Drift CEO shares insights from 20+ years of startup experience – TechCrunch

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Headings…
Drift CEO shares insights from 20+ years of startup experience
“If you’re creating a paid-for product, you have to start charging from day
To find what people really want, ask for money — any money.
Letting people go isn’t always a bad thing
For finding customers and employees, he turns to LinkedIn

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To find what people really want, ask for money — any money.
One thing Cancel says he’s learned over the years: when you’re just getting started, you need to charge for your product right off the bat because you never know how someone really feels about a product until you ask for money.
“If you’re creating a paid-for product, you have to start charging from day one,” he says.
“What it teaches the entrepreneur is that most of the people who will tell you that they love this thing will not give you a dollar,” actionable information that can save time, money and stress.

 

“What would happen, almost every single time, is there would be this awkward pause. They’d say ‘I have to go talk to my manager, I need to go talk to someone, I’ll get right back to you,’” he said, adding “Almost every single time that person continued to be a customer and never asked for that feature again.”

“When it’s free to ask for anything,” says David, “people will just keep asking.”

The dollar test “shortcuts things; most people will end up spending so much time coming back to you because you keep telling [them] you love it, because you’re a nice person and you don’t want to hurt [their] feelings.”
They’d say ‘I have to go talk to my manager, I need to go talk to someone, I’ll get right back to you,’” he said, adding “Almost every single time that person continued to be a customer and never asked for that feature again.”
“When it’s free to ask for anything,” says David, “people will just keep asking.”
His reasoning is twofold; on one side, it means he knows his teams are made up of people who want to be there; on the other, it means employees know he’s looking out for them.
If people ask me, ‘hey, do you know a really great engineer who does X, Y, Z?’” I say ‘Eric does, and Eric’s on my team.’ I’m like, you should talk to him.
Similarly, if an employee says they want to leave and start their own company, David says he’s often the first to write a check:
“We would attract, in the early days, people who wanted to learn how to start their own company.
One of the things I would say, and I still say to everyone: Look, if you come on board, and work with us for some days, if you want to leave at any point and start a company, myself and my co-founder Elias will be the first checks in whatever you want to start, no questions asked

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