Product Playbooks
Decisions that shape the product itself — what to build next, when to say no, and how founders used real feedback to steer the roadmap without losing focus.
277 tactics · page 1 of 10
“Data in itself is not a value add to the business — collecting it, storing it, having it is not value to the business. It's whether or not you're actually using it and turning it into meaningful insights that impact the business. Not even insights just for the sake of insights.”
Collect What You Will Act On — Everything Else Is Noise With GDPR Risk
Collecting everything feels safe — you can always analyze it later. In practice, it creates GDPR exposure, inflates analytics costs, and drowns your data team in noise. Taylor Wells frames data collection as a question of action: for each event, ask 'what decision would this inform and when?' If the answer is unclear, don't collect it. The discipline to not collect saves more than the habit of collecting everything ever could.
“If you just focus on revenue and value is not moving at the same pace as revenue then eventually revenue is going to crash. If you can focus on how do I keep growing that footprint of value and have revenue be a function of that value then revenue is going to be much more sustainable.”
North Star Metric Reflects Value Delivered — Revenue Is a Lagging Shadow of It
Sean Ellis defines a north star metric as the single measure of aggregate value delivered to customers — not a revenue proxy. Revenue lags value; when value stalls, revenue collapses later. The NSM forces every team to ask 'does this move the thing users actually care about?' instead of optimizing local metrics that don't translate to sustainable growth.
“KPIs — don't overthink it. A KPI's usefulness goes down proportional to the amount of time you spent thinking about it. The best ones are just like: how many people use the feature, how many dollars through the feature. If a KPI you need a PhD to design, you probably need at least a masters to understand it.”
Simple KPIs Beat Complex Ones — If It Takes a PhD to Design, No One Will Use It
Complex KPIs look rigorous but fail in practice because no one except their creator understands them well enough to act on them. Taylor Wells observed teams designing elaborate composite metrics that were technically precise but practically ignored. The inverse: the KPIs that actually changed behavior at Disney+ were the ones a PM could explain in one sentence. Clarity of metric beats theoretical accuracy every time.
“What I would recommend for anybody designing to do is to use references — I'm grabbing different apps that have similar functionality and design to what I'm looking to build, and then using that to inform my design process.”
Use reference apps in Figma instead of designing from a blank canvas
Figma fluency is non-negotiable even for non-designers — it's the surface where you brief contractors and pressure-test layouts. Pull reference apps with similar functionality and remix their patterns rather than designing from a blank canvas.
“I needed to reduce my space of ideas to something that I can really build. It should be a quality product. And since I was a backend developer, I knew how to build APIs — that was kind of my super skill.”
Cut your idea space to ideas your existing skills can actually ship at quality
Pick ideas you can ship at quality with your existing skill stack and discard everything else. A backend developer should weigh API products heavily and skip ideas that require mobile or design depth they don't have.
“People should not use AI for any of this — any of it should not.”
Do not use AI for the strategy work — brand identity and business plan should stay human
Brand identity, positioning, target market — these are documents that require you to think hard about what you actually believe. Outsourcing them to an LLM produces glossy nothing. Reserve AI for execution, not for the decisions only you can make.
“The cool thing about AI is, I don't have to code to teach the AI. A resume review would take me three hours to do, but now I can do 20, 30, 100, 1,000 resume reviews a day with this AI I built, for a fraction of the price.”
AI lets you scale expertise without learning to code — one expert review becomes 1,000 a day
The leverage in AI products is not faster code — it's bottling expert judgment that doesn't scale physically. Teach the model the rules a domain expert uses, and a service that consumed hours per customer becomes one that handles thousands a day at near-zero marginal cost.
“As an entrepreneur we always want to be selling a painkiller, not a vitamin. A vitamin is a nice-to-have, a painkiller is something you have to have — and it's going to sell a lot better.”
Sell a painkiller, not a vitamin — only painkillers convert at scale
Builders fall in love with clever inventions instead of testing whether anyone is in real pain. A vitamin is interesting; a painkiller is non-negotiable, and only painkillers convert at scale. Filter every scoping decision through which category the product actually lives in.
“Building on a platform is easier — you don't have to build the community around it. You can kind of cannibalize part of it and try to solve a sub-issue… Notion already had a huge community, people were really fans of the product — they had like a huge subreddit, tons of Facebook groups.”
Build on a platform with an existing fanbase — cannibalize their community instead of creating yours
Picking an existing platform with a passionate user base means you inherit their community instead of building one from scratch. Solving a sub-issue inside that ecosystem lets you ride attention from a hungry crowd already organised in subreddits and Facebook groups. Platform risk is real, but the distribution head start is worth it.
“I wanted to believe my best customers thought of us as an innovative new customer education tool. The hard truth is that they didn't think of us as that. They actually thought of us as a pop-up tool. If our best customers think of us as a pop-up tool, you can extrapolate and say a bunch of other customers who think of us as a pop-up tool might pay us some money.”
