Humor is a universal language, it has no limits, no boundaries. It is the channel to communicate with your customers and collaborators in a direct way and the most efficient transport for your ideas to go around the world.
In the ever-growing ocean of content that is shared every day in social networks, those that add irony, sarcasm or sympathy or usually the ones being shared the most. All colors and tones of humor are welcome on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, blogs and newsletters.
So, if you want to know how you can use the right sense of humor to spread your brand in all the corners of the world wide web, here are some clues:
Connect with your audience. Write, edit, program or design in a way that you talk to your customers in a natural way, inteligent people with whom you would go for a beer with. You will understand their needs, this process is called empathy.
Be funny without making a face. This is important, a good sense of humor does not consist of easy jokes. You could be sympathetic the same time smart and professional. The tone should fit with your company’s values.
Original content. This is the key to everything and to have more value adds some customization and adapt your messages to each format. Creating content is easy, being original not so much, start enjoying your own products and services. Enjoy doing your job. Feel it and try it. Write down your sensations and you will have perfect script.
The spark. This point is as easy as it is difficult. There is no manual to know for sure what’s funny, the best way to know may be to use the scientific method. Make a hypothesis, try it, and then take a distance and decide: Does it make you smile? Then it’s working.
Choose your channel. The continent is as important as the content, it simply chooses the networks and channels, it does not have to be omnipresent. Always think about who you want to read your content and who your target audience is and that will give you the answer.
As product focus is more important than ever in building startups in a very competitive market, the product manager role is increasingly getting more common and is highly valued.
But to many it’s a job description that’s a bit vague, and often means different things from company to company.
We invited three product people from the startup ecosystem in Barcelona to discuss the topic: Former PM at Google and currently product consultant Itamar Gilad, CEO and co-founder of FactorialJordi Romero, and CEO and co-founder of QuipuRoger Dobaño.
Long time product expert Gilad says it’s hard to explain the PM role in one sentence:
The position has changed so much over time, and it’s still changing. I like to define the PM as the person who’s the expert on the users, the customers, the market and the competition, and manages to deliver this context to the product team in a good way — it’s a super man basically!
From product to customer first
From the left: Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig, Jordi Romero, CEO and co- founder of Factorial.
The last 10–20 years, tech companies have shifted their focus from trusting their engineers more than market, to lifting the customer and the users as the number one priority in making the product, says Gilad that for the last six years has managed products such as Gmail and Youtube:
The first time I heard the term product manager was back in the 90’s, and back then it was very new. The thought was that engineers always knew best, but that has changed a lot.
Also Romero, CEO of Factorial, recognizes the attitude from earlier times when he worked in other SaaS companies in the US and in Barcelona:
I remember we first defined ourselves as a product-first company, then a sales-driven startup and later a customer focused company. It think these terms are hard for startups that alter and change the way they do business often.
Dobaño is both CEO and head of product at accounting SaaS Quipu, he defined the product role like this:
You’re the CEO of the product, but it’s not just about making a great product, it’s about continuously solving problems for the customers and making an impact in your customers life.
Even though the PM has the word manager in the title, all three guests agrees that the only thing the PM actually manage is the product itself.
Romero points to several challenges connected with this kind of responsibility:
An issue I’ve seen in many product teams, is that the PM is managing the team itself, and not only the product and process. I think this is a real problem that is hindering the communication in the organization.
Itamar explains that the PM is there to fill all the holes of work that aren’t being worked on, which means that the person needs to be diverse:
The PM is working closely with both customer service, the business side, designers and engineering, it’s more about creating a pattern for collaborations and a good flow of progress. It’s needless to say that soft skills are in high demand.
He continues to say that a startup needs a designated PM when the startup is at a scale where the business people and the engineering team start arguing what to build next, and you don’t have time as a CEO to deal with all the discussions.
How to become one
From the left: Itamar Gilad and Roger Dobaño.
Romero says he believes a lot in promoting PM’s within the company that share the original values and vision of the founders.
Itamar explains that it’s not necessary to know how to code, but many big companies require it:
In companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google they alway prefer someone with a coding background. However, the personal also needs to be interested in the business side of the startup and have strong soft skills for team management.
