Listen, Prioritize, and Scale to Build a Winning Product

[00:00:00] Matt Paige: Today we’re chatting with Arda Bull, co-founder and CTO of Hockey Stack and Hockey Stack’s, a SaaS analytics and attribution platform, the unit’s website, CRM ad data so that marketing and growth teams can actually. Measure marketing’s roi. Nowhere to invest more and see account based 10 signals. And y’all been experiencing substantial growth as of late, attracting notable customers like Airme, lavender, cosm, to name a few, and I’m pumped to get into this story.

[00:00:38] Of Hockey Stack today. So it’s a story of multiple pivots on their journey to product market fit the holy grail of product market fit. So many great learnings for product and engineering leaders in this episode, including some insights towards the end. You’re not gonna wanna miss with Arda and what he’s learned on his journey of building hockey stack.

[00:00:59] But welcome to the show, Arda. 

[00:01:02] Arda Bulut: How are you? I’m excited Doing good 

[00:01:04] Matt Paige: here as well. Yeah. Excited to get into it. Hockey stack’s doing some awesome stuff right now. And hockey stack, I’ve been following y’all as of late and it’s such a great example of a product that’s built right and the way we think about that, you gotta.

[00:01:20] You gotta build the right thing, right? That’s valuable for your end user, viable for the business, feasible from a technological perspective. And then you gotta build it the right way, which is a lot into your wheelhouse on the CTO side, in terms of being maintainable, scalable, secure, and usable. And the problem that you’re solving is a big one, especially now in, recession.

[00:01:40] Hyper attention on budget. I know, I’m feeling that. And you’re going after a. Problem in the market. But to start though, I want you to take us back to the beginning. When you started, it was the height of the pandemic. You had an initial vision of what you wanted to build, which is actually different than where hockey stack is today.

[00:02:00] But take us through that first part of your journey. 

[00:02:03] Arda Bulut: You had a great description there, but you know what I say, it hasn’t always been like this the first year, especially like it wasn’t easy as you said there, there has been a, and the first product, even though it was like always an tics product, wasn’t anything like this.

[00:02:19] When we started it was like at the height of the pandemic and like we were trying to do other projects and one of the key things that we noticed there, We couldn’t really like measure product usage and like we tried to mix panel lamp to those kind of classic product A tools and maybe it was our fault, but we couldn’t really get time to work.

[00:02:40] We couldn’t really set set them up easily. So the initial, like the very, very first idea that we had was actually building a product analytics. That focused on ease of use, that focused on actually like giving insights automatically so that you won’t have to look at anything yourself. We want to use artificial intelligence, which was like, it’s weird.

[00:03:01] It was always like at the height of AI as well. Then it’s also it’s also trend right now as 

[00:03:06] Matt Paige: well. That’s the weird journey, A new height, that you’re we’re going into with generative ai, right? Yeah. But it’s interesting. Going back to that point, you mentioned you built an analytics. With the focus on ease of use.

[00:03:18] Yeah. I think this gets into part of the learning it like nowhere in that statement did I hear like the target customer or the problem you were going after? Maybe go deeper there on that initial kind of thing you were building and where you hit some roadblocks. I. 

[00:03:32] Arda Bulut: Yeah, I guess like you also had a great printer from the beginning.

[00:03:36] One of the key things that we want to do was build a product that was easy, that was like, from the setup perspective, from the usability, it had to be like intuitive for whoever we were selling to. The AI was just a way to for us to just say that there’s gonna be some magic there that’s gonna give you the numbers easily so that you won’t even have to like, analyze the data yourself.

[00:03:57] But like the. The actual first product that I mentioned now, we tried working on it for about five to six months. We were talking with people like the usual talk with your customers, talk with people, potential buyers, et cetera. We thought we were talking with them. We were getting all these like great feedback or that’s a cool product, that’s a cool idea, you should do that or something.

[00:04:21] But as we’re. One thing we noticed was no one really wanted to put the script on their website to actually track the data. No one wanted to share their like current data stack with us. So even though they were saying like cool product, et cetera, it didn’t really mean much. Then you had to talk business with them.

[00:04:38] No one gave any money to this product. Yeah, 

[00:04:41] Matt Paige: that, that’s a key piece too, right? Is that this concept of, you can get customer feedback and they may say how awesome it. But when push comes to shove, when it comes, like you mentioned, putting the, with your tool, it’s putting a script on their website, we’re actually paying for the solution.

[00:04:58] If you’re not getting those positive signals it may not be actually good enough to replace status quo of how they do it today. Yeah, 

[00:05:05] Arda Bulut: exactly. The actual validation comes v p people use the product. Not when they say they can use it or that it’s so interesting or something. That was the first key learning.

