CHURN FM
CHURN FM is the podcast for subscription economy pros. Every Wednesday we hear how the world’s fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention & engagement to fuel their growth.
CHURN FM
E256 | Community-Driven Development: Boosting Retention with Integrations with Biro Florin
Today on the show we have Biro Florin, a misfit, angel investor, exited founder, and show host of Misfit Founders.
In this episode, Biro shares his experience in building successful integrations within the Atlassian marketplace.
We then discussed how community-driven development can significantly enhance user retention and engagement.
We wrapped up by exploring the balance between acquisition and retention, and the lessons learned from Jexo’s journey in the SaaS ecosystem.
Mentioned Resources
Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Biro Florin: You know, talking to customers is great and such, but most of the time, data can be your best friend when it comes to churn and retention.
[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.
[00:00:00] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.
[00:00:42] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.
[00:00:53] Andrew Michael: Hey, Biro, welcome to the show.
[00:00:55] Biro Florin: Hey, nice to be here. Thank you for having me over. I know we've discussed quite a bit about ChurnFM and I'm excited. I feel like you instilled the excitement in me when we were having our conversation over on the other side.
[00:01:09] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Yeah. For the listeners, Biro is a misfit, angel investor, exited founder and show host of Misfit Founders. And actually we first met when we were in SaaStock in Dublin. I was fortunate to be a guest of his show. And prior to that, Biro also founded Jexo where they built productivity tools for Jira, Slack and beyond before being acquired by Appfire. So my first question for you Biro is how does it feel now that you have efficiently left Appfire?
[00:01:38] Biro Florin: Strange. You know, it's a strange feeling in a way because, one, I've been part of the Atlassian ecosystem. So, you know, we build apps on the Atlassian marketplace and I've been part of that ecosystem for six years. So I kind of slowly fizzled out of it. So it wasn't like, okay, super engaged and up to, holding on to everything in terms of work and then all of a sudden disappeared from the ecosystem, from the community and so on. No, it was gradual. I started shifting interests.
[00:02:15] Biro Florin: It is strange, but it's also exciting to step in a different area. I do this every four or five years, I would say. I get excited. I get excited about a new topic, a new industry, and I kind of try to reinvent myself like I am right now.
[00:02:32] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think from at least what I've gauged from you as well, though, when you do try to do that, you take things extremely serious for the listeners as well. Like, as I mentioned, Biro interviewed me at SaaStock and the setup that he had just coming to that event was like next level, we was like three speakers. I don't even know how many microphones you had there, like professional lighting A grade and like, this is something you just recently almost started. It hadn't been very long. I think had you even launched at that stage, the show yet, or was about to be launched?
[00:02:59] Biro Florin: It was launched. We launched in July last year and, but those are around the first episodes in general.
[00:03:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Amazing. And before the show, you mentioned a little bit that something's next. What are you up to these days now? Like, obviously we actually had this discussion where like everyone sort of immediately asked you, as soon as you've exited your startup, what's next? What are you going for? And if I recall the conversation, you sort of said like, well, why is that always the question that gets asked? And isn't just like doing something like this enough and yeah, obviously it wasn't because you've said you're doing something else now. So.
[00:03:35] Biro Florin: You know, I feel that maybe it was a kind of, like a deep rooted challenge with myself when I was having that conversation. But to be honest, in general, I feel like there are a lot of entrepreneurs that want to slow down, do a bit more investing and so on. And that's why I was also mentioning that because I stopped asking what's next because I don't want to put people in a weird position of them being like, well, how can I explain this to you? Cause I'm not doing the next big thing.
[00:04:08] Biro Florin: But for me, and I don't even know if what I'm planning to do next is going to be, and probably might not even be bigger than software as a service business. It's in the creative space. I'm moving in this area. I've been passionate about filmmaking, camera gear, and the output of, you know, having together a bunch of creative minds. We've done that quite a lot at Jexo. We had an entire marketing and creative team and we're putting out a lot of good content together. And I think that just stuck with me.
[00:04:40] Biro Florin: So I'm not going to give too much away just now, cause it's not launched and it's probably going to take a while until it happens, but it is in the creative and educational space. So mixing the two worlds of creative and education. So yeah, apart from Misfit Founders, which continues to grow and it's my positive impact. I call it adventure.
