back ups in place. Don’t plan major activations around exact delivery dates, instead ensure there is some slack. Be very careful ! #softwaredevelopment #buildingtech #techproducts

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Founders, take timelines on software with a pinch of salt. Whether you’re using an agency, contractors or have an in-house team. Definitely don’t hinge everything on it ! When I was 19, I took over my family’s musical instrument retailer and digitised it. I made a load of mistakes, but also learnt a lot very quickly. I spent too much money on custom code when there were off-the-shelf platforms I could have more readily used. I also trusted the timelines the development agency gave me for the launch of our platform, which was meant to be ready well in time for Christmas. In true fashion, the platform wasn’t ready in time, and we’d bought a load of stock in preparation. We had it all sitting there, and had to resort to platforms like eBay (which the suppliers didnt like us using !). Christmas is the biggest time of the year for most retailers, so it was a big blow. The business was almost gone before I could even give it a good crack. Instead, I had to do a sale in January and sold most of the stock just to survive. Two key bits of learnings here: - Don’t build custom code when there’s off the shelf available (at least not at the very start, and this was 15 years ago - that's even more the case today). - Don’t hinge everything on development timelines. It’s really hard for development teams to estimate delivery, so it's vital to have back ups in place. Don’t plan major activations around exact delivery dates, instead ensure there is some slack. Be very careful ! #softwaredevelopment #buildingtech #techproducts

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A losing A/B test is fantastic. Weird...don't we normally associate losing with something negative? In CRO, this notion gets flipped on it's head. In the short snippet below taken from a recent webinar, you can see Cameron Calder comparing the results of two separate tests that we ran. Test 1: We added the sign-up form to the home page and saw a 15.89% INCREASE in in Player Registrations. This was fantastic and we were super happy with the result. Test 2: Adding quick count buttons for ease of deposits - here we saw a 22% DECREASE in Player Registrations. This was fantastic and we were super happy with the result too. Why were we happy with this loss and drop in registrations? Because rather than blindly going and investing in dev and design resources to implement the change as a new feature request with no data backing it, we now know for sure that this will certainly not work and we should not implement this. We have saved time, money and effort which leaves us to only use our limited resources to implement winning tests that we know will increase conversion rates. Takeaway: Winning tests are great, but losing tests can sometimes be even better. With a win rate of about 30-40% across the industry, we need to learn to celebrate losses as much as wins.

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How can we be heroes when the base rates are zeros? :) WHAT IF: Jony Ive ran this as an a/b test? Would it break the stats? I think it might, assuming the control has a 0% conversion rate and the variation is almost guaranteed to increase above 0 - making the relative effect choke up and spit out dust. Ok, but honestly. How do data scientists / statisticians make decisions when the base rate is 0%? Are there maths and statistics to support this? Or is my half-joking hunch correct - that we roll out anything with the potential of >0? Perhaps we could still run such situations as a/b tests and check for do-no-harm on other elements / interactions / guardrails (assuming the rest of the web site is not a blank canvas). :) Share your approach when dealing with a base rate of 0 on a binomial metric. Happy Friday! ps. To be fair: Jony does not need online traffic. Online traffic needs Jony. :) So our little button pattern is a spec of dust in such a business context where brand, personal relations, prestige, reputation and exclusivity reign supreme (respect for being able to pull that off!). ps2. For all other mortals, there is this pattern https://lnkd.in/guyQAEqH - make that CTA button shine. #experimentation #optimization #ui #statistics #datascience

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What % of your week is spent client-facing? ⌚ (sharing my numbers below 👇 ) I've been reviewing my time spent over the last year, and it's really insightful to assess how much of it was spent with our ICP. It's a hard number to back into, since I'm mostly going off of Google Calendar and our meeting link analytics, which isn't great. The Startup Stack has a few different ICPs: 1) Founders 2) Software and service providers (we call them vendors internally) 3) White Label partners I'm averaging 25-30% of my time at a minimum with our ICP since going full-time May 2023. That's actual time on calendar, face-to-face with our audience. 550+ hours with our ICP From what I can tell, mid-market account executives ideally have 10-12 ICP meetings per week (best proxy I could think of). There's a lot I could say about that number. At the very least, I'm proud of what we've done. It takes a lot of work to just get face time with your ICP. Most companies fight hard every day to get time on calendar with their ICP. The time spent trying to get on their calendar vs. actually being on it is brutal. What's startling is that our ICP-time has been almost entirely warm referrals, introductions, inbound, etc. I believe this is because of what a good karma organization we've built. All we ask from founders is the information we need to provide them with the referrals and introductions we provide them. It's abundant and free. Brutal to monetize. But gosh dang it, I think we're doing some good in the world. If we've helped you in some way, please share!

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Your app + native checkout. Here’s what we’ve been working on.