[00:05:17] We tried to get that work. As I said, we were like five to six months or something, but at the end, like we realized it, it wasn’t going anywhere plus us three. Like we didn’t have any LinkedIn press or something done, so it was like three unknown people coming from Turkey. How are you gonna trust that basically?

[00:05:35] So after that, like we realized we had to change something about the product, like we. At the same time 

[00:05:42] Matt Paige: let me pause there actually. So you’re in Turkey. It’s you and your other two founders. And you’re at this inflection point, right? And so many folks, when they get to this point, they scrap it and go find a day job.

[00:05:53] You know what, where you’re what, maybe early 2021 at this point, and you’re at this inflection point of, do we keep going? Yeah. Yeah. And what was the. What was the trigger for y’all to keep going? Was there was it somebody in the founding team that’s like, all right, we’re gonna keep doing this.

[00:06:11] Did you have an insight that kind of led you to go down another angle? What? What pushed you to keep building? 

[00:06:18] Arda Bulut: Yeah. I think it was just blind faith, yeah, 

[00:06:23] Matt Paige: sometimes you need that, right? Like 

[00:06:25] Arda Bulut: sometimes, yeah. We weren’t sure if it was gonna work. We weren’t sure, if we were actually tackling the right problem, the right audience, whatever.

[00:06:32] But we just want to build something and we like working together. So it was just like a matter of, okay, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna build, actually? So it never even crossed our minds to, at that stage, especially Find another job. It was more about what are we gonna do? I remember we had some motion docs where we were doing like pros and cons list of each idea that we have, like what’s working here, what doesn’t work there.

[00:06:58] And we had some very terrible arguments around that time on everyone wants to go in some different direction. But during that stage, one of the ideas that we had was a webinar text tool. Like instead of focusing on product antics and saying that we use AI or something, we realized that no one really cared about like the technology that you’re in, as long as we are providing some value to them.

[00:07:21] So around that time we tried like focusing on a webinar tool that’s like a competitor to Google Analytics. You can think of this as the second version of the product. Okay. The idea there was basically like tracking the same way that we were tracking like the product analytics part, but for web analytics and all actually like showing people the journeys of all the visitors that they had, giving them like easier to understand dashboards rather than going to like Google Analytics and like going through all their like complex data visualization methods.

[00:07:54] That was the second idea Around that time, there were of simple webinar tool, like privacy friendly tools that were coming out as well. So like we wrote their wave along with them at that point. Yeah. And one of the key things that we did around that time was actually applying to a website called AppSumo.

[00:08:14] It’s like a lifetime deal platform. Have you heard. Yeah, I’ve heard of it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. We applied there and it was, I think er actually applied there, but he didn’t really think much of it. He just filled out an application and forget about it. And he just left the product there to chill on its own for a while.

[00:08:32] And then after a month or so, as we were still like deciding on what we were gonna do next, we realized that there were like a little traction there. That may be like a means something. Oh wow. Yeah. Like we came back. So 

[00:08:45] Matt Paige: You didn’t even realize it was getting traction. It just, it was something you had did.

[00:08:50] That’s what I love about so many journeys and stories. It’s these random serendipitous moments that happened. So you started to get traction which, gave you another kind of nugget of insight of, okay, there may be something here. 

[00:09:05] Arda Bulut: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think around that time, like it’s made about one one k or $1,000.

[00:09:12] We taught us the, again, thing there. We saw that, like we said, okay, maybe there’s something here. So like we decided to invest more in depth, small channel. There are like some Facebook groups or other like committees that they have for the buyers there. So basically we just. Try to be more active talk with the customers around there.

[00:09:31] And as people trusted us more, like we try to actually gain some traction from the part which is like easy to use website analytics tool. This is before like any attribution, before B2B assess any of the current things that we are working 

[00:09:44] Matt Paige: on right now. So who is your target customer at this point? Yeah.

[00:09:48] Or did you really have a target you were going after? 

[00:09:51] Arda Bulut: At that point, we didn’t even choose a target audience. It was whatever customer basically showed us, mostly agencies and e-commerce people though their audiences Usually those people, like the Facebook groups are full of them.

[00:10:04] But yeah, like we started gaining some traction there. Like people really like the product. I think one of the key things there was playing the underdog against a big tool like Atlantic, because like then you become that big. There are gonna be out of people that don’t like it. There are gonna be out of people that like really hate it.