[00:05:06] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Well, today we're gonna talk a little bit about your adventure at Jexo. And as you said before the show, that this was sort of like one of the first serious SaaS businesses that you had started. A lot of lessons learned along the way, particularly when it came to churn and retention. So, [I think], maybe just for a little bit of context, can you give us some insight into what Jexo was and how you were building for the Atlassian ecosystem?
[00:05:29] Biro Florin: Yeah, sure. So Jexo was a Atlassian marketplace partner, meaning we were developers and vendors of apps that plug into Jira Confluence, the suite of apps that Atlassian has a marketplace where you can list your applications very similar like you would list on Apple Store or Salesforce marketplace and so on. It is focused on work, work management, productivity and so on because that's the type of tools that Atlassian provides. And we started back in 2018 and I say we because I have a co-founder which just happens to be also my life partner, Nikki, and we were working together at a previous company as employees.
[00:06:19] Biro Florin: And in 2018, we decided to just play around with creating apps for Atlassian marketplace. Initially, we wanted something just internal because you can do that. You can create, develop apps and just use them internal for your own Jira instance. But as soon as we put the first sketches together, we were thinking, this could actually be used for others. And we knew by then that there's a marketplace. And we started just getting an understanding of what it takes to get into this ecosystem. So that was the beginning of it.
[00:06:52] Andrew Michael: Very interesting and a very good result that you can actually work with your partner, like me and my partner, we've tried a few different times and although we love each other dearly, like it's just one of those things working together. We always find it's a little bit better to keep them separate.
[00:07:06] Biro Florin: Yeah, the secret for me has been, it's been the fact that Nikki and I were colleagues first, so we met each other at the previous company. We were working well together. Then we started dating. Then we decided to start this company. So we kind of know each other in quite a lot in the world. And you know what? Now it's strange because Nikki is still at Appfire and I'm starting all of these things on my own. And it feels odd not to be under the same company, under the same brand with her. So it's a bit strange navigating us not working together, but we help each other quite a lot. I give her advice. She gives me advice on my stuff. So, yeah.
[00:07:51] Andrew Michael: Nice. And one of those things like the Atlassian marketplace for me as well is like always been a little bit of a black box. Like I've used Atlassian's tools. I think the only interactions I would ever have with the marketplaces, I remember like in the editor, when you went to go in bed, like you were trying to look for maybe a list and then you had got a list of different products or services there which you can embed. I think that was, like as far as I got into it. So maybe just let's know a little bit about the Atlassian marketplace itself. Like in terms of size and scale, how big is it? It's like how does it work and operate things and outs?
[00:08:23] Biro Florin: So I think that… so they recently reached two billion in sales, in just, on the Atlassian marketplace. And that was actually quite… So to give you a sense of the acceleration of growth of the Atlassian Marketplace, from when the Marketplace was launched, which was like nine, ten years ago, until two years ago, it was this road to the first billion. So they achieved the first billion two years ago, which was after quite a few years of the Marketplace. And last year, they've achieved the second billion in less than two years or such. Like don't quote me on those numbers, but that's kind of the ratio in a sense. Yeah.
[00:09:09] Biro Florin: And it kind of tells you the acceleration. And you can also see that from the amount of investments and consolidation that's happening in that ecosystem. There's more money because the customers of Atlassian products, Jira, Confluence, and so on, they're getting more and more used to the fact that there's thousands and thousands of apps in the marketplace that they can install and pay a bit more and significantly enhance the functionality of Jira. There's a ton of like our apps, we are doing portfolio management, we are doing prioritization. So really transforming your Jira instance into a proper project management suite rather than just a task management tool.
[00:10:01] Biro Florin: So as the customers get more and more aware, as Atlassian grows as well, they invest more of their budgets into apps from the store. And that also means that there is a really big opportunity for investors. There's quite a few VC companies that have invested in app developers like us. And there's more vendors, more developers that start building. You know how it is where there's money, there’s explosion in terms of growth. So I would say it's the golden era of Atlassian marketplace nowadays.
[00:10:36] Andrew Michael: Well, that's interesting. I would never have expected that. And specifically like that size and scale considering, like I've interacted with Atlassian products over the last 10 years or more and just never really interacted with the marketplace itself or been exposed that much to it. I don't think they do any sort of, like pushing of the marketplace either, at least from what I've experienced previously.
