How Podia Approaches Self-Serve (with CEO Spencer Fry)

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Spencer Fry, the founder and CEO of Podia, shares Podia's approach to Self-Serve, from how they shifted to making more long-term goals once they hit profitability to how they set up their activation and retention systems.

Timestamps

(03:12) Podia's Shift To Long-Term Goals

(08:33) Using Usage As A Metric

(13:45) Cutting Costs To Overcome Growth Plateaus

(15:50) Relying On Customer Revenue

(18:54) The Right Time To Focus On Activation

(21:01) From Product Onboarding To Feature Onboarding

(23:41) Combining Data And Intuition

(25:48) Podia's Retention Setup

(33:45) Get To Profitability And Then Build Out Your Vision

Highlights Of Spencer's Approach

Build for user success, and build big

Users typically have a crystal-clear picture of what they want, but a vague understanding of how to get there. Spencer's roadmap decisions are based on the best way to achieve an outcome he knows that customers are interested in — what customers SHOULD be doing to be successful.

...what can we introduce that's not just simply making the experience slightly better, but how can we make substantial changes that might shock people at first, but slowly introduce them to this new way of thinking in terms of how a creator should operate their business online, or at least how we feel like they should. Because a lot of times, you're so focused on what you're trying to do in The Now that you're not really thinking about your future. So, it's our goal as a company to think about where the creator is gonna be...because they don't have the mental energy and capacity to think about that themselves

Use usage to amplify what's working

Engagement isn't the be-all-and-end-all of metrics at Podia. Instead, Spencer uses usage data as a way to figure out when might be the right to double down on a feature he knows will be critical to user success.

With our email tool, [...] we send hundreds of millions of emails a year, but the usage as a percentage of our customer base is still quite small. I know that that's a tool that we need to have in our product even though that's not the largest percentage used feature because my goal one day is for a hundred percent of our customers to use our email tool.

[Over the years] more emails were sent, and actually, over the last couple of years, it's really ballooned in terms of the number of emails sent. That was a light bulb moment for me where I knew we now needed to shift a lot of resources into email because we could see that [usage] spiking in the product.

Stay lean to stay strong when growth plateaus

Cutting down costs is an efficient way to plan for growth plateaus in a down economy.

March 2022 — I saw the writing on the wall that the economy was not gonna be the best over the the coming years. And so I completely stopped hiring. I cut a bunch of expenses that I felt like we didn't need to spend on at the time. I took our Facebook budget and our Google AdWords budget to zero. I really tried to conserve capital. I knew that as long as we were in this defensive position where we're making more money than we're losing, we'd come out stronger.

Growth plateaus aside, Spencer strongly believes in being reliant on revenue that's coming directly from customers. A "bootstrapper mindset" has allowed Podia to stay lean from day 0.

So I've always had a mentality as an entrepreneur of... I have a bank account, it has this much money in it, to raise the amount of money in that bank account, I need to make revenue from customers. So, despite the fact that I did raise money for Podia, I've always had that bootstrapping mentality, where I've not tried to overspend.

Different growth levers have become relevant at different times

At different points of the business, you care about different levers. Early on, I was very obsessed with how many people we could get to sign up for the product. [But later on] there's this sort of shift where people are starting to love it and it's almost at that point where you realize that you have something and that you can start shifting your attention from how can I get a ton of people to try all my product to how can I get a bunch of people to convert?

Collecting onboarding data and using it to build feature onboarding sequences

Spencer used onboarding to collect data about why users were at Podia at all. Once he had an understanding of user intents, they built out onboarding sequences for the features that were most relevant to those intents.

They collected the data (during onboarding) with an intent-based checklist.

There was a very simple checklist that you could check off of all the things you were looking to do.So, that first step of onboarding was like, check off all the things you're looking to do. And based on that, we would customize the email sequence.

And used the data to build in-product, feature-based onboarding experiences.

We started to get a lot of data from our customers about their intent. We know that, say, 60% of our customers are looking to sell an online course. How can we then improve the onboarding for the online course feature that better serves those people? So then we built individual onboarding features for all [online course] parts of our product.

Filling out the gaps in data with intuition

Spencer's developed a finely tuned sense of intuition about what customers need over the years, and he relies on his gut to fill in blanks in the data.

Having been here since the beginning, having seen all of our customers change, having seen our product change, I still have the best intuition for what our customers need. So I still feel like I have the best breadth of knowledge as to what our customers are looking for. So I'm still making most of those decisions, and a lot of it is gut and intuition.

Podia's retention setup

When it comes to retention, Podia's got a straightforward cohort-based setup:

We look at [retention] based on cohorts. So this month compared to the previous month, compared to the previous month and so on back in history. And we're always trying to get that percentage [of retained customers] up. So, say for example, after 12 months, 50% of our customers are gone. How can I, with the next cohort, make it so only 49% are gone and then 48% gone and so on and so on.

But there are problems with looking at a retention metric like that one, without also having the means to assess the quality of the customer cohorts you're pulling in:

It's not foolproof because it could be that, say, a thousand people that signed up this month are just a better fit for your product than the thousand people that signed up last year.

Profitability first, vision next

If there's a one-line summary of Spencer's approach it would be that he did everything possible to get to profitability as soon as possible, and once he was there, thinking about the vision he had for Podia:

I know it's everyone's goal when you start a business but...get to a point where you are at least sort of like cashflow positive and then completely shift your attention from how can I get the next dollar to, like, how can I really grow the business and focus on the long term vision?

How Podia Approaches Self-Serve (with CEO Spencer Fry)