[00:10:24] That’s also like one of the things, all of those simple Retics tools used. And we tried to use it as a, like the alternative tics, like the analytics that you’ll actually want to use. That was the messaging around that time. People got behind that, like they were sick of Google, Netflix.

[00:10:41] We also tried to fight with session recording and heat map tools a little bit as well. That was like a time where we were trying to position us based on like other tools. That kind of works for a while, like if you’re going for that kind of a why, but I think in the long run it wasn’t gonna really work out because.

[00:11:01] At some point you have to change your messaging so that your product is at the focus of it instead of some other product. Yeah. If you have, that’s interesting. Yeah. I think if you have like another tool in your header in your website Yeah. Like in your main page. Yeah. I think that’s gonna be a problem later on that you should probably think about.

[00:11:20] Yeah. But it’s worked for a while. The money from the money we made from AB. Probably the pree round that we did there, like just from the buyers, just from the cost that they bought there. That really helped us going for at least like another year or also 

[00:11:35] Matt Paige: that money. So at this point you’re you’re at this next inflection point, you’re starting to get some positive signals.

[00:11:40] You actually have got some kind of revenue coming in. You mentioned like these agencies are interested, but you still haven’t gotten to click this is it. We’ve got product market. What’s that next inflection point that got you? I think this is where you actually start to get to what hockey stack is today.

[00:11:56] Yeah. What was that next inflection point? 

[00:11:59] Arda Bulut: Yeah. Basically like we got the money from smo. We were doing good, but the problem this time was like the customers and the features that they were requesting wasn’t really aligning with the vision that we. For the website analytics tool leader, they were asking for like white labeling features.

[00:12:18] They want to basically show use our product, show it as their own to their own customers, especially like the agencies. And we didn’t wanna go down that road, you, your product then wouldn’t have any, Brand or something we, yeah, as a SaaS. Our SaaS, like we felt closer to other SaaS businesses, but we didn’t really have a way to validate the idea to actually focus on that.

[00:12:40] So around that time, like the second pivot that we were about to make was more about an audience problem. Rather than like the actual product, because we were like happy with the product. It was usable, like people were getting value out of it. So we didn’t really think about the product aspect that much around the pivot.

[00:12:57] So what we did there to actually decide on what we were gonna do next, how we were gonna execute that is talk again with a lot of. But it isn’t just like talking about some abstract concept or like a problem that they might be having that they just stay to like in a cold. They actually had something to show to them, like the actual product.

[00:13:17] And we could ask them like, this is the product, this is how can use it. Would you use this? Like, how does, how do you think this works? Fits in your workflow? That was like the big question that we were asking around that time. Unlike. We tried that with e-commerce people. We tried that with agencies and we also tried that with SaaS people.

[00:13:36] And what we realized that SaaS people were generally a lot more responsive to our messages. Yeah. They were like, they really wanted to like help us out as well. And they were also interested in the product. But the key thing is most of the people that we talked to weren’t interested in 90% of the.

[00:13:56] Wow. I remember one person just said I’m not gonna use this. I’m not gonna use that feature. I’m not gonna use this page. All I want is this specific thing. And that specific thing that they wanted to see was actually attributing revenue back to block posts. It was like insight that we had. Yeah.

[00:14:15] I love 

[00:14:15] Matt Paige: that too. Cuz some people may hear that, that, oh, I’m not gonna use 90% of your. And they walk away with their tail between their legs. But what that customer just gave you is like the biggest inside of all. Yeah. Like here’s the gold, this 10% right here is what I care about. And not only what I care about, it’s what I would pay for.

[00:14:35] Yeah. And what’s shout like props to y’all for actually now focusing in on that area. So now you’ve started to understand. Who’s that core customer that kind of B2B SaaS marketing person looking for attribution, and you’re getting to what is their job to be done, which is beautiful. And now you’re starting to you’ve gotten to, what’s that core problem that needs to be solved, right?

[00:14:59] Yeah. At this point, 

[00:15:00] Arda Bulut: yeah. At that point, like we started the messaging with the same thing that they told us, like at between revenue back to block post. And the fun thing is around that time we didn’t even. That much about attribution, like it was just a, like a funny word that we heard about. We didn’t even have that functional thing, the product, it was just like a precursor to that.

[00:15:22] So just that weekend, like Pura just hacked away, built like that, the very, very first attribution feature onto the product and try showing. To be SaaS businesses and like with that, with actually like being able to show that they were a lot more like open to their problems. We could really talk about like the core problems that you mentioned that they were having and we realized that it isn’t just about block post or like revenue there, it’s about actually unifying data.