[00:10:57] Biro Florin: They do a bit more nowadays, not necessarily in large, I would say, leads facing campaigns. Because if you think about it, and this has been one of our challenges in acquiring customers is, you can't really promote my app that does prioritization to someone that probably doesn't use Jira. Because then that's a big ask and a big sell. I'm saying, well, my app does prioritization, asterisk for Jira. That's prioritization really well, but asterisk, it only works in Jira. So if someone's coming in and looking for a prioritization tool and haven't used Jira, that is a big ask to say, well, actually you have to adopt Jira as well. But no, because I have my own task management.
[00:11:46] Biro Florin: That's the challenge. You have to sell to the existing customer base. And they do that quite a bit. There's a lot of initiatives and campaigns around featured being featured, being promoted, landing pages for apps and so on. But yeah, you're right. As an outsider, you wouldn't hear that much about the marketplace and apps in there.
[00:12:10] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Nice. So you decided, okay, this was the direction you wanted to take. You started building apps for the marketplace. Like what was the initial experience like after launching the product, like what are some of the early feedback you got from that first version? Because obviously you mentioned you started building for yourself internally. You were like, oh, there's something here. This could be for everybody else. Like you launch a product. What did it look like post launch for you?
[00:12:36] Biro Florin: Honestly, it was crickets in the early months. So we launched our first product, when it was, September, 2018, and we got our first paying customer in on 1st, January, 2019. Right. So quite a few months afterwards. And to be honest, in the first two months, we've had almost zero installs. Now these applications, there's an enforced trial by Atlassian for apps. Right. So all of the apps that get installed automatically have a, I think, 30 days trial period. And after that, you start paying for the product. Right.
[00:13:19] Biro Florin: So we didn't even get that many trials in the early days. It was only after a period, we started getting a bit of trials and the first paid customer, but it was super, super slow. And that was because we didn't really knew how to get leads and customers. We had no idea about marketing or anything, sales. I did try my hand on SaaS businesses in the past, but it would always fail. And that was because I had no idea how to get eyeballs on what I was building. So they kind of had a very similar smell to me at the beginning. I was thinking, Oh, this is deja vu. I've had built so many things and just posted on my social media and this and that, and no one came and what do I do now?
[00:14:08] Biro Florin: And the thing is nowadays Atlassian has a lot more better resources on how to get started. But back then it was very slim. You'd have a couple of webinars and so on, but not much. So, yeah, so it was very, very slow.
[00:14:23] Andrew Michael: What changed?
[00:14:25] Biro Florin: Us. So once we realized, well, this is going really slow. We were already quite invested in the Atlassian ecosystem. So we started exploring and building in March 2018. So by the time we launched the first application in September, and then we spent a couple of months up until, beginning of 2019 and realized that it's not picking up, we were so invested in this ecosystem. So we were determined to make it work, right? Maybe others might've said if they would've built something really quick overnight and launched it and spent two months and realized, well, I'm not getting any traction, you know, whatever, just drop it. It doesn't really matter. But we invested quite a lot of our energy in it. So we were determined to make it happen.
[00:15:20] Biro Florin: So we started looking into, how could we get more customers and more eyeballs on our first app? And a couple of things that we've done really well was over that period before starting to ramp up was to be present in the community forums, the user community forums. And one thing that we started realizing was that there were a lot of requests for features for certain type of features, certain areas of the applications that Atlassian did not have the capacity to address at that point. And fundamentally that was our entry point, right? Because we were building, the first app was a release management app.
[00:16:05] Biro Florin: So we're building a calendar view and a bunch of features for release managers to be able to track their releases in Jira and not have to use other tools, which is super useful at that point. Jira had a very basic release listing page, but nothing like what we were designing. And we started seeing a lot of requests for features around releases that Atlassian wasn't touching yet. So we implemented two of them. And those became our hooks, right? Our lead magnets in a sense, because we were able to get people to install the apps because of those features, because there was a lot of search queries for those specific features in the community forum, on the marketplace, and even on Google.