Listen to how your best customers describe you, not how you describe yourself
Sean and his co-founders insisted they were an 'education and loyalty tool' for a year with only two customers. The unlock was admitting their happiest customers already had a different word for the product (pop-ups) and rebuilding the entire company around that word. Positioning is downstream of how the market already categorizes you.
“We decided to go all in on that and we've chosen to do nothing else besides that one thing, which is called pop-ups. Do one thing and do that one thing phenomenally. When you're a younger founder, the one currency you have that the incumbents of your industry don't have is speed and urgency.”
Cut every feature that is not the one thing customers actually point at
Alia was originally a loyalty program plus education tool plus pop-up; Sean killed the first two and shipped only pop-up features going forward, even renaming the product page from 'product features' to 'pop-up features.' The radical scope cut is what let a 12-person team outrun 15-20 year incumbents.
“Don't try to create a new market, just work on the validated market. Go for products or markets which are actually generating revenue. Once you have identified the validated market, your next step should be to figure out your competitors, use their product day in day out, and try to come up with a 1% increment in the quality of the product.”
Don't create a new market — build a 1% better version of one that already prints money
After his last product shut down, Devin deliberately hunted for validated markets instead of inventing categories. He studied Taplio, Contentin, and AuthoredUp daily, mapped their flows, and asked where he could be 1% better. Content creation was the universally weak point — that single edge in a hungry market was enough.
“When it comes to building a SaaS, you should be solving a problem in a growing market. A good example I can give is building a SaaS tool for newspaper owners — newspapers are in decline. Or you can build a tool for vibe coding, which only in the last months has been exploding.”
Build in a growing market, not a declining one — same effort, opposite trajectory
Diego frames niche selection as picking the tailwind, not just the pain. Vibe-coding tools vs. newspaper-publisher tools is the same engineering effort but opposite revenue curves. Pick a market that's already pulling builders in and ride the demand wave.
“You need to focus on building painkillers, not vitamins.”
Build painkillers, not vitamins — and pick a razor-tight niche
SuperX is a textbook painkiller — every X builder is desperate to grow, and SuperX is the only tool showing why posts went viral and helping you replicate. Combined with a razor-tight niche (X growth) and the sharpest positioning angle (data-driven virality), the product hit $13K MRR with 450 subs in 4 months. Acute pain plus narrow niche beats broad utility every time.
“Uber had just come out. I wanted to have the same experience waiting for a bus. I wanted something that would allow me to finish having my coffee in the morning without having to stand at a bus stop for 10, 20 minutes in the rain.”
Import the magical feeling of a hot app into a boring daily ritual
The wedge wasn't 'better transit data' — it was importing Uber's delight pattern (watching a vehicle crawl toward you on a map) into a category that didn't have it. Pick a tired daily ritual (commuting, queueing, waiting) and clone the emotional payoff from a hot app in an adjacent category. The feeling sells the product before any feature does.
“I built about 10 to 12 projects across different spaces, most of them never made it to production. With Lyric AI video generators or automating job applications, I didn't really know what the end user wanted or why the current softwares weren't living up to their hype. With the Amazon world I already understood from A to Z what problems new sellers were running into.”
Build the tool you wish you had — graveyard projects came from foreign domains
Hassam's failure pattern was building for domains he didn't operate in — every AI-video and job-automation project died because he guessed at user pain. Launch Fast worked because he built the exact tool he wished he had as an Amazon seller, with the user-flow already proven by his own daily workflow.
“we created step-by-step interactive demos using Super Demo of thousands of different workflows and keywords and we would create SEO focused again programmatic pages with super demos embedded how to export Figma to PDF or how to merge cells on Excel and our bet was by solving their question in an interactive and engaging way and putting our product front and center enough of them would be within our ICP”
Embed interactive product demos inside SEO workflow pages to qualify traffic on arrival
Instead of generic how-to articles, Super Demo embedded live product demos directly into SEO pages targeting common workflow queries. This turned informational traffic into a product trial moment, qualifying visitors from the second they arrived and removing the need for a separate funnel step.
“You're not hiding behind proprietary software that we need to grant access to someone at a bank that is trying to evaluate whether it would be a great fit for the infrastructure they have to run through so many checks and they can do that very easily by just by auditing our open source code.”
Open source auditability removes security review friction for enterprise buyers
Enterprise buyers in regulated industries face months of security review before adopting proprietary software. Papermark's open codebase lets prospects audit security themselves, eliminating a major sales-cycle blocker and enabling trust that accelerates enterprise conversion without a dedicated sales team.
“we shut down all marketing and spent 4 months completely rebuilding from scratch. we launched the new version on April 15th where we were at $1,700 MRR and around 15 downloads a day. the next month we go all in on marketing again for the NBA playoffs and all of a sudden our conversion rate to paid was over 50%”
Rebuild from scratch when trial-to-paid conversion sits below 20%
Rather than iterating on a broken product, they killed marketing entirely and spent four months rebuilding around the core insight that users wanted answers, not tools. When they relaunched, paid conversion jumped from 13% to over 50% and they hit $30K MRR within 10 weeks — a result that would have been impossible without the full rebuild.
