Raising $3M & building a product people love
My chat with Ashutosh Priyadarshy, Founder & CEO of Sunsama (reissue)
Introducing Ashutosh Priyadarshy, Founder & CEO of Sunsama, a daily planner for busy professionals.
Sunsama was in YC’s W19 cohort and they raised $3M.
What we talk about:
Activating customers and reducing churn
Having reference points for new feature development
Building a product people love through customer feedback
This is an updated reissue of a previous post.
Joshua: Hey man, can you tell people who you are and what you’ve been building?
Ashutosh: I’m Ashutosh, one of the founders of Sunsama. I love building digital products that people use everyday that make them a better version of themselves.
Sunsama is a daily planner for busy professionals. Each day, Sunsama walks you through the process of planning a calm and focused work day.
As you plan your day, you can pull in tasks from any of your tools, like email, calendar, Slack and project management tools. Along the way, Sunsama nudges you to pick a realistic workload so you don’t burn out.
Experiments
Joshua: What was your first meaningful experiment?
Ashutosh: The first meaningful experiment we ran was getting rid of our freemium tier and requiring all new customers to be onboarded personally by a founder and only after paying.
Basically, we tried the Superhuman playbook.
It gave us really high quality conversations with customers. Instead of “interviewing” customers or “watching them use the product”, we had a 30 minute call where we had to figure out how the product would become an indispensable part of their day.
It created a strong filter for qualifying customers. It only attracted people who really needed what we were building. That way we didn’t get distracted by filthy casuals.
Growth strategies
Joshua: What growth strategies did you pursue in the early days?
Ashutosh: When we got into YC, we decided to “blindly” trust our group partners for the duration of the program on what strategies to pursue in terms of how to talk to customers, how to price, etc.
Later on, we started making our own decisions about these strategies but it was really helpful to have someone with a lot of data points suggest to us where to start.
It was easy to put trust in them because they've seen so many companies.
Eventually, we changed some of the strategies.
For example, our group partner, Michael Seibel, he really pushed us hard to try the Superhuman approach, which was incredibly valuable in terms of having a strategy for talking to customers, and figuring out if what we're building was valuable at all.
But it was not a strategy that we wanted to pursue long term because we didn't want to build an army of people who are onboarding customers.
Unlike Superhuman we didn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank of VC money that we could throw at having this many customer support representative to onboard our product, etc
So for us, we made the decision that if this was going to work, we weren’t going to raise a ton of money and we weren't planning on doing that, we would need to figure out a way to build an onboarding experience that was self service.
Joshua: What single strategy or tactic worked better than anything else?
Ashutosh: There was a summer where all we did was work on our self-service onboarding. We’d get on calls with customers and watch them onboard or watch FullStory at the start of the week, make a list of things to improve, build them and repeat.
All of our success has come from and continues to come from focusing on activating customers.
We reoriented the product around the daily planning flow, the guided daily planning flow. That worked because all of a sudden people understood the product, what it was for instead of having this nebulous canvas of tasks and calendars, they had a very specific use case that they would use it for.
Then it also gave us the focus internally to know that every product feature we're building is oriented around how does it help you plan a more calm and focused work day.
So just having that as our reference point and our anchor for every feature has been really valuable in both adding new features and saying no to features.
Signs of traction
Joshua: How far along was the business when you started seeing initial signs of traction?
Ashutosh: There was a product we had before Sunsama also called Sunsama. It was a meeting documentation tool and it had some initial attraction.
It had about $1,500 in MRR from paying customers, which I think is a form of traction.
But almost all of it was one customer who's just a total evangelist for it. And they had a bunch of seats and one day they cancelled and they're like, yeah, it's too expensive. We're going to just document our meetings and Google Docs or something like that.
And that was when we were just like, oh shit, whatever we're building here is not good enough.
And that was actually the moment where we pivoted to Sunsama, the daily planner as it is today.
Joshua: Did you have an aha moment? If so, what was it?
Ashutosh: We were in YC doing early customer interviews. So we were saying, ‘Sunsama is a tool to manage your tasks and meetings together.’
You have tasks and you have meetings, but what we hadn't put together is that the use case was to plan a single day at a time.
So that's what we've really honed in on at this point.
And one thing we kept noticing in our early user interviews is that we would have these customers who would have a task lists that would have 40 items in it.
We considered that to be sort of an anti-pattern—you're not actually going to do 40 tasks today. That was a big moment for us because then we moved the product to be more into a guided flow.
So we added the guide to daily planning and we basically built features that would augment that. We added time estimates to every task so that it would become more obvious when you were over committed for the day.
So if you had 40 tasks, you can never get all 40 of these done because they add up to 70 hours of work for the day.
So orienting around that daily planning flow was a big aha moment for us.
Advice for founders
Joshua: What advice would you give to founders looking to get their startup off the ground?
Ashutosh: Honestly, I say you just got to try a lot of stuff.
That's biased from my experience. One of the really interesting things that came out of building and then iterating and sun-setting six different products is that you start to really hone your ability for interpreting customer feedback.
I think the first thing you build, when you get any feedback, is that there's no reference point for that feedback.
Earlier on, you lack any perspective. So I think building a lot of things and getting more perspective on whether or not the feedback you're getting from early users and customers, and understanding if that feedback is indicative of the fact that you've built something that people want.
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