Dobaño thinks many companies are setting too high requirements for their PM’s:
What you’re describing here is a unicorn. I do agree that PM’s should have a computer science background, but my job is to empower one person within each product team, and I’ll then make sure the communication flow is good between the company.
Romero repeats how vital soft skills are to this profession:
To have all the technical skills is one thing, but to be able to both do a sales pitch and to convince the developer team that what they’re building is the right thing to focus on, that’s tricky.
Going into its fourth year, one of the things the Quipu team and its CEO Roger Dobaño are proud of is their low churn rate.
Quipu is an online billing software that solves your daily administrative tasks. And as with any SaaS product, churn is a number they keep close track on, says Dobaño:
I’m in touch with the churn numbers daily, but we measure it monthly, like most startups.
A low churn percentage is not only validating that they’ve built a product people like, but keeping the rate down over years has also taught them a lot about how their customers think and act, according to the CEO:
For a B2B SaaS company, it’s often quite expensive to acquire new users, so we’re very proud that we’ve been able to hold churn under one percent from the start.
Support
It’s not rocket science, with more customers come more responsibilities, and that means a higher demand for service.
As you’re scaling your customer base, one of the most important things you need to do is to make sure your customer service team scales together with your customers. The easiest way to keep churn down, is to have someone that really understands the product and cares about the customers.
He continues:
Even though many of your customers never need any help with the product, it’s part of the trust relationship you build, as the customers know that there are humans to talk to at the other end of the software.
The first 12 months Quipu didn’t hire customer care people says the CEO:
For the first year of our business, I did all the customer support myself. Not only because the team was small, but so that I always knew what our customers thought about our product.
He says he’s still in touch with the customer service team, as it’s one of the best ways to know how to develop and improve the product.
He explains that the way customer service agents should attend struggling users could be an article in itself. The baseline is to listen a lot, be understanding, patient and get to the core of what kind of problem the user is facing. There’s usually always a way to fix it.
No automated unsubscribe button
It’s not about making it hard for customers to unsubscribe, according to Roger, but it’s about understanding why they want to leave.
If you want to unsubscribe, we’ll get notified when you push the button, and we’ll get in touch. Their reason for unsubscribing is often connected to a task we can help them achieve very easily, preventing them from leaving and making them happy again.
And if the customer has decided to leave anyway, you’ll at least have the data on why, if you actually talk to them. It’s also for security reasons, as people’s financial data has to be treated carefully.
When you’ve grown a significant amount of customers or users you should also consider measuring CSAT and NPS metrics.
Also read:How To Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score
Apart from great service, upselling is another way to prevent customers from choosing another product. The more ways people use your product, the lesser is the chance of the person leaving you.
With a very low churn rate, you’re actually able to reach negative churn, if you’re able to upsell enough.
Quipu is counting 13 heads these days, but growing steadily every quarter.
Track patterns
When you have a payback period of one year, which is normal in SaaS companies, you need to know that people are happy especially in the beginning to keep the retention rate high.
Apart from speaking with the customers, tracking their movements and tasks inside the product is a very good way of seeing where it goes right and wrong.
For example, in Quipu one of our services is managing invoices. After looking at the user movements, we now know that the retention rate is much higher if the user creates three or more invoices. With this info we’ve been able to retain more customers over the years.
Dobaño adds that it’s also important to use movement trackers to contact users who are struggling, even before they complain or think about leaving.
Don’t go crazy with features
It’s both upsides and downsides to talking a lot with your customers (obviously more positive sides though). One of the challenges is that people have a lot of thoughts on what kind of features you should develop next.
If you’re working B2B, you’re in touch with professionals, and they’re aware of what type of features would make their day easier.
This results in new features that both keep the retention rate high and make it easier to acquire new users.
But it is easy to take water over your head and create ten good features to please everyone, instead of making 3 perfect features. It’s a difficult balance, according to Roger:
We try to focus 60 percent of our capacity on building our existing product better, and 40 percent of our time making features for acquiring new customers.
The holy two percent
When you’re working with high growth products, it’s often essential to be raising funding from investors.
A motivation in keeping your churn low is that most investors will not bet on a SaaS startup if it has a churn rate of 2 percent or more.
So even though you’re acquiring a lot of customers early on, having churn in mind from the first minute, can be more valuable than you think.
