Case Study: On The Road To Product-Market Fit, Flike's Tobias Müller Relied On User Feedback As The Unquestionable Truth
“The number one lesson was to learn to throw out all internal beliefs, hypotheses, and opinions about a problem and instead take the users' input as the unquestionable truth.”
Introduction:
Even though Excel and Google Sheets are powerful tools, they haven’t kept up with the way we work. As a result, teams waste up to 40% of their day manually managing workflows rather than doing the deep, meaningful work only they can do. Flike goes after this $20B opportunity by building a collaboration and automation layer on top of Excel and GSheets designed for the workflows of modern professionals. Our software allows users to grant access on a granular level and to easily collect, review and consolidate data input. In short, Flike is GitHub for Spreadsheets.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Tobias Müller, co-founder and CEO of Flike, about his company’s journey so far in finding product-market fit.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Extracting Unbiased Data From User Interviews
Müller: “A critical problem we’ve had to overcome early on was figuring out how to get unfiltered data from user interviews.”
Market: Finance and FP&A Teams Who Need Better Ways To Collaborate
Müller: “A critical problem we’ve had to overcome early on was figuring out how to get unfiltered data from user interviews.”
Solution: Asking “Stupid” Questions To Get To The Real Problems That Must Be Solved
Müller: “We believe that having customers who want us to succeed is incredibly important. Both founders spent a week at a customer's site, which gave us insights into their workflows we could have never anticipated. This enables us to ask many "stupid" questions and get to the core of things.”
Team: Trying Out Potential Candidates As Consultants Before Hiring Them
Müller: “We spent a lot of time with potential hires to assess fit (e.g., hiring them as consultants on specific problems first) before making an offer. While great technical ability is a must, I think nothing makes up for true intrinsic motivation, and we like to hire for that.”
Takeaway: User Feedback Is The Unquestionable Truth
Müller: “The number one lesson was to learn to throw out all internal beliefs, hypotheses, and opinions about a problem and instead take the users' input as the unquestionable truth.”
Case Study: Flike
Problem: Extracting Unbiased Data From User Interviews
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
A critical problem we’ve had to overcome early on was figuring out how to get unfiltered data from user interviews. We had hypotheses and frameworks in our heads on what the pain points looked like and why our solution “made sense.” However, we noticed that users would mostly agree and sort of concur when we asked questions like, “Would the tool I just demoed solve your problem?” We made the learning that these questions already carried too much directional bias and made it too easy for the user to simply respond “yes.”
Instead, a more general, undirectional questioning approach worked better, where users were encouraged to think and express their unbiased opinions. We instituted a rule that we wouldn’t even demo the product until a third of the interview time since this forced us to truly listen to the user’s general pain points and description of settings in which they appeared. After this shift, the actionable feedback from each interview increased significantly, and to this day, we are trying to fine-tune our ability to speak to users meticulously. The Mom test was extremely influential on this front.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
If it were easy to figure out precisely what the market, i.e., users, wants, the opportunity wouldn't exist. Therefore, the skill of seeking useful data from the market is something all successful founders have had to master. It is one of the determining success factors in whether you even have a chance to get some traction, so this is the number one thing I try to improve upon every day.
Personally and intellectually, this is not easy. There's so much uncertainty involved; users telling you contradictory statements, a million potential use cases which require different features, and so on. This is where two things have helped me keep pushing and staying on track. First, our team is working on this day and night, each and everyone pulling more than their weight. That's incredibly motivating. Second, processes for dealing with uncertainty have helped. We don't try to overemphasize a single data point (e.g., in the form of a user interview) and only discuss new findings after multiple new data points have been gathered. This helps prevent bias, for example, just having spoken to one overly positive user, thereby normalizing market feedback a little.
Initially, we experienced pain points during internships in the space. We started documenting our problems and went through many discussions on the most critical pain points. We continuously reached out to people we thought might run into the issues we solve and applied the interview methodology laid out earlier. We gathered market feedback by building landing pages, promoting them, and seeing what traction they got. One page might be catered more toward version control of spreadsheets versus other variants promoting solutions for gathering input from multiple stakeholders into the main file.
A method we also applied to get unfiltered feedback on pain points was trying to pre-sell our product (idea). Even when there was little to show for, we would ask customers to pay for our solutions right away from very early on. People often hesitate to give negative feedback or admit your product is useless. If you ask them to pay for it, though, you'll see whether it solves a true pain point or not. We generally try to make our decisions based on hard feedback rather than wishful thinking. This requires us to understand bad news as an important learning point guiding us to a Product-Market fit.
