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Profitable on day 1 🤑, product-led growth 🚀, how to consistently go viral 🦠

TLDR Product <dan@tldrnewsletter.com>

August 27, 10:05 am

TLDR Product
True profitability means being able to afford to pay others to do your job and sustaining a business without depleting personal savings 

TLDR

Together With Pendo

TLDR Product Management 2024-08-27

Compare your product's performance with your peers (Sponsor)

Developing a product without data is a lot like roadtripping without directions. Sure, you can hop on the highway without your GPS—but you need guidance to reach your destination as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The very best product teams use benchmarks (think: user retention, feature adoption, and stickiness) to compare, understand, and improve performance. 

Learn what KPIs you should track, and what's considered “good,” in Mind the Product's global benchmarks report. Powered by 6,800 applications using Pendo, so you can understand how you're doing (and where to improve). 

Compare your product with 2024 benchmarks →

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News & Trends

Profitable on day 1 (4 minute read)

Business owners may mistakenly claim profitability based on minimal expenses, but true profitability means being able to afford to pay others to do your job and sustaining a business without depleting personal savings. Building a genuinely profitable business takes time and early stages often involve financial struggle, so they should focus on realistic goals and sustainable growth instead of premature profit claims.
Input coffee, output code: how AI will turn capital into labor (5 minute read)

AI is driving a major transformation where software becomes labor. It is not eliminating white-collar jobs, but creating new "AI jobs" that weren't feasible before. AI software companies will fall into three categories: tools enhancing existing software, tools that could replace existing software, and tools that perform entirely new tasks, essentially becoming labor itself.
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Opinions & Tutorials

Should you product-led growth? (10 minute read)

Whether to adopt product-led growth or not is often misunderstood. Most companies blend PLG with sales-led models, and the key is finding the right balance. Ignoring PLG risks disruption, while overdoing it can harm unit economics. For many established companies, adapting to a market that now expects a mix of self-serve and sales is essential.
Cheap! Cheap! The perils of low cost being your only advantage (5 minute read)

As a small competitor, you can grow unnoticed, but eventually, bigger rivals will catch on. Relying on low prices alone is risky — larger companies can undercut you, and price wars squeeze margins. Build a true differentiator, or you risk being disrupted when someone offers a similar service for less.
Building enterprise products: how to manage complexity and customer needs (9 minute read)

Two common pitfalls in enterprise product management are underestimating customer complexity and failing to manage customer input effectively. Low feature adoption often stems from issues like lack of true value, low usage urgency, limited awareness, or difficulty in use.
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Resources & Tools

📋 Free integration spec template by Prismatic (Sponsor)

Building product integrations? Starting from well-defined requirements will speed your time to market, reduce development and maintenance costs, and keep your end users happy with the results. Download the template to help your team be more effective at gathering integration requirements, and to make sure you're capturing all the essentials. Get it here, free
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier's playbook for winning at consumer apps (90 minute podcast)

Learn strategies for viral consumer apps, the challenges of creating durable social products, the importance of targeting teens for growth, how to optimize user engagement quickly, and why big companies struggle to launch hit social apps compared to startups driven by hunches about basic human motivations.
Heartbeats: keeping strategies alive (3 minute read)

To effectively lead a large team, it's crucial to not only create and communicate a clear, strategic plan but also to keep it alive and relevant through regular updates and engagement, ensuring it remains a practical tool that guides the team's decisions and progress.
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Miscellaneous

Growth teams must learn play well with other teams... or else (6 minute read)

Growth teams often face challenges when coordinating with core product teams, as their need to influence various product areas for business metrics can create conflict. Collaboration and credit-sharing are crucial to ensure successful outcomes.
The power in belonging (5 minute read)

Humans naturally seek belonging, but its impact depends on how it's fostered. To build true belonging at work and in communities, we must meet people where they are, understand their motivations, create space for constructive disagreement, and find common ground. Belonging thrives when people feel safe to be themselves without pressure to conform.
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Quick Links

3 learnings from training 30 teams on discovery (2 minute read)

To successfully implement product discovery, it's important to educate all cross-functional team members, balance high-level guidance with practical applications, and treat the adoption process like a product by starting small, iterating, and scaling based on proven value.
No unforced errors (4 minute read)

This post reflects on the challenges of being a passionate change agent, pondering the importance of managing energy, avoiding unforced errors, and understanding when to step back to preserve long-term impact and well-being.

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Thanks for reading,
Ellen Le & Sinan Zhang


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