Grow with Less
Dear Growth Designers,
I’m the founding designer at June.so. We’re the only product analytics software that creates autogenerated reports most relevant to a company’s stage and business goal.
For example, June is a venture-backed, seed-stage startup with a target of 4x annual userbase growth. We cannot incrementally ship micro-optimizations to score small percentage point gains; we don’t have the volume for that.
Our design practice must build the foundational user experience that can deliver long-term compounding value for the next 1,000 users. Counterintuitively, this means we remove more than we add. We cannot afford feature bloat. Our aim is a solid, streamline core product. Our design concepts and tests focus on removing barriers to go from basic to better.
In this newsletter, I will outline our three-part focus:
- Remove setup requirements
- Speed up early value
- Reduce product concepts
Yours in growing with less,
Founding Designer at June.so
Remove Setup Requirements
At June.so, 80% of our sign-ups do not add their own data during onboarding. We highlighted the most important problems to solve here:
- Buyers of technical products are usually non-technical. Buyers have to be able to experience June early, and easily invite their technical teammates to connect data streams. And as part of the first-time user experience, some data still has to come in so some dashboards are empty. How can we deliver early value?
- We rethought our four, friction-filled onboarding steps to enter the product.
We approached solving these problems by:
Offer a demo data for the product. Demo data is a great way to experience what June looks like once you have tracking setup to feed data from your product into June. This helps buyers evaluate June by connecting them to its value without being blocked by setup.
Move the setup experience later in the new user journey. To enter the product, you had to complete a minimum of four onboarding steps. We removed ALL the requirements and relocated them to their own space in the product. This way users can self-serve when the time is right for them. It also enabled us to provide more context at each step improving setup success.
Speed Up Early Value
Product analytics is arguably a crowded sector with mature companies. So why did June decide to get into this market just two years ago? The problem we saw was that existing products assumed people knew the right metrics to measure, how to set up reports, and where to communicate them appropriately for their business. We found autogenerated reports with an amazing Slack integration were drastically more valuable user experience.
Autogenerated reports
June studied what and how to track products so users can understand their customers like the best companies do. This led us to autogenerated reports for acquisition, activation, active companies, company retention, and power users. When users land on their June Home for the first time, they immediately get valuable reports. These metrics apply to all SaaS companies. And over 80% of users keep these setups months after signup and conversion.
Slack bot
Additionally, another friction to product analytics is the effort to continuously review your data. Event alerts and report digest notifications in Slack is a simple yet powerful way to keep teams updated, aligned, and brought together on their most important metrics. Users that connect Slack have a 4x retention rate, compared to those that don’t. It’s important to understand these levers for retention and make them simple for users to find.
We see cross-functional teams leveraging product usage data to bring the company together. For example, product teams are using this data to celebrate milestones and feature adoption. Customer Success uses to it to understand product champions. Marketing identifies sources of traffic that convert. Sales uses product usage data to identify high-value leads.
Reduce Product Concepts
Great products do a few things very well. So as much as we ship new updates every week, we try to make sure that over time, June gets easier to explain and use. We listed all the things you need to know to use June, and then started to remove as many of those things as possible. For example, our sidebar now has half the features it used to have, and we removed Pageviews and Templates as product concepts, previously core concepts of June.
The core of our product is now 5 auto-generated reports that are useful for every Saas company. Product sprawl is the enemy.
In Conclusion
For a seed-stage company like June, there has been no single silver bullet to growth. We talk with customers every day. Each feature and change has to be seen as part of the whole, as we ask ourselves does this simplify the whole of the experience? Does this make product analytics simpler? After a year of improvements, we launched June 3.0 and by then saw a 4x improvements to activation and retention.
About the Author
Daniel Beere is the founding designer at June. Before joining June, he was at CircleCI. He loves his current and past teams. In his free time, he enjoys running, climbing, and practicing yoga. Currently based in Málaga, Spain. If you’re passing through he’d love to connect.
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