Market: Finance and FP&A Teams Who Need Better Ways To Collaborate
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
This goes in the direction of what I touched upon earlier - we firstly stop ourselves and plain and listen. We will ask questions on the context of the pain points (e.g., during what workflows they occur), their frequency, cost (e.g., time), and existing workarounds. We then look at how you (as a user) measure or would measure improvements in the problem, which could be a kind of KPI of the issue. This has a twofold purpose: we know specifically how the customer measures success, giving us precise direction for the product, and strengthen our future sales pitch by knowing how to demonstrate the value of our solution.
In terms of concrete questions, we've been inspired by Eric Migicovsky (YC partner), who suggests the following five questions for user interviews:
1) What's the hardest thing about doing the task causing "pain"?
2) When did you last encounter the problem?
3) Why was that hard?
4) What have you done to try to solve the problem?
5) What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?
We made the learning that you can invalidate theses in 10-15min interviews if you're intellectually brutally honest with yourself.
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
We learned a lot about the vertical vs. horizontal approach to productivity tools. Specifically, in our case, a horizontal approach targets all kinds of Excel users, from novice to pro, HR to research Excel uses, etc. Going vertical means focusing on a specific department or even use case. We learned that it's incredibly tempting to think on platforms and solve a problem for more than one billion spreadsheet users at once. However, getting closer to a pmf is way easier if you narrow down the market initially and gradually expand into other use cases. The main reason is that you'll have to understand your users extremely well to build a product that solves their problems.
Focus has been useful; however, we're trying to be cognizant of the opportunity costs. However, this focus can lead to trade-offs since certain features push the product toward the envisaged use case. Customers with different workflows might get confused and experience negative value from the directional iterations. We've also had engineering discussions where the buildout of certain functionalities closes some doors in terms of features down the road. It's, therefore, a constant conversation we're trying to have internally.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
That was fairly easy for us. The frequency of pain points we solve correlates with the intensity of spreadsheet collaboration, which unsurprisingly occurs most frequently in finance and FP&A (Forecasting, Planning & Analysis) workflows.
This made these target segments a natural focus, and most of our early adopters are from this part of the market.
Further, before Flike, we've also interned in the FP&A space, witnessing and living the pain points of collaboration in Excel day-to-day. Therefore, the workflows are already well known by us, making it an easy starting point. I also have a lot of university friends who are now in finance or FP&A roles, which allowed us to understand their pains by shadowing them at work.
While we had a rough strategy, which I'll describe in a second, early on, we just wanted to talk to as many people as possible. We targeted our outreach at all roles within finance and FP&A teams and wanted to learn every detail of each person's duty. This was, I guess, our strategy. To cast a wide net within the finance customer segment and then narrow it down after understanding these teams' roles and division of responsibility. We forced ourselves to document the most important learnings of each call, which helped us understand the bigger picture.
Solution: Asking “Stupid” Questions To Get To The Real Problems That Must Be Solved
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
While we're on our way to PMF with our current product version, we're still optimizing for learnings rather than merely optimizing the existing product. One of the things we might do, for example, is to include half-baked or even purposely broken features. If customers don't complain, we have a good case for ditching the feature - saving valuable engineering time and focusing our efforts on what truly matters.
In terms of product challenges, we're working hard on improving the onboarding process. We strongly believe that our product should be self-served and get you started in minutes, not weeks like some related products. Looking at our product analytics, there is still some room for improvement here.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
That's a good question. YC pushed us to do some of these things. First, we do everything to satisfy our alpha customers. We set up our analytics so that our alarms ring when somebody runs into any issues. This forced us to wake up in the middle of the night – we're serving global customers.
We believe that having customers who want us to succeed is incredibly important. Both founders spent a week at a customer's site, which gave us insights into their workflows we could have never anticipated. This enables us to ask many "stupid" questions and get to the core of things.
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
We schedule a weekly call with our alpha users to have a casual conversation. These sessions help us a lot! We also onboarded most of our users to our slack channel, which was a game-changer – we get way better feedback this way, as this gives our users the ability to message us right when they have suggestions for improvement.
With very early customers, we sometimes shadowed them during the use of our product. Watching them click through the product is incredible. So many details, e.g., a misclick or slightly lengthy search for a button, give us valuable feedback on what slight tweaks we can make to increase ease of use. It's harder to do these sessions regularly; however, I've been surprised at the details you can pick up, which wouldn't be conveyed in a discussion or via Slack.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
One word: "LinkedIn." Outreach campaigns on LinkedIn have had solid conversions for us. Definitely by far the most valuable tool in recruiting our alpha customers. Of course, some intros from investors and friends have also been useful. We're also continuously trying email outreach and other channels, whereas Linkedin has been the most successful channel for us. We're leveraging a tool called Linkedhelper, which automates the outreaches.