[00:16:55] Biro Florin: So we started looking at keywords and figuring out how, analyzing how these users that were raising this feature request to Atlassian were positioning and talking about these specific features. And on our landing page, on the marketplace for the app that we had, we used that exact vocabulary, that exact language. So that started getting us an increase in installations and ultimately paid customers.
[00:17:24] Andrew Michael: I like that. So you really got to sort of take a look at what are the main pain points that the users were expressing, how they were expressing those pain points in their own language and then using that and flipping it and saying, Hey, wait a second, we have the solution to this problem. Here it is. And here's how you talk about it. So you understand it. And I think like a lot of times actually, like when we talk about churn and retention as well, like we often overlook how important position, just simple positioning work is and like a good understanding of what the main value props and the pain points that your users have are when it comes to actually activating them effectively, but in the first place, even just converting them.
[00:18:00] Biro Florin: Can I give you another example of that?
[00:18:02] Andrew Michael: Yes.
[00:18:03] Biro Florin: Which kind of, like, gave us a lot of headaches down the line. So clearly, this was a pattern that we realized that works. So we had that every aha moment, right? So you're telling me that all we have to do is monitor the forums, see what people want in this area of releases or calendar views and so on, and start implementing those before Atlassian does in Jira because they're a big company, they have a lot of priorities, they move sluggish, it takes time to do things, and then go back to those requests and say, hey, I know that Atlassian that you want this feature included in Jira and so on. But if you want to pay, here's an option for you. Right. Here's our app.
[00:19:01] Biro Florin: And I think I personally got a bit drunk on power with that a bit where we were doing a great job of implementing new features and giving customers what they were looking for from Atlassian and ultimately from us, because as we started getting more customers, we were listening to customers and implementing features and so on. But one thing that I think we've done at one point, which was a bit too aggressive, is keyword staffing, if you know what that is. Especially on a marketplace like this, you don't have to battle Google and other large competitors on keywords that are already oversaturated.
[00:19:48] Biro Florin: When you have a marketplace and your potential customers search for solutions on that marketplace search bar, it's a lot easier to optimize for your customers’ search searches, right? And keyword stuffing means that on your landing page, you add as many of the, on the, basically on the marketplace landing page to be specific, not your website landing page, on your marketplace landing page, adding as much of the description and the keywords that your customers could potentially look for. Right.
[00:20:28] Biro Florin: And I think one of the mistakes that we've done when I got drunk on power, around figuring out this entire strategy, this hack was to do a bit too much keyword stuffing and lean into potentially more topics that we weren't covering fully with our products. I'll give you an example. We started using, quite early on, portfolio management because we were allowing the users to import projects and tasks and releases from other projects and have a high-level view of those projects. We call it portfolio management. Or portfolio management includes a lot of other features that we weren't covering for.
[00:21:15] Biro Florin: Of course, it was a very popular keyword and people started searching for that keyword and started seeing our result, started installing the app, enjoying the interface, the kind of like flashy UI and experience that we had, enjoyed a couple of features, but after two, three, four months realized, hold on. It's not really giving me everything that I needed from a portfolio management tool. So they would churn and we would lose those customers. Right. And that was quite a big issue in, you know, I would say mid our journey into this business.
[00:21:57] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think this is also like another area as you highlighted, like when it comes to positioning where marketing on one front can sort of oversell the product. And then when customers come in and realize that the product itself doesn't meet the promise of the marketing. It's a big issue and a big reason for churn and a lot of times even just activation from the start. And it's one of the things you really need to, like I just said, you need to get a good balance of it to figure out when's the right time and how do you talk about your products or service? Because you always do want to, maybe hype it up a bit so people get excited by the product or service, but not to the extent where they come in and they say, well, hang on a second, like, this is not what I thought you did. Like this is missing X, Y and Z and interesting that you came to that as well in this process.
[00:22:39] Biro Florin: And I think that in the SaaS world, where you don't see a lot of the faces that buy your product, it's a very dangerous thing to do, which is to not validate your customer, as in basically trying to get way too many people in the door that might not be validated, they might not be the customers that you're looking for. Because then down the line, you started getting a lot of churn and you're not talking to a lot of these customers, right? You might be talking with a couple and over time you start realizing, well, the people that are here are not the right people. They're not the right customers because they're looking for something else.
