Product Immersion

I had two goals this year:

And thanks to Rally I’m on my way to achieving both.

Rally is a platform that allows investors to buy and sell equity shares in collectible assets… and we’re just a couple days away from their IPO of the world’s largest dinosaur skeleton.

Barosaurus skeletons are among the rarest in the fossil world, and there’s just 200,000 shares being offered.

Here’s how it works:

My updated portfolio: stocks, bonds, and dinosaurs.

This is not investment advice. For all disclosures, visit rallyrd.com/disclaimer.

I’ve written extensively about our product velocity at beehiiv. I believe it’s the only reason that we’re still alive as a company today.

Back when I was raising money for our seed round in the summer of 2021, there was already a sea of competitors. Most had either a decade head-start or tens of millions of venture funding.

Companies like Mailchimp, Active Campaign, MailerLite, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, and Sailthru had millions of customers. Substack was already the VC-backed darling of the space, raising a $65M Series B led by a16z. And even large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter had recently launched paid newsletter services of their own.

It was no wonder that over 40 investors laughed me out of the room and passed on the opportunity to invest. (I’ve still got all the names).

When we first launched the company, you could barely even send emails. Those investors were right to be incredulous (dope word, I know). We had a lot of catching up to do.

So from an execution standpoint, the gameplan was simple from day one: ship or die.

Our founding team consisted of four engineers. Well, three and half if you consider my efforts as a scrappy self-taught developer worthy of an engineering title.

Our first few hires were also full-stack engineers (those capable of shipping both front-end and back-end code). This allowed us to task a single engineer to a feature start-to-finish and parallelize our work, which led to us shipping a handful of new features each and every week.

Each morning I would wake up to a handful of emails from disgruntled users complaining about the lack of features. (Note to others: this is a very unhealthy way to start your mornings). The running joke on the team was that I would tell every user to “give us two weeks.”

Although it actually wasn’t a joke. That would buy us a little time, we would drop everything to build it, then overdeliver and turn that user into a lifelong fan.

That was the entirety of our playbook in those early days — just a revolving door of high priority feature requests that we would churn out as quickly as possible one after the next. This is also why I have dozens more grey hairs today than I did when I first started the company.

Granted, it’s a playbook that is far easier said than done. While the feature development fell on the engineering team, it took the buy-in of the entire team to actually be able to execute.

Organized chaos is really the only way to describe it. Launching dozens of new features each week meant that our documentation was always out of date, the sales team never gave the same demo twice, the support team resolved issues for features they didn’t even know existed, and the product team was always three steps ahead triaging future initiatives.

But when you’re prioritizing velocity, things are going to break. We definitely had a reputation as a company that moved fast and loose. Users would roll their eyes when we launched new features and would call attention to the existing features that were still broken.

That was the cost of doing business and a tradeoff I was willing to make. I honestly don’t think we would be where we are today if we did it any other way.

But we eventually had to grow up. We were beginning to support very large reputable brands who had very little tolerance for our move fast and break things way of operating.

About a year ago we shifted away from our two-week engineering sprint (which to be honest, felt like one continuous multi-year sprint), to a three-week sprint followed by a one-week cooldown period.

The purpose of the cooldown is to shift focus away from new feature work and instead prioritize bugs, performance and scaling issues, product enhancements, quality of life improvements, and other infrastructure work.

The move has had a profound impact on the business.

It ensures that we never go more than a few weeks without addressing all of the most pressing platform issues and bugs. In turn, that means far fewer fires during sprints, giving the engineers more undisrupted time to ship new features.

The second and third order effects are just as notable. With less bugs plaguing our users, less support tickets are submitted, thus quicker response times and higher overall customer satisfaction. Internally, the overall vibe and operating cadence of the company feels far less chaotic and reactive than before too.

We have been doing cooldowns for almost a year now. While the first few were intense and felt like we were digging out of an insurmountable backlog of issues, each subsequent cooldown feels a bit more attainable and a lot less dire.

We shipped over 160 tickets worth of improvements during our last cooldown in September 🤯.

Anecdotally the platform feels so much more polished (and faster) than it did just a few months ago. The thesis is that this should correlate with retention and reduce churn (which is reflected in our numbers).

Let’s put a pin in cooldowns for a moment to talk about dogfooding. The definition, per ChatGPT:

But at beehiiv we don’t just dogfood, most of the team is fully immersed in the product on a daily basis.

This very email that you’re reading right now was written and entirely built on beehiiv. I’ve scaled the Big Desk Energy newsletter to over 120,000 readers using automations, Boosts, a referral program, magic links, recommendations, lead magnets, surveys, polls, and everything else the platform has to offer.

Each department lead sends a monthly newsletter to the entire company outlining their team’s accomplishments and upcoming initiatives. And several dozen (!!) employees have a newsletter of their own that is a legitimate business venture, side project, or hobby.

In fact, in just the past few weeks our Head of People launched a newsletter, as did our Lead Product Designer, and our Senior Product Manager.

We have a Slack channel called #topic-feedback where employees routinely drop product feedback from users, support tickets, social channels, or more often from their very own experiences.

You can tell when an employee recently launched a newsletter or is using the product more because they will light up the channel with tons and tons of feedback (which is both invaluable and incredibly stressful).

How does this all fit together?

This current week is a cooldown week for us. And for the first time ever, rather than drowning in bugs and performance issues, the cooldown is focused almost entirely on addressing feedback flagged by our very own team of employees.

In (almost) four short years, we’ve gone from being the least impressive entrant in an overcrowded market, to having an army of employees power users guiding our platform toward true product excellence.

Customer obsession, product velocity, and tight feedback loops is the (not-so) secret to our success. I want beehiiv to be the most enjoyable product people use on a day-to-day basis. We’re still so early.

P.S. Speaking of product, we’re announcing the biggest news and updates in company history during our upcoming Winter Release Event next month. RSVP to be the first to see what’s next.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/product-immersion

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