“Everyone can build a product but there are really few that are very simple and easy to use. That's why we are here.”
Simplicity beats features as the only real competitive advantage
When asked what makes Letterly worth paying for when ChatGPT exists for free, Anton's answer was immediate: execution quality. He argues that in a world where anyone can build software, the rare thing is a product so simple it removes every possible point of friction.
“If you go to Zapier and check the most common zaps, you will see pairs of two applications — for example QuickBooks and Sheets. If you're able to build that in just one piece of software that does everything, you're going to be solving a huge pain point for customers.”
Zapier's most popular zap pairs reveal hundreds of underserved integration gaps
Asked where he'd look for new micro-SaaS opportunities today, Leandro pointed to Zapier's popular automation pairs as a signal for unmet demand. High-volume multi-step zaps indicate workflows painful enough that users cobbled together a workaround — a gap a focused app can fill cleanly.
“if you go broad like if you focus on acquisition and at the same time have a low retention you will spend a lot of energy pushing people to your software and 99% of those people are going to flow away directly after trying your software you need to make sure that your retention is good you need to make sure that you have stickiness”
Prove Product Stickiness Before Spending Anything on Acquisition
Most founders rush to grow their user base before their product is sticky enough to keep anyone. Tibo's playbook demands proving retention — defined as users who cannot live without the software — before opening any acquisition channel. Scaling a leaky bucket wastes money and energy that could be spent making the core product indispensable.
“The number one thing that we focus on is simplicity is the quick and easy experience that we offer. There is no simple solution to get you where you need to go. So the reason we started working on this app was to offer the same value to our users. The best-in-class solution with way less complexity.”
Build the Simplest Version of What Competitors Made Complicated
Steve identified that incumbents in the calorie-tracking space had become bloated and complex, giving him a clear opening to do less, better. His entire product strategy was to strip everything down to the core action and make that one thing faster and simpler than anyone else. Simplicity became both the competitive moat and the central marketing message.
“Don't just make generic call to actions like yeah just go check out the website. What we've been doing is we create specific call to actions so we make them sort of interactive not just a generic one and prompting them to do an action inside of the site.”
Use Interactive CTAs That Prompt a Specific In-Product Action
Generic 'visit our website' CTAs leave viewers without a clear next step, reducing conversion. By crafting CTAs that direct users to complete a concrete action inside the product, Vasco reduced friction between watching a video and becoming an active user.
“Authentication honestly isn't even needed for modern apps. Like mine doesn't have authentication or a database and I'm printing money. The reason I made it this way is for two reasons. I wanted to reduce friction as much as possible. I don't want my users wasting time on signing up.”
Skip authentication and databases to eliminate mobile onboarding friction
By storing everything on-device and skipping sign-up, Matt removes the single most common drop-off point in mobile onboarding. The app anchors retention through daily prayer streaks and Bible verse rewards — habit loops that don't require accounts. This design choice also drove a 12% review rate, far above the typical 1-3%, since frictionless users who complete prayers are more satisfied and more likely to leave feedback.
“design for constraint not for ideal every persona have their constraints — for example developers they really prefer self-hosted tools that they can test and check on their local environment instead of going through any kind of signup wall”
Remove all developer friction before adding a single feature
Jonathan's pivotal realization was that developer trust is earned by removing barriers, not adding capabilities. ChartDB required no sign-up, no credentials, and no software installation — the opposite of most SaaS products. That zero-friction entry is what turned a GitHub post into 250,000 users.
“It was just like upload a video add text trim it done.”
Solve Your Own Pain by Stripping the Product to Its Simplest Form
Saba built Veed.io by cloning the radical simplicity of a GIF editor and applying it to video. Instead of competing with full-featured desktop editors, he stripped everything away — one job, in the browser, done.
“The right way to do it is to focus on building a portfolio of projects around the same niche.”
Build Multiple Products for One Niche to Unlock Cross-Selling
Floren built a course, ebook, and SaaS — all for developers — so each product fed the next. When your audience overlaps, a course subscriber naturally becomes a SaaS customer without additional acquisition cost.
“Aim for solving a problem by chaining and stitching together tools and products that are out there than spending months in R&D.”
Chain Existing Tools Together Instead of Building From Scratch
Ramsri used no-code tools for the first version of question.ai, only re-platforming once he hit real bottlenecks. The principle: prototype fast with off-the-shelf parts, learn what users actually need, then invest in custom infrastructure.
“customers started sending us requests for new features in that plug-in and sometimes it was best to achieve that not through a feature but a completely different plug-in”
Let Customer Requests Reveal Your Next Product, Not a Planning Session
Katie never sat down with a list of 19 ideas — the portfolio grew organically from listening to paying users. Spinning a frequently requested feature into a separate product keeps the core plugin lean while creating a new revenue stream the customer already wants to buy.