[00:15:52] That they were getting with the rest of the tax stack that the company is using. Because without that, like the, I think someone else just said that like they were, every month they were praying that the blog post, that they were like publishing will have some kind of traffic Samsung kind of visitors because otherwise, like they had nothing to show to, like execs to C suit, whatever.

[00:16:13] They were just like praying to get that success and they had no way to measure it. They had no way to optimize it. 

[00:16:20] Matt Paige: Yeah. When the alternative is praying for success, then yeah. Yeah. You got a good if you can solve against that, then you got an opportunity space there.

[00:16:28] That’s such an awesome story. I’m curious though you’re the CTO of this product. Yeah. I’m assuming it’s built on a really modern stack, being a new solution. But I’m seeing like every week, like new features, new functionality. Being built. What do you attribute that to? Y’all’s ability to quickly iterate and build and deliver.

[00:16:48] Not only build the new features, but actually deliver and put them into production in, a safe and secure way. 

[00:16:54] Arda Bulut: Yeah, I think it’s about like the mindset, because even two years ago when he first started, deciding on tech, like the tech, actual tech stack was just about, okay, which technologies do we know?

[00:17:08] Yeah. Which are technologies that we can actually like push some code, some production server, and what’s the fastest way to build the mvp? Basically, that’s what we like Bora and first thought. And that’s how we like built the frustration of the product that like some parts of that code is still being used in production right now.

[00:17:26] But like from then on it was about always choosing the simplest text that you can have for that stage of the company so that you can quickly find something to show off to people. And like even now, while we are like pushing features, it’s about making, like finding the simplest way to actually build that.

[00:17:45] And I’m pushed that and iterate over it over time to actually make it like the complex thing that it is now. I think like Base Camp had a great example about this, like while building their calendar feature, they didn’t just go out and build like this complex calendar, but instead they tried to understand the core problem that people are having.

[00:18:05] Yeah. And then build feature around that core problem instead of just saying okay, we should build a calendar or something. In our case as a we don’t just go out. Build the most complex thing and see if that works for the people. We try to like iterate over the process to make sure, like the first version works, second version, not that well, maybe we improve it at the third version.

[00:18:26] So that way like we’ll have something to show the people every week. Every week there’s something like new happening in the platform. Yeah. And right now especially, 

[00:18:36] Matt Paige: No, I was just gonna say, you’re speaking my language. Basecamp is such a good example and use case Yeah. Of how to do this. And like you said it’s quickly iterating and not being afraid to put something out there so people can react to and you can continue to iterate on, right?

[00:18:50] Arda Bulut: Yeah, exactly. Like we have some features that not also people use. Sometimes we remove features from the product that we know that no one’s using. So that’s, that also happens, but you should invest like from the start, try to invest less than you would normally do. So then you have to actually build, remove it from the product.

[00:19:10] It’ll be such a big close at the end there. Yeah. That’s like a big thing there. 

[00:19:15] Matt Paige: And that’s such a good nugget too. It’s the everybody’s always in the mindset of build more features, put ’em out there. But what you just mentioned was critical. It was. If a feature’s not being used, if it’s not adding value, remove it.

[00:19:29] Because at the end of the day, like you’re only creating more complexity in the solution for your user. I like to think of it as you’re forcing your users to burn more like brain calories, right? With the more stuff you have out there. I love that approach. Even early on, y’all are taking stuff out.

[00:19:45] If it’s not adding value to keep it lean and very focused on the problem it solves. 

[00:19:51] Arda Bulut: Exactly. The simplest example for that is like in the sidebar, for example. You think about how many things you have in the sidebar and like how much page that you have. Yeah. Just the other day, like we had to remove one feature, like the complete feature from the sidebar because like we knew no one’s using it right now.

[00:20:09] It isn’t like the key thing in the product right now. So you have to like sometimes do those kind of sacrifices to actually make the product. More intuitive, like it comes back to the ease of use as well. If it’s less complex, then people are like more likely to use it more. 

[00:20:24] Matt Paige: Yeah. That’s a great segue.

[00:20:25] And that’s a big piece of what we think about as built right? Is the product usable? Yeah. And it’s more than just the ui, it’s the actual user experience. And one thing I love about Hockey Stack is y’all don’t just think about it in the span. I’m a customer. I’m in the solution. You take it further than that, and I see this with the interactive demo that people can use Yeah.

[00:20:46] Online. And I know that’s an engineering effort to do that. There’s all kinds of, how quickly you can get it set up. I think y’all, you’ll talk about, you can get set up in two minutes. Talk about that and how you think about the importance of ease of use Yeah. In the product. 

