Back in 2016, I was working at Autodesk on one of their few consumer products, SketchBook. SketchBook was a sketching application aimed at making the digital drawing process as smooth as pen and paper. As everyone working on a subscription product, I wanted to figure out: What our core subscription metrics were – LTV, MRR, […]
The shift from perpetual license-based business models to solely focusing as software as a service (SaaS) has been a defining trend over the past 20 years. Led by Salesforce as the first pure-play SaaS superstar, companies of all types have shifted including Adobe and Autodesk, and also others were born into the business model, such […]
Product launches always tricky. Figuring out what market segment to play in, who competes in that arena, and how you are different are just some of the challenges. But, once a product has begun to expand well into a market, this opens up the opportunity to go global as certainly the problems your product solves […]
Mid last year I wanted to go on a vacation with my friends. We looked up options, compared prices, and ended up selecting Cancun as our destination and Hotel Riu as our all inclusive resort. We were all excited and got up early, around 3am, to get catch a 6am flight to our destination a […]
Imagine if H&M only sold size large men’s shirts because that is what the average male wears? What if they only sold size small women’s shirts because that is what the data showed was the average size for the female? They would be leaving so much money on the table, due to only producing for […]
Over the past six months, I’ve been working on SketchBook, a subscription based sketching app, where I spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of customer lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Tons, and I mean tons, of content has been written about both these concepts from the marketing gurus of […]
Has Instagram killed Snapchat yet?
Vanity metrics argue yes; actionable metrics say otherwise Facebook announced last week that Instagram Stories has now reached 200M daily active users (DAUs). Compared to Snapchat’s 161M DAUs, alongside the slowing DAU growth rate, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Snap is doomed, and soon to be dead as illustrated below. But […]
Startups live and die by growth. Growth is comprised of many factors, which can be boiled down to: acquiring new users who find value in your product, and making sure they stick around actively lovin’ it (perhaps, this explains McDonald’s jingle). Once a company is finished the first few iterations of their product and has […]
Over the past few months I’ve been reading a lot of books and have briefly experimented with learning the process of starting a new venture for a course I was taking. After getting feedback on it and through all the reading I’ve done, I decided to jot down my thoughts on building products.
Not everyone is accepting it but the state of traditional media is rapidly drifting away as we now live in a world where nearby, if not all, marketing actions can be quantified. Watching sports on television has declined by 10% and movies and other programs has dropped by an even steeper 13%. People are still […]