[00:23:27] Biro Florin: But it can take a while and you realize, oh, we have a churn problem, but you might have a validation problem that convert it into a churn because, you know, you might be losing some at the acquisition bit, but there will be a lot that will start the trial. We'll not have time to set up. We'll spend the next couple of months paying out of pocket for the product. And then they go and set it up five months later and realize, hold on, this tool is not for us. Why are we paying for this? You know, and they cancel it. Then you never know. You're just up. Our application is not good enough or, but no, it might actually been the wrong customer for you.
[00:24:11] Andrew Michael: To start, is there any specific case that you can remember where this happened for you?
[00:24:16] Biro Florin: Well, as I mentioned, this example with this portfolio management and we were at one point getting quite a few customers that were churning and we tried constantly to figure out what's going on. What's going on? We were talking to customers, right? But majority of the customers that we were talking to, and I think this was a challenge at that point as well, were validated customers that wanted hand holding on setting up and getting things running and so on. So for a while, didn't know that much, that we were missing the point with how we acquire customers, that we were acquiring the wrong customers.
[00:24:59] Biro Florin: And it took us a bit of going back to the drawing board, talking to more leads before acquisition, right? When they're trialing, when they're looking at stuff, trying to get an understanding about the tool. And I think it was at that point where we kind of realized, it was a bit twofold. We realized before the acquisition segment of the funnel, when talking in demos, that people were booking demos, thinking that the product was something else than it actually was and having to redirect it. Because again, this has been an ethos of us. We're not going to try to jam our product in a team setup if they actually need something else.
[00:25:45] Biro Florin: And we referred them to apps and products and companies that we were seeing as future competitors because we just didn't have the product the way they would have had, or because we weren't planning to head in the direction that they were already in and the customer needed that specific solution. So we redirect them to that. But that made us realize, hold on, people are coming here. Is it our keyword staffing that's causing a lot of the challenges in our positioning, our messaging around the products that's causing issues? And then we also started having conversations as we improved our communication and customer success pipeline.
[00:26:32] Biro Florin: We started talking to more customers that were already using the tool and realizing the same thing that they had a completely different... They were using the tool for three, four, five months, tried to make it work by hacking and bypassing and setting up things in a weird way. And you realized, like, I'll give you an example because you want a clear example. Like, for example, trying to... So in Jira, you have epics, stories, tasks, subtasks, and so on. So you have this kind of, like this structure of your work items. And that's what it is, right? And when you talk about portfolio management, you need a lot more, of branches upwards, right? And a lot more consolidation units at the top. And we didn't offer any of that.
[00:27:26] Biro Florin: So the customer started using epics and stories in very weird ways and starting to create custom tasks. And when you see that, you realize you're trying to jam this product into your organization. And it's primarily my fault because I've falsely advertised, right? And it's actually not what you thought it was.
[00:27:54] Andrew Michael: Interesting. It's hard to build the product. You launch it, there's crickets. You're like, okay, what do we do now? Let's go and listen to the forum, see where the problems are. You see that, you build something to solve those problems. You see it starting to work and you're like, oh, wow, there's gold here. It's continued this path. And then you went to the other end where you sort of overdid it, oversold what the product service did.
[00:28:17] Biro Florin: Drunk on power. They call it.
[00:28:19] Andrew Michael: Drunk on power. Yeah. And then, like I had to realize that in the hardware when it came to churn and retention. So it started off as an acquisition problem. You resolved that acquisition problem, but you ended up causing a churn problem on the other end and figuring that out. But interesting, like it's like, these are obviously stepping stones and part of the journey and they're necessary things to figure out, but I'm pretty sure that's not it. It's like what happened after this. So you've now sort of realized there's a path for acquisition. We know how to not overdo it. So we don't cause churn. What was next?
[00:28:52] Biro Florin: It was hard because it's hard to come to this realization and think whether do you want to continue to play dumb, in a sense. Sorry for my phrase here. But as in, do we continue down this road, maybe change our messaging? It's going to impact potentially our flow of new customers, which is scary in itself, right? Because all of a sudden we reposition ourselves and all of that flow of searches and keywords that we don't use anymore. That's one. Two, do we clean up? Because we could just, again, just play dumb and just continue as is and churn happen whenever it happens with the existing customers that came in.
