Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah, co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira, uses pirate and explorer for two reflexes he noticed while watching founders build. A pirate sees a feature elsewhere and copies it. An explorer decides the existing version is weak and builds a better or opposite one. At the extremes, a pirate studies the market in order to copy it, and an explorer studies it in order to reject it. Shah says a new founder should notice which reaction gives them energy: they have it, so I should, or they have it and I think it is wrong. He finds the split easiest to see in software, where copying a feature is common.

According to Hiten Shah, the most difficult part of sales and marketing is getting used to the grind.

Doing the same set of things over and over and over again.

Sometimes with such mediocre results that you think about giving up right before striking gold.

Hiten Shah and Neil Patel were lucky enough to start Crazy Egg together, a company for which they were not able to raise venture funds. Even after moving onto another venture funded company, they have kept Crazy Egg around, putting in a part-time CEO to keep an eye on the basket. Many years later, the company is still operational and is bringing in revenue. You can make it work, if you insist on doing it your way.

Steli Efti, on The Startup Chat with Hiten Shah, says founders will visit customers and still fail to hear them. He describes a founder building a smartphone for everybody. Efti could not tell who it was for, or why it beat phones already for sale, and the team had little experience building one. They said the problem was not knowing their customer, then said research showed everybody loved the device equally. Efti concludes they talked with great passion, missed the clues, and decided the love was real. He does not think the case is rare. Founders lose the insight because they keep talking, aloud or in their own heads, and leave no quiet in which to listen.

On The Startup Chat, Hiten Shah tells Steli Efti that he beats a creative block by starting, including when the first attempt is bad. For writing, that can be one clumsy sentence or a single word. Thinking the piece through before any words exist removes the freedom the writing needs, so he refuses to stay stuck in his head. The same move covers an interface or a sales email: write, draw on a whiteboard, or look at other products until a reaction gets him moving. He says the key is simply to start. The episode's own notes put the point the same way: getting past the block means doing the work.

Hiten Shah tells PressNomics host Sean Tierney that companies lose product-market fit when they stop paying attention to the customer and stop asking what problem to solve next. Shah is the co-founder of FYI, Crazy Egg, and Kissmetrics, and he writes the Product Habits newsletter with his co-founder Marie. Tierney notes that Shah has advised more than 120 companies, and reads out LinkedIn, Recurly, SlideShare, Clearbit, Buffer, Gusto, and Front. Shah's line on the episode is the Zig Ziglar motto Tierney quotes back: you get what you want if you help enough other people get what they want.

It usually happens when there is a lot of intimate knowledge of customer needs. This may mean building a product and then learning from the customers that use it. Or, it may be doing research before developing a product.

On The Startup Chat, Steli Efti and Hiten Shah go through Hiten's 2019 Remote Work Report, written with Hiten's cofounder Marie. Steli says people prize the freedom of working remotely, then fail if they do not have the discipline to match it. Those hires run into emotional problems they have not dealt with, and the employer is stuck too. He says a company retreat does not fix that. Without discipline, remote work does not succeed, and the cost lands on the person who did the hiring as well as on the employee. Hiten points listeners to the report at bit.ly/remotereport.

Hiten Shah surveyed 400+ remote employees and found out that while everyone loves remote, it comes with some challenges. The report itself contains tips and tricks on how to make remote work the best for the employees, and the company.

Check out the Remote Work Report and learn more.

Hiten Shah surveyed 400+ remote employees and found out that even though mostly everyone loves remote, it comes with some challenges.

Check out the Remote Work Report and learn more.

Hiten believes that all organizations have to adapt to the way that their employees want to work. It’s more of adaptability for a company to meet the needs of the employees to help grow the business. Another aspect that has to change in five years is investors’ comfort when it comes to funding in remote teams because there will not be a physical location to see what the team is doing.

Hiten believes there is. Three or six months in, people will love it less because they are still figuring it out. After those points, they have it figured out and enjoy it more. Either you figure it out or you quit and work in an office. Less people are going back to an office because most companies have an understanding that it’s a great way to work.

According to Hiten, it would be difficult for companies to train millennials to work remotely if they don’t have their process written down. He says that the younger you are, in some ways, the more likely remote work will be really traumatic to what you are used to. Younger people, also considered to be “digital natives,” are used to this digital lifestyle, which is what remote work is based on.

When it comes to getting out of the house, getting a co-working space, work with other remote workers, Hiten says that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution. The biggest tip is to figure out what matters and works for you. We have freedom, but we don’t know how to utilize it when working remotely.

As human beings, we aren’t forced to figure out what’s best for us because there’s a set structure when working on-site. Remote work is completely different because individuals are not forced to have structure, but they have to be figured it out on their own. This means to measure their productivity on their own to create a personal structure.

It is due to the heavy emphasis of collaborative work to get something done. If one person tries to do something creative, the need of collaboration is emphasized, so more people are added to a project that could have been completed by one person, which then creates a compromised version due to everyone's ideas and differences.

Communication, socializing, loneliness, and boundaries are costs when it comes to working remotely. Isolation is heavily mentioned for remote workers. Hiten relieves that this feeling is impactful for newly remote workers since they are used to going into work and being around coworkers.

Both James and Hiten agree that company retreats should not be used for strategy meetings. Rather, it’s a company crutch that’s used to get people together. Hiten points out that if you’re a remote company, it’s questionable to why a retreat, which requires having to be in the same place, should be used to get something that’s critical for the organization done.

James states that whenever individuals are working in an office with other people, they tend to feel like there’s a weight of having to work constantly, which does not make sense for deep, creative work. He feels like it’s impossible to take an hour to focus on the middle distance because it’s costly and not able to be done in close office settings.

As Hiten puts it, the tools his companies use are simple and the processes they use are thorough. The tools that Hiten’s companies use are ones that are the easiest and most ubiquitous because they are usually ones they are sharing to others who are outside of the company.

Information oriented tools and communication oriented tools are what his companies use, and some of them are all of G Suite and Slack. They have many other tools, but they utilize them when it’s necessary.

As a flaw, Hiten feels like people get tool centric. He states how he would rather get purpose centric, which includes stating the purpose, figuring out what needs to be accomplished, and then figuring out the tools to get there. People can get excited over every tool that comes out, but it will not be as effective to use if the purposes aren’t established.