[00:21:01] Arda Bulut: The thing there is like, there’s always gonna be some effort to actually set this and use these tools, but it depends on whether you’re putting the effort on the customer side or the developer side.

[00:21:11] And like as much as possible, we try to put it on our side, put the weight on our shoulders. So that for the customer, everything looks automated. Everything looks like very easy set up. That means that we have to do out of con like configuration out of like generalization on our side because we integrated a lot of tools.

[00:21:28] We get out of data from from these customers and they have different configurations of these tools. We don’t ask them to actually provide us. All these information about their configuration, like they don’t have to fill all these forms to actually integrate at all. For them, it’s just one click.

[00:21:45] But for us it’s actually making sure in the background that everything works according to the generalized model that we have for our data. So it’s It’s about who is it gonna be hard for either you or the customer. And I would always prefer for it to be hard for myself other than the 

[00:22:01] Matt Paige: customer.

[00:22:01] Yeah. I’m stealing that. I love that concept of putting the weight on your shoulders and not your customers. That’s such a great way to think about it because it really, you have that trade off, right? It can be on your customer’s shoulders or it can be on yours. And one thing I heard you mention, like a big part.

[00:22:18] Product or solution are the integrations and making that easy. Yeah. How do you go about prioritizing and determining which integrations to add to the platform? Do you have any kind of criteria you go through when you’re saying, let’s prioritize this integration first over this integration within the solution?

[00:22:37] Arda Bulut: Yeah, that’s a good question. And like it has a very simple answer. Whatever video. It’s things that people like, it’s things that our customers ask us. It’s things that we In the download. Yeah. So like the simple metric that we use is okay, who is asking for this? How many people are asking for this feature?

[00:22:56] If we have just one person asking for integration, we still put that in the roadmap, but like a little. Lower than the other things. And if we get like a lot more people think we use this tool as well, if they like mentioned that thing, that test gets prioritized more and more until it’s like in the cycle for this week, in the cycle for next week.

[00:23:17] So it’s like very simple. But it works like for the last couple months at least, we aren’t building anything that our customers aren’t asking. Yeah, it’s just local. So many good. 

[00:23:29] Matt Paige: So many good insights here. And that’s the thing. Like so many people, I think overcomplicate this, what you just said is, does the customer need it? Have we heard them ask for it? And the big piece there is you’re actually continuing talking to customers. Listening to customers, which a lot of people overlook. A lot of the times people will talk to users and customers at the. But don’t do it throughout. Yeah. And you make it easy in that way cuz it’s not some complex formula or prioritization framework.

[00:23:56] It’s no customers have told us they want this, they need this. So we prioritize it in that way. Exactly. Yeah. To wrap it up. I got one more question for you. CTO Hockey Stack, y’all are growing. Y’all are, we’re just chatting before this. You’re living it up in San Francisco now mingling with all the folks there, but what’s.

[00:24:15] The biggest thing you’ve learned, like if you could go back to your former self at the beginning of this, what’s that one piece of advice that you would give your former self or another young, CTO or engineering leader about building a solution that can scale and grow? 

[00:24:33] Arda Bulut: Good question.

[00:24:34] I will. The biggest thing while building a product with limited resources is like the last thing we talked about, actually, prioritization. So like you have, it’s like a very simple problem. You have about, I don’t know, eight to 10 hours that like you can potentially work in a day and like most of the day, like even though you think that you are prioritizing the same things, if you actually.

[00:25:01] Drill, drill down and actually see what you’re doing at hr. Usually there are gonna be things that don’t really matter that much, but you still do because you think that they matter because you didn’t like criti. Critically think about those stuff, but if you can actually prioritize your day as well as prioritize the futures, you can actually have a lot more impact.

[00:25:20] I’m like a big. In the 80, 80 20 rule or yeah. Yep. Most of the things is gonna come from that 20% of the work that you’re doing. The other 80% is just manual things that we can probably like automate or just don’t do at all. So if you can actually correct the code, if you can actually always try to optimize the process that way you’ll be able to move a lot faster than a lot of people are think like, how are they actually building all this so fast?

[00:25:47] But in fact you are just focusing on that like key part, key 20% that’s giving, like creating delusion of that. You’re doing like everything at the same 

[00:25:56] Matt Paige: time. Yeah. Yeah. Such a foundational lesson there. And it’s broader than just. For engineering a solution that applies to life and everything.

[00:26:06] And going back to that customer you talked to, sometimes it’s that 10% of the solution they care about. Yeah. But that’s awesome. But Arda I appreciate the chat. It’s been great having you on. Built right. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. All right, so let me stop.