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Most early founders will overlook customer experience UNTIL they realise what they're loosing out on. 1/ Once your customer experience drastically improves, you will have an increase in conversion rate from the increased perception of value. 2/ When people experience something that blows their expectations, more often than not they will go and tell other people about it. You should receive an increase in referrals from the improved customer experience. 3/ A customer experience which head and shoulders above everyone else's shows increased care, expertise and attentiveness. People are willing to pay premiums on what they perceive as better.

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Founders, when the game’s uncertain, it’s your move. Here’s how to stay ahead: 1. Adapt Fast: Pivot, switch lanes, and keep your agency flexible. Don’t get stuck on old moves—flow with the culture. 2. Be Real: Double down on authenticity. In tough times, people want brands they trust—make sure you’re that brand. 3. Level Up: Equip your team with new skills. Stay sharp, stay relevant. 4. Move First: Don’t wait—bring solutions and bold ideas. Be the agency that sets the pace. Uncertainty is where the real growth happens. Step up, stand out. ✍🏾 — DINES ® Creative Director & Modern Culture Specialist at STUDIO BLUP®

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What % of Ecom founders do you think have had nightmare-agency experiences? 40%? 50%? 60%? Either way, it's 100% too many because most ‘nightmare’ agencies— Can be fixed if they just had better communication between the brand and the agency. It's honestly a little ridiculous how far the little things in business can go nowadays. Take TVG, for example, one of the things we do to help ensure the client is cared for Is follow our strict communication protocols, such as strategic emoji deployment. It literally takes three button clicks, But for our clients, it means the difference between stressing if we got their message and if the project will be finished on time, OR… Knowing that we got their message, are working on it, and that everyone is having fun along the way.

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Product-led growth is a lot of fun... until it isn't. When you're getting 100s of signups a month, it's really easy to ignore churn—you know it's there, but it's not *the* big problem (yet). You should be optimizing for acquisition as a growth-stage startup. At the same time, you can't afford to keep churn on the back burner for too long... I see it happen all the time. Founders wait until churn becomes a thorn in their side to take it seriously. They wake up one morning and find their startup at the following inflection point: > Revenue lost from canceling customers is *COMPLETELY* offsetting revenue gained from incoming customers < Even scarier, they don't even know the main drivers of churn. Since they acquire customers in a hands-off manner, they never learned the finer details about *real* customer needs, pain points, and how their product is failing to address them. Suddenly, runaway growth has turned into runaway churn... You've now got a big problem on your hands—one that'll require significant investment, a company-wide effort, and months (if not years) to get under control. But there's one thing you can do today to start reducing churn in a meaningful way: you can implement a customer offboarding flow. Customer offboarding done right will help your business in two key areas: 1️⃣ You'll begin to understand WHY customers aren't renewing - Is your pricing out of whack? - Is marketing attracting the wrong buyers? - Has a new, lower-cost competitor emerged? - Is there a lack of functionality in the product? - Is there a season where more customers tend to churn? 2️⃣ Then you can take that data, run effective win-back campaigns with it, and begin reducing churn "I left because of price" → 30% off for 3 months "Temporary cancellation" → 90-day account pause "Lacking feature 'X'" → reach out when gap is filled Done right, you can cut active churn by up to 40%. Better yet: what you don't save, you'll learn from—enabling you to make better product, pricing, and re-marketing decisions. Although this is far from being "silver-bullet" churn solution, it's a quick win that drives long-term value. Curious to see what this looks like in practice? Drop a comment (or leave me a DM) and I'd be happy to show you :)

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At Craze (YC S22) we are customer obsessed. Every feature we built to make a founders life easy. This is why we can onboard companies within minutes and process payroll in a few hours. I haven't seen a more customer obsessed bunch like the one at Craze. We do not sit on feature requests for long. We have in fact pushed feature requests on the same day multiple times. If you are a founder looking at HR softwares to make your life better, Craze is THE solution to go for.

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Congratulations and well articulated, I am taking notes as I start my journey with Techmark Pod #techmarkpod #techpodcast #marketingpodcast

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So this is a design reference for Mitgo Ventures's monthly stakeholder meeting presentation... ... ... 🤔🤔🤔 ... ... ...because you can't bore people into buying your shit. I've sat through thousands of hours of presentations that made me want to put a bullet in my head. Doing the same for others would go against my understanding of human ethics. It's hard enough to look at someone's reports and try to figure out if they did a good job or not. It's pure decision-making - probably the hardest job in life. Right? Imagine how easy it would be if all the decisions were obvious or even made for us. I know more than a few people who would like that so much, they convince themselves that have no choice in all slightly-above-average-difficulty situations even though there are literally a trillion of possible solutions. "Got no choice man, gotta do what you gotta do" - and proceeds to do the dumbest shit ever with zero necessity. But we should have compassion. It's been a hard week and it's still Tuesday - cut them stakeholders some slack and at least try to make your slides 5-6% fun, okay? ...please?

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