[00:29:43] Biro Florin: And again, it wasn't like all of our customers had the wrong impression, right? We had the biggest portion of our customers were there for the right reason. Right. But we did have a chunk that kept on churning and it was because of this reason and we thought, well, should we carry on and let them churn whenever? Right. At least we don't overnight lose a percentage of our revenue, right. By us communicating, Hey, we're repositioning our product to make it clear what it is and are you still interested in using it or if you were looking for a different product then, you know, by all means let me give you some other–
[00:30:30] Andrew Michael: Alternatives.
[00:30:31] Biro Florin: Samples, other alternatives from other marketplace partners and we wind up doing basically both, right. And it was risky but you know, how people say when you increase your prices, the first time you increase your prices for your SaaS business, you think, oh my God, all of my customers would churn, that is terrible, right? But the reality is that that's not true. Like you're not going to have a big churn, huge spike in churn after you increase your price, unless you're unreasonable, right? But if you increase because of, you know, market and time spent and new features and so on, and everything is very rational, then I don't think you're going to lose much customers.
[00:31:14] Biro Florin: And at the end of the day, if you're losing a bunch of customers, maybe those are people that you're not interested in having as customers. Maybe they're looking for something cheaper and with less features, which you might not offer. You might not have multiple plans. So in a sense, it was a surprise for us. We did get impacted on the search terms a bit and the volume of installations initially, but we were already building a feature that we knew that will hit really well in terms of wants and desires and on the search of, on different search keywords. So it was kind of like a swap and it was a swap for the better because now we did have the confidence that we have the feature that leads are looking for and searching and typing.
[00:32:03] Andrew Michael: Yeah, so it can't be easy to make that sort of a decision as well. Like you say, like, it is easy just to turn a blind eye and like, not pay attention to it and take the revenue for what it is. But I think ultimately as well, it ends up hurting the brand long-term and the business long-term. And that's one of those things that's very difficult to measure in the short term, but over time it can really have a compounding impact that, again, it's one of those things, it's very hard for you to even realize it's happening because in a lot of cases people just end up leaving because it’s not worth the product service does. And then also like they have that memory in their mind that they were told one thing and it's not so you lose trust as a brand as well. I think which is not a good place to be in as a company.
[00:32:44] Biro Florin: I think there's a lot of bad practices that you can adopt in an ecosystem, in probably any ecosystem, because everyone wants to kind of like rig the game. Cause you're not, we're not talking about Google discoverability, we're not talking about paid advertising on Google or search optimization on Google, which is like a super robust algorithm and system. And you have huge players in a lot of these ecosystems, be it Salesforce, be it that, be it that. Like a lot of people want to, a lot of these partners and vendors are interested in having their products seen. Right.
[00:33:25] Biro Florin: And some of them, not many, but some of them will try to rig the game, right? We'll try various things. We'll, I don't know, give themselves, rating, create things to position themselves on most top positive rating and a bunch of things. Install bloating, like having a farm that installs the applications for them to increase the numbers and so on. So. And for a lot of these marketplaces, especially in the early days and coming to an age, they don't have very elaborate systems in place to prevent this rigging. So yeah, we try to stay away from a lot of that. We want it to be as sincere and as open with our customers and as fair game type of competitor in the ecosystem as possible.
[00:34:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's interesting, like mentioning, that some of the things, like you've seen them in other areas, but something I would not even expect like to consider when going to choose like an app from a marketplace, but it is a very legit issue in the sense, just like you have like fake reviews for restaurants. Like, the same thing can be applied in these marketplaces where you have this, like you said, download bloats, like paying people literally to go and download apps. So it looks like this is a popular app in the app store, but in actuality, it can be a different picture. And it's sad that that happens.
[00:34:51] Andrew Michael: And like you said, maybe some of the times these marketplaces don't have the sophistication in order to detect that fraud, like a Google or like a Tripadvisor or somebody else at that scale does where it's their core business and they need to make sure reviews are legit and what they say they are. So, but yeah, definitely I think long-term, like it's a short-term play. It's not something that you can build a business around and grow over time.
[00:35:14] Biro Florin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, I think some of the ecosystems, most of the ecosystems take action when there's clear, clear evidence of that. But, you know, there's a couple of offenders that are silly enough to leave a footprint, right? In a sense for the others to see, for the other competitors and then point, hey, he's doing something bad. So you still have a lot of people that play the game in a sense. But I mean, we didn't care. Right. We had new vendors coming in because as I mentioned, the marketplace was growing in size and revenue. There was a pot of money there to be had.