Some last tips on the list to prevent churn you should consider is:
Make meaningful partnerships with complimentary services.
Don’t let credit cards expire.
Let the whole team know your churn rate and be aware of changes
Hi! Thanks for agreeing to chat with me now that you’ve had your human body for a couple weeks. I’m excited to hear about how things have been going. Here’s how I’d like to spend our time: we will have an open conversation and explore your experiences. Later on, I have some specific questions that I would like you to answer, to get more specific feedback. At last, I’ll be sure to leave enough time at the end for any questions I might be able to help you with.
Does that sound good? — Sure, sounds good.
Awesome. So is there anything you’ve noticed that you particularly like about your new body? — Well, I like these sausagy things, but there’s one that is too short and out of the way, I wish they were all the same length and pointing in the same direction.
I’m going to assume you’re talking about your fingers. The little one is called “thumb”. Has it been useful in any way? — Not really.
What if you want to grab something?
— I don’t see a problem. I have more sausagy things.
That’s true. Anything else about the fingers that you’d like to share? — Let me think. Five sounds like too much, no? Maybe two or three would be enough.
Were there any particular situations where those extra couple of fingers were in the way?
— Yeah I was in bed with a friend…
That’s enough. Thank you. Any other aspects of your body you’ve particularly enjoyed or liked over the past couple of weeks? — As I was saying, I was in bed…
GOT IT. Let’s move on. Have there been any events or situations where you’ve found your new body limiting? — Yes I tried to fly from a tree branch and realized quickly that I couldn’t fly.
How did you reach that realization?
— I fell. Straight to the ground, landed on my arm. Which also made me realize these arm things aren’t very good at taking impact, the bones are pretty weak. I had to see someone called a “doc” and now I have this cast thing on. Are you going to fix that?
Oh my! I’m sorry to hear that happened. I’ll take a note to make sure we cover that type of bug in the design for later versions. How does the cast change things for you as you evaluate your body? — I can decorate it with doodles. I really like that. If I do it on the outer layer of the body it wears off. Are you going to make cases for the body? Like with flowers and stuff. I saw some people wearing them.
You mean clothes? Sir, are you walking around naked? — What are clothes?
Never mind. Let me ask you something. How has the temperature regulation been in the new body? — Hmmm… what’s that word…? Cold! Yeah, that’s it! This body doesn’t have enough fur. Except in some funny parts, where it shouldn’t. You should definitely review the fur.
Interesting… I’d like to switch gears a little to focus on keeping the body up and running. In your orientation, we went over things like eating and grooming. Is there anything noteworthy you’d like to share about those kinds of processes? — Eating is good. I like that. But I felt it was a bit random. There were no clear instructions on what I should or shouldn’t eat. I enjoyed the sweet things. I don’t really know why you offer green stuff with no taste.
Vegetables? — Whatever you call it. The red stuff was good, like tomatoes sometimes, when they came with cheese, in a bun, with bacon, and meat.
Burgers? — YES! Those were really good. I basically just ate those.
Welcome to America. — What?
Nothing. Thank you so much! That’s all for regarding that subject. I just have a few more questions. On a scale from 1–5, where 1 is “I wish I had my old self back” and 5 is “I can’t believe I didn’t get this body sooner”: — Not having a body is very different, you can do a lot of stuff if you have a nice working body I guess. I’ll say 4.
How would you rate your satisfaction level with your new body so far? — 2. Maybe 3 on a good day.
Is there anything in particular that lead you to answer that way? — It’s kind of slow and fragile. I wish it was faster. And bigger too.
How likely are you to recommend this experience to a friend? — 3.
Is there anything in particular that lead you to answer that way? — It’s fun to use for a while. But I guess you might get tired of it after a while, and would like to change it for a newer, faster, better-looking model.
Right on the spot. And finally, what’s one thing you really hope will be added to your body in the future? — Wings. Or wheels. Whatever makes it faster. And fur. I said fur before, didn’t I?
You did. What value would that addition provide to you? — I want to be faster. And warmer.
Thanks again for all your feedback — you’ll receive the gift certificate to the new body maintenance shop shortly. I’ll talk to you again in a few weeks. Take care!
