Alex Bychok

Linear became a profitable $1.25B company with <80 people by bucking the “growth at all costs” mindset. CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen focuses on craft, not metrics. On The Review, he details the company’s slow and deliberate path to product-market fit. He shares how he’s operationalized quality at every step, like: -Validating the idea with coworkers before quitting to work on the company full-time -Building a highly opinionated prototype that met the co-founders’ high standards -Launching in private beta and handpicking early users to join -Staying focused on the day-one ICP of IC product builders even with subsequent product launches -Designing enterprise sales as an extension of the product Read the full story below.

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How we built HeyReach.io into a product our customers LOVE?! 😍 The "secret" behind HeyReach's hyper-growth is the product and the support we offer. The only aspect that I'm fully operational in (and obsessed with) nowadays is the product. I do believe in the saying that the CEO should be the CPO of the company. Here are some of the tactics we use in our feature development process: 1⃣️ We don't have a 3-year roadmap - We know only 80% of the stuff we'll ship in a quarter, 50% of the stuff we'll ship in a year. We don't know what HeyReach.io will look like in a year, 2 years, or 3 years. The whole focus is on what HeyReach will look like next month or in 3 months from now. 2⃣️ Feature prioritization: churn reasons, users' pain points, closed-lost reasons, low-hanging fruits ($$$), market-shifting features - Around 70% of the stuff we are working on is improvements. The rest 30% is new stuff. We focus first on the low-hanging fruit (brings new $$$, doesn't cost much to build it), and then at the end on the industry-changing features (yep, they are coming pretty soon, too). Simple, focused, user-centric approach. 3⃣️ Clear product-development process, building teams on the go & single owner per a feature phase - There are multiple phases of feature development @ HeyReach. Idea, wireframe, design, development, testing, launch, revision. A team is assembled for each feature, and a separate Slack channel is created for that feature, containing only the members of that team. There's always a single owner per phase, and it's his responsibility to ping all stakeholders and get info from them. Ideally, once the feature moves from one phase to another, we shouldn't get it back (since it means we've made a mistake somewhere in those phases). I'll write a new post about each of the phases in detail. 4⃣️ We never listen to the *exact* user feedback, but to the *exact* problem that the user has - We "don't know anything about the market"; our users literally create our roadmap; we live and breathe USER FEEDBACK. Yet, we never implement it in its exact form 🤨. We rarely look at our public roadmap and feature suggestions (sorry guys), and almost never implement the feedback as is. The thing is that users care only about solving their current problem, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and they don't care how your product will look/work with that feature suggestion, or know the direction you are going to. And they shouldn't care. It's your job as a founder to uncover what's "hidden" behind that feature suggestion and find a way to implement it into your product in the simplest way. Also, you can get the real user feedback after they start using the feature, not by you pitching it to them. =========================== You can see a screenshot of our product improvement roadmap and how we categorize feedback. 📊 User satisfaction, Frequency of the issue, Revenue impact, and later: cost of development

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It's easy to get distracted by the headline here - $120M in ARR in 7 months (yeah yeah yeah, quite impressive) - but this exchange was the highlight and a nuanced perspective that is getting lost amongst all of the shiny conversations re: agentic commerce & payments: Harry Stebbings of 20VC "What would you most like to do now that you aren't doing or can't do?" Anton Osika of Lovable "So I would like to rethink how the applications are built. Like, what is the best way to build an application... All of those software applications are going to have some sort of AI, and they are going to have completely seamless payment and checkout flows." I wish I could say we had the foresight to see this coming in 2021 when we first started building Basis Theory (we didn't) but we knew *something* was going to change and it would be dramatically impactful. Today, some of the most interesting payments flows are distributed or embedded. Tomorrow, they will be agentic. Agnostic, flexible and modular payments infrastructure is required for all of it 🙌 Check out the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gqPTZJD9