[00:35:58] Biro Florin: So we had clones of our apps. You could see that they copied the UI and the features one-to-one in a sense. And we just ignored it. We just moved on. If you're the most popular or the fastest growing or the most exciting contender in the space, the last thing you should be doing is giving attention to someone that's trying to catch up or keep up with your stuff and doing some nastier things in the middle.
[00:36:32] Biro Florin: Yeah, sure. We could have potentially reported a couple of occasions. I've even seen a couple of codes looking at the browser source code, seeing a couple of codes that was, just lately copied, you know. We could have reported, we could have taken them down, but you know, even that takes energy. Like why focus on that? Just focus on our craft and carry on and continue to be the top app for that specific category.
[00:37:02] Andrew Michael: Yes. Nice. I see we're running up on time. So what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?
[00:37:14] Biro Florin: That's an interesting question. I think there's always going to be churn, right? No matter how good your application is and how well the onboarding and the customer experience and your prices and so on, there's always going to be a bit of churn. That hit me really hard in the early days. Why did they uninstall? But I had a beautiful conversation with them over a demo and so on. It hurt my feelings and I've had my feelings hurt quite a few times from customers like that, but it happens like it's out of your control. Most of the time is out of the control of the person that represents the company that advocates for your product, right? So that's one.
[00:38:00] Biro Florin: And I think the second would be, I know I'm cheating here, just tracking, making sure that you have as much visibility over the behavior of your customers inside your product as possible because there were so many hypotheses that we were running when we got a second wave of churns. It was absolutely impossible for us to figure out why that's happening. We had to put down data and analyze, and we spent weeks analyzing the data and seeing certain features that were… users were getting disconnected from.
[00:38:43] Biro Florin: And it was like a significant gap and we had to go back and look and go through the exact same flow and realize, yeah, this doesn't make sense. People seeing this will just churn. So, you know, talking to customers is great and such, but most of the time data can be your best friend when it comes to churn and retention.
[00:39:05] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. But I'm sure we could continue going for the next hour on this topic. And it sounds like you have a lot of wisdom as well in the pains and the mistakes made along the way. Is there any other final thoughts that you want to leave the listeners with today before we wrap up? Obviously we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes, anything you want to mention a little bit about Misfit Founders or churn and retention in general.
[00:39:31] Biro Florin: Yeah, I would say in general, the one thing that I've learned, as I mentioned earlier, don't look too hard at what others do. Make sure that you listen to your customers. I think that's the most important thing. And follow your strategy. Yes, analyzing competitors and so on, it's a thing. But I, way too many times, fallen into the trap of, you know, but they're doing this and that. Oh, why are we not doing this? And being a bit too emotional about that. And fundamentally, that's not a good... That's not how we want to run your business.
[00:40:05] Biro Florin: So yeah, focus on your craft, pay super attention to your customers, cherish the relationships that you build with your customers and don't try to emulate or look too much at what your competitors are doing because they have their own world with their customers and so on. That's kind of it. And then, yeah, you know, if you, if you're a founder and you're interested in hearing more stories from founders, maybe I can plug my Misfit Founders podcast. We talk mainly about the challenges of building a business and all of those times that you feel out of place.
[00:40:41] Biro Florin: And there's a wonderful episode with Andrew on Misfit Founders. And I think that was one of the most, I would say I've not had someone on the podcast that has been to the trials and tribulations that you've been. So I, that's one of my favorite episodes to date, to be honest.
[00:41:01] Andrew Michael: You made it super dramatic as you're watching the trailer. I was like, okay. But yeah, no, it was great talking. I think it's also nice, like the concept of the podcast and diving deep into those stories as well. So definitely like, if you haven't listened to it yet, make sure to do so. We'll leave it in the show notes so you can pick it up there as well. But Biro, thanks so much for joining. It's been a pleasure catching up as well with you and wish you best of luck now going into the new year with something new on the cards for you as well. So I wish you best of luck with it.
[00:41:29] Biro Florin: Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it.
[00:41:31] Andrew Michael: Cheers.
[00:41:35] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.