A few of our customers have also been referrals. We found that CFOs and Finance professionals like to share their experiences with tools among themselves, which has led to some opportunities. We found a lot of value by joining dedicated slack communities where new tools and solutions to problems are discussed. You'll find the relevant group to your need through a simple google search. Also, meetups, etc. are a great way to get in touch with potential customers. After all, you'll have to overcompensate for the product in the early days, which might not be at the stage your users need it to be to get traction.
We learned how to navigate ambiguity. You need to fix certain assumptions deliberately. Hence, we have a weekly product development cycle in place, whereas we focus on validating a clearly defined hypothesis at a time. This helps us make sure we're not constantly changing direction during the week, which is needed to validate a hypothesis based on hard data. This also helps the engineering team to get things done.
We start the product development cycle with a meeting on Monday with everyone where we discuss all features to be built, bugs to be fixed, and UI improvements to be made. This is the most important meeting for us, and we always make sure we're allocating enough time to it. While there is collaboration during the week, we try to check off all larger cross-team topics where input from all sides is valuable on Mondays.
During the week, everyone collects inputs from customer interviews or their own hypothesis that we then discuss in a plenum at the end of the week.
Team: Trying Out Potential Candidates As Consultants Before Hiring Them
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
We had an idea of what we were looking for regarding technical abilities. At the core of Flike, we are solving a theoretically "impossible" optimization problem, so we've had to look for an engineering team capable of solving these diverse and tough challenges. Leveraging our connections to swiss tech and business universities was hugely important here. People here in Switzerland are super motivated to hustle at a startup. Still, there are not as many opportunities as you'd find in Silicon Valley, which gives us an advantage in recruiting smart people.
But much more important for us was a cultural fit. We spent a lot of time with potential hires to assess fit (e.g., hiring them as consultants on specific problems first) before making an offer. While great technical ability is a must, I think nothing makes up for true intrinsic motivation, and we like to hire for that.
After all, I think we managed to build a core team of incredibly talented hustlers, which is something that makes me very proud. Beyond that, the book Who: A Method To Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street was very influential.
We're currently a team of six, so still quite tight-knit and haven't scaled up considerably yet. However, all of us believe that what we're doing is meaningful in terms of motivation. This leads to a general sense of excitement. I try to actively push the team to challenge all assumptions and get everyone to interact with users.
I've said before that it's been game-changing to learn how important user feedback is, and I want the team to experience this firsthand. It's also fascinating to reflect on customer interactions in the team, as our more design-focused team members pick up on totally different points than our engineers.
The mantra I try to instill in the team is: "Kill the case, rather than build the case." I believe it's incredibly challenging to be intellectually honest regarding your own ideas. Wishful thinking is the enemy of all startups. Hence, we keep reminding ourselves to be laser-focused on our users and only build new features if we have hard data that validate the value.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
I would tell them the following:
"Over the next century, nearly all full-time work – 1.3 billion jobs – will move online. The pioneers of this transition – software developers – created cloud-native products like Github to easily discover code, build off others' work, and collaborate efficiently.
However, most professionals today – in fields like finance, technology, government, and professional services – still work in spreadsheet architecture that was created 40 years ago.
As a result, teams spend 50% of their day manually managing workflows – looking for the right version, recreating existing work from scratch, managing revisions across tools – rather than doing the deep, meaningful work only they can do!
Therefore, we're working hard on enabling teams to spend more time doing the work they've been trained for! Increasing the productivity of the 1.3 billion people is massively impactful!
We started Flike to enable knowledge workers to focus on innovating rather than managing versions and folders. And we won't stop until we live in a world where everyone can focus on making a difference.
Takeaway: User Feedback Is The Unquestionable Truth
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
The number one lesson was to learn to throw out all internal beliefs, hypotheses, and opinions about a problem and instead take the users' input as the unquestionable truth. It is easy to rationalize issues; however, once you engage with folks encountering the pain points, counterintuitive nuances of the problem emerge, and you should optimize for the bad news. It's much better to get the bad news early on rather than moving in the wrong direction for a long time (opportunity costs).
You'll want to solve a problem that is so pressing that users want you to succeed.
What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
We're getting a lot of feedback from our customers about the current product. We learned that it is a tough challenge to figure out how to translate customer feedback into actionable items, though. It is even more challenging to understand what feature you should build and which leads you down a rabbit hole.
Our current solution to this challenge is to generate several hypotheses that we then try to invalidate using whatever means we can. We might, for example, set up landing pages and ad campaigns to validate whether a pain point exists in the broader market or if this is a specific problem of one customer. As you might imagine, this is a time-consuming process, and we're constantly looking for ways to move faster on that front.
After all, we try to be laser-focused on users and let them make up our product roadmap.
Flike Founder File:
Müller: I keep an aggregated list of the most influential reads for our journey so far. I try to revisit them from time to time, plus I’m continuously adding/editing the list.
In the end, I’ve also inserted a bullet summary of the number one book for me so far. Click the button to check it out below!
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