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I watched Elena Verna (Head of Growth at Lovable) speak at #ProductCon AI yesterday, and one idea stuck with me: “Your brand can be your moat.” 👀 Not just a layer of polish or a marketing wrapper, but a true product differentiator. One that makes your experience easier, more delightful, more trustworthy. One that users actively choose, even if alternatives exist. We often talk about brand like it’s a billboard or a campaign, but increasingly, brand is shaped through product. It’s the little moments: ✅ how fast the product loads ✅ how support speaks to you ✅ how copy is written ✅ how you feel when you finish a task In that sense, building brand isn’t something the marketing team “does”. It’s a product and growth lever, and a compounding one at that. The takeaway for me: If you’re not actively building your brand into your product, you’re probably leaving defensibility on the table. #brand #moat #lovable

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Every once in a while the paradigm shift we're seeing with AI comes into sharp focus for me. Today was one of those moments when Pedro, one of our brilliant engineers, demoed the internationalization features he's been building. If you've every had to deal with internationalization you know how painful it can be. We had a non-trivial consumer-facing product translated into 3 languages in a week. Pedro subsequently built an entire translation management console that lets us auto-translate to any language (seen below is a non-validated first pass in Hangul) and then included a human-in-the-loop feature to effectively crowd source refinements. We're using AI for the translation but also as a coding assistant and UX designer to deploy features like this that once wouldn't have be worth the effort.

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Everyone’s talking about AI hype. I shared my take with Ramzan Kamali on Yahoo Finance’s Morning Brief. We also covered: → Why companies of all sizes, from global giants to scrappy startups, are choosing Synthesia to scale their comms with video. → How new products like AI dubbing aren’t just bells and whistles for Hollywood studios, they’re accelerating enterprise adoption in a very real way. → The future of jobs in the age of AI (spoiler: it’s not as dystopian as some make it out to be). → And why even if we are in an AI bubble, it still feels fundamentally different from the metaverse or crypto hype cycles. This one will actually produce generational companies. If you’re curious about where AI is going and how video is becoming the new default for workplace communication, give it a watch.

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"Productivity without peace is just burnout with a schedule." Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs, said it best. After some time away to rest, I am FEELING the power of rest.  And I come back inspired by the superstars who prove what the data shows:  Rest isn't weakness. It's strategy. These women didn't rest because they ran out of steam. They rested to reach new heights. → Anne-Laure left Google Brain to focus on health. She built Ness Labs, inspired by what she learned, and now helps 100K+ leaders.  Her rest became her revolution. → Simone Biles stepped back on the world stage in Tokyo.  She returned to Paris the greatest of all time, winning 4 medals.  Rest was her legendary reset. → Arianna Huffington collapsed from exhaustion at her desk.  She left a $315M media empire to build Thrive Global, now valued at $120M. Her breakdown brought her to her mission. → Reshma Saujani built Girls Who Code for 500K girls.  Then pivoted to fight for moms in the workplace.  Her pause became her purpose. Each superstar discovered the same truth: ‒ Peak performance requires rest. ‒ Strategic withdrawal makes quantum leaps possible. ‒ Rest isn't the opposite of achievement. It's the springboard. 3 rest habits you can start today: 1. Disconnect daily ↳ Set your status to offline at the same time every night 💡 Teams led by managers who log off report up to 23% lower stress [Microsoft] 2. Normalize breaks during the workday ↳ Step away from screens, take a walk, tell your team 💡 Teams with leaders who take breaks see up to 14% higher trust [Global Wellness Institute] 3. Protect focus like it's equity ↳ Schedule and defend a daily focus block 💡 Leaders who defend team "focus windows" have teams who report +15% productivity [Center for Creative Leadership]  Your next breakthrough probably isn't hiding in your 14th hour of work. It's waiting in the space you create by stepping back. These 4 superstars prove it.  Rest is how champions are made. 💬 What rest habit will you start today to boost your performance? ♻️ Share this with someone who needs permission to pause 🔔 Follow Jen Phillips for leadership that models healthy success

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