Having it all…in yoga pants

When my daughter was born, it gave me an opportunity for perspective and reflection. Although I was happy at Mixpanel, I had been there for four years, and was craving greater flexibility I heard about InVision almost accidentally, through my brother, a UX designer. He was talking about how much he loves the product, and as a tech salesperson, I always perk up my ears when people gush about software. “Where are they based?” I asked. “I think they are 100% remote,” He replied. “What!?” I did my research and found that, sure enough, InVision consists of several hundred people

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Building an outbound sales machine

When we hired our first outbound rep (a business development rep, or BDR) we had what seemed like infinite tests to run.  Should we target individual companies, specific industries, or just “spray and pray” with generic emails? And within each one of these campaigns, we aimed to perform multivariate testing on our subject lines, email templates, and number of touch-points.  Reading everything I could get my hands on about prospecting, there seemed to be some golden rules: Keep it short & sweet Be polite Include only one call to action Don’t be salesy I wanted to a) validate these general

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How I landed my dream job

People often ask me how I ended up at Mixpanel. Well, several years ago, I began hunting for a new job, and I was very methodical about my process. I was working at a company that sold services rather than a product, and I found this exhausting. I wanted to find a really great product, with a loyal customer base. I wanted to sell something that sells itself! (Shouldn’t every sales person want that?) I came up with a plan: I would research which products people were raving about, and then hunt on LinkedIn to see which companies had no

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Measuring on Mobile – Best Practices

Last week I spoke at 500startup’s #500distro event on best practices for mobile analytics. It was an interesting event with lots of great talks – 500Startups did a fantastic job of arranging an in-depth look into the challenges of acquiring and retaining users. I heard the word retention over and over again – this is a huge change from the way people were speaking about analytics a couple of years ago. It was refreshing to witness the shift from “traffic” to metrics that really matter. My talk focused on the nuances between web and mobile analytics. These differences stem largely

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User Quality: Engaged users matter more than MAUs

I hear it over and over again – people have no idea how often their users visit their app, or which ones visit the most frequently. The stats that people tend to be able to rattle off include number of sessions each month and number of monthly average unique visitors. These are nice vanity metrics to give your investors and are useful to measure growth over time. Where these numbers are less helpful is in understanding why you are growing. To understand the why, we need to dig into user engagement. An increase in user acquisition can be attributed to

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The Art of the Freemium Sale

Considering going freemium? There are two questions you should ask yourself: 1)   Is your product really, really great? 2)   How difficult is it to setup? If your answers are “yes” and “a breeze,” then go right ahead! If your answer to the first question is “maybe” then freemium is NOT the right model for you. If your answer to the first question is “yes” but your answer to the second question is something along the lines of “well, it depends…” then, you’ve got a few items to take into consideration. I would put products like Salesforce, Marketo, and Google Analytics

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