From zero to one — the story of Simply Guitar
The making of a new product and how the unique culture at S made it happen.
I joined Simply 2 years ago as a product manager to take part in the mission of spreading the joy of playing music to homes around the world. This time has been the most interesting, challenging and rewarding of my career. After reading this post I think you’ll get a sense of what’s unique about how we approach things at Simply, and why I’m so excited about the journey ahead.
A few things stand out when talking about product at Simply. Firstly, we’re as consumer-oriented as it gets. We develop music learning products that empower people, enrich their lives, and are joyful to use. Secondly, our company’s growth entails many avenues for tackling new verticals and new markets. This means that we have the opportunity to continuously go from zero to one, creating new products and services. And thirdly, over the past few years we’ve developed the know-how for creating successful products that people love and the methodologies to do so repeatedly.
Simply Guitar is one of those unique opportunities and I’ve had the privilege to take part in its formation, not long after joining the company. Simply Guitar is now the top grossing guitar-learning app in the App Store, and you might be surprised to learn that it was brought to market by a really small team in a matter of 6 months from inception to launch.
In this post I’d like to share some highlights from the story of making Simply Guitar, and how our company culture and values made it happen.
Zero to what?
I’m writing this post on the same day that we launched the beta version of Simply Guitar for Android. While celebrating the launch of our Android app today, my colleague Liran downplayed the whole notion that we need to celebrate this event. In his words, “launching is just a milestone on the journey”. I tend to agree, and this begs the question — when going from zero to one, it’s very clear what ‘zero’ means: starting from scratch. But what does ‘one’ mean? If launching isn’t it, then what is? And how do you know you’ve reached it? This question gets straight to the heart of what we’re all about in Simply.
What does culture have to do with it?
We work in small cross-functional teams called pods. This is a method popularized by companies such as Netflix and Spotify, and we adapted it to our own flavor and needs. In Simply we take this very seriously and every person in the company belongs to a pod (even the CEO). These pods are equipped to be self-sufficient and highly independent.
When Simply decided to build a guitar product, we created a new pod with all team members who were needed for this task — a designer, a developer, a musician, and a product manager (myself). Yes, four people. We had complete autonomy and freedom to define what we wanted to build and how we were going to do it. The only constraint was the pressure to deliver something as quickly as possible that will serve as the company’s next growth engine.
Prior to Simply Guitar, Simply had a wildly successful piano app — Simply Piano. It has already been in the market for several years and we set out to see if we can replicate this success for guitar learners. Since piano and guitar are very different instruments to learn, we really had to go back to the drawing board and plan our approach for this new audience.
We were literally thrown into the water and had to start swimming. This sense of freedom can be very scary, but it’s also energizing. No one told us what to do because no one really knew. We had to employ basic product principles and methodologies for coming up with our strategy. We started by identifying our target audience and understanding their needs through market research and user interviews. We then developed prototypes and conducted user testing to validate our approach and refine it. We had to decide on a go-to-market strategy, define what we were going to build and execute it. It was all up to us.
Now this all sounds crazy. You may ask — how do you put the company’s future growth in the hands of such a small team. Well, along with this extreme autonomy we got all the support that we needed. Our veteran VP Product, Lior, had a huge role in mentoring us. We called him our “coach”. This support was given on all levels — professional, motivational, and psychological — and it was invaluable.
In addition to the professional support, there’s also the organizational aspect. When we had to bring more people on to the team, or get more resources, we surfaced the need and found the support to fulfill it within the company. It’s literally like being a startup within a company. You don’t have to worry about keeping the lights on, you just need to worry about your business goal. That kind of freedom paired with a clear objective allows for maximum focus, which is really what you need when tackling tough challenges.
Trusting your team is key
Like the greatest companies in the industry, one thing that struck me as I joined Simply is that we hire really great people. So much has been said about this, and I’m sure it’s not news, but you really can’t underestimate the impact this has on a team’s ability to succeed. I’ve had the fortune of working with really talented people, all of whom are smarter than me. Talk about “imposter syndrome”…
One thing I learned when working with really talented people is that if you just give them space they will achieve so much more than you could ever have imagined. For example, when we started working on the app’s content, Idan, our musician and Or, our creative specialist, formed a really fruitful synergy. Idan brought his experience of teaching guitar, while Or brought his unique sense for creating engaging videos. This duo laid out a series of funny instructional videos as the foundation for how we teach guitar. Who would have thought that humor can be part of this. It turns out that people loved it, as it gave the app an emotional aspect that made it more human and delightful.
I would be remiss if I only talked about the positive side of things. Working in a team under such stressful circumstances obviously has its challenges, and I can assure you that we had our share. First of all, as a newly formed team we weren’t used to working together. We went through all the known stages of team development — forming, storming, norming and performing. Great people are usually highly opinionated as well, and as such the storming phase was really inevitable. We had to make a big number of choices in a short amount of time so discussions and debates were abundant.
What allowed us to stay our course was not being afraid to make decisions, as hard as those were. When charting new territory you’re often in great uncertainty and that breeds hesitation and doubt. When that happens the important thing is finding a way forward by hearing everyone out and making a decision. After a decision is made everyone on the team fully commits to make it happen even if they didn’t support it at first. This is what’s commonly referred to as “disagree and commit”.
Reaching good alignment in a cross-functional team is a challenge. Especially when that team is evolving and growing. The key is developing real trust between team members. That takes time and builds up slowly with every challenge along the way. But once achieved, it unlocks tremendous velocity, and that’s when great things happen.
By the time we launched Simply Guitar our small team of 4 tripled its size. And today, as the product has grown and scaled up significantly, that original pod has evolved into multiple pods forming an entire “tribe” within the company. That tribe includes all the teams necessary for growing and maintaining the business, from user acquisition to long term retention.
Succeed or fail, but do it fast
At Simply, impact is at the core of everything we do. While some companies may celebrate hard work, such as spending months on redesigning a product, or launching a really big coordinated effort, at Simply we make a point of elevating impact over effort. This means focusing on outcomes rather than output. The longer you work on something, the harder you’ll need to justify its impact.
This framework is really key and it’s called impact velocity. You always want to be optimizing for the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. The best case is when you can do something small which drives great impact — these things do exist, but are rare.
In the case of Simply Guitar, we were a big effort by definition. Building a new product involves making a leap and taking a risk. We could have easily spent months and months doing market research, developing a new design language, and building out all the features that we thought “should be” in a guitar app. But in the mindset of impact velocity, we were constantly thinking about how we can get results faster.
Our main focus was validating our basic product assumptions, and the only way to do that was to launch something quickly and measure it in the real world. That doesn’t mean being reckless and just throwing anything out there. We had to make it our best shot, and that involved a hard balancing act of learning and moving forward at the same time.
We had to really understand our target audience and that meant relentlessly talking to them, inviting them to our office for testing, and doing so while the product was still bare bones, or even just a prototype. That allowed us to get feedback and adapt our solution while in motion.
Another key point in keeping our impact velocity was being religious about the scope of our first version. After 2 months of discovery work we were ready to decide what would be the essential parts of the product we were going to release. From that point onwards we became very strict about what’s in or out of scope.
For example, although strumming patterns are a crucial part to playing the guitar, we didn’t think they were essential for our first version so we decided to put them out of scope. Strumming patterns were a big design and technological problem to solve and we spent some time thinking and debating how to solve it. But as our lead developer, Saggi, keenly put it — “if we decided that’s out of scope, there’s no reason to waste any more time talking about it”. Once we did that, everything became a little bit simpler. Simplicity is powerful because it removes noise and allows you to move faster.
The good-enough product
Going back to the question we started with — when creating a product from zero to one, how do you know you’ve reached ‘one’?
Once we launched our first version we could then start to validate whether our product was delivering its value. Like everything we do we were intent on measuring outcomes and doing so through metrics. After seeