🏔️ What are people actually using your product for?
Discord and Slack, hill-climbing vs. hill-finding, and what analytics won't tell you
Discord, the red-hot group messaging platform, didn’t start out as such. It was born as an online, multiplayer video game called Fates Forever. And while the game flopped, the founders realized that the live voice and text chat system built into the game was still quite popular. The rest, as they say, was history.
Oddly enough, Discord’s competitor Slack followed a similar journey. Its creators originally built a whimsical animated game called Glitch, and while the game never took off, the creators had this to say when they shuttered it:
Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, will continue. We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products.
Quite a bit of foreshadowing, eh?
🏞 Hill-finding and hill-climbing
One thing that a lot of entrepreneurs (and product managers, for that matter) get wrong is that they insist on climbing the hill they’re currently on — relentlessly optimizing, tweaking, and growing their existing product — without pausing to ask themselves whether they’re on the right hill in the first place. For all they know, they might be scrambling to climb a tiny hill, oblivious to the Everest looming a short distance away.
The savvy thing that Slack and Discord’s founders did was to look up and realize they were on the wrong hill. Their video games weren’t going to amount to much, but they discovered that they’d developed the seed for something much bigger — they stumbled upon a titanic mountain right next door.
This is the distinction between hill-climbing and hill-finding, and when you’re building a product, you have to make sure you’re in the right mode for the situation. Slack and Discord are in their hyper-scale, hill-climbing phase right now, and that makes a lot of sense, but early on, they were right to do their hill-finding first.
📊 The limitations of Google Analytics
Just as you need to pick the right strategy for the occasion, you also need to find the right tool for the job. Most entrepreneurs and PMs are well-versed in Google Analytics, and to be sure, it’s an essential tool for optimizing your product’s sales funnel and figuring out how to best drive conversions.
But that’s also its limitation. Google Analytics is well-suited for hill-climbing, but not so much for hill-finding. It’ll help you optimize your existing product, but it won’t necessarily tell you if you’re working on the wrong product. If you’re trying to figure out whether you should pivot — as the Fates Forever and Glitch PMs were probably asking themselves at some point — you may not find the answer in the funnels, flowcharts, and tables of Google Analytics.
Or, in brief: quantitative tools like Google Analytics aren’t that useful for qualitative questions like your product’s future vision.
🎁 Find what you already have that people like
If you’re trying to find a taller hill to climb, you usually don’t want to throw everything out and start from a blank slate. Instead, you want to take advantage of what you’ve already done: look at what you’ve already built, figure out what part of it has real user and business value, and make that your new centerpiece. That’s the very definition of a pivot.
The question, of course, is how to find that often-buried nugget of value in the first place. The Slack and Discord founders mostly used gut feelings, and most mega-corps would (at least in the pre-pandemic days) call in a focus group to get their qualitative feedback.
The problem is that it’s hard to know if your gut feeling was right — Slack and Discord were success stories, but just imagine how many unlucky pivots are in the product graveyard. Focus groups don’t work all that well at scale or in our remote-first era; plus, people don’t always behave naturally in a lab setting.
What would help is a sort of Google Analytics for qualitative user research, to understand firsthand (and at scale) what people like about your product and what they don’t care for.
☕️ Find the right hill to climb with Hotjar
This is where our sponsor, Hotjar, comes in. Hotjar is a tool for tracking which parts of your product resonate with users — which things they’re ignoring and which areas really engage them. It even lets you ask users their thoughts about each part of your product. Had Fates Forever and Glitch had access to Hotjar back in the day, they would have discovered the latent power of their messaging platforms much sooner.
(Find out which areas of your product users love and which areas they don’t — sign up for your free 30-day business account!)
Here’s our hill-finding story: we once published a website with a long job list of non-engineering roles (sales, finance, PM, etc.) at tech companies, since we knew that readers of our books were interested in such jobs. We installed Hotjar’s heatmaps feature, which lets you see where on the page users spend their time, to see which jobs our visitors were most interested in.
We expected them to be most interested in the business-side jobs like strategy and marketing, since those are well-paying jobs open to people with non-technical backgrounds. But to our surprise, Hotjar’s heatmaps revealed that people were spending a ton of time browsing the product management job postings. Turns out, our assumption was wrong — it was PM that everyone was interested in!
Armed with that insight, we launched new PM-focused businesses like Product Alliance, and the rest is history. Hotjar’s power to show us what was really salient to our users was key to discovering this massive opportunity space.
Again, if you want to find the right hill to climb, you need to understand what parts of your product are appealing to your users. Tools like Hotjar’s heatmaps and the live feedback widgets, which let visitors share their thoughts on specific parts of your site, helps you reorient yourself around that core user need, that core nugget of value.
Once you’ve found your hill, you need to climb it. After we launched Product Alliance, we turned to Hotjar’s mouse-recording feature, which lets you run an online user study at scale. You can follow participants’ movements around your site, almost as if you’re peering over their shoulder. When we looked at our recordings, we noticed people seemed overwhelmed by the site — they were almost freezing in place, instead of clicking around the landing page — leading to a high bounce rate on our course pages.
So we introduced sticky information bars, GIFs, videos, and clear call-to-action buttons to make the value props and next steps clear. And it worked: we increased our average session time more than 3x and our conversion rate over 30%.
You can see why we now include Hotjar as a key part of our product-building arsenal, right alongside Google Analytics. It’s one of those tools that we recommend to all our peers to help them discover new product opportunities and execute on them. Here’s a way to add it to your toolkit, too:
🌄 The need to alternate
As we’ve seen, you need to find the right strategy (hill-climbing vs. hill-finding) and pick the right tools to understand how best to execute the strategy. The last thing to add here is that hill-climbing and hill-finding aren’t one-off initiatives; as your product grows, you’ll probably want to switch between modes. You hill-find to discover an opportunity, hill-climb to make the most of it, then hill-find again to figure out your next move, and so on.
If you can develop skills with both these modes, you’ll be ready for any stage of the product lifecycle: pivoting to discover the next Discord, scaling and optimizing your next billion-dollar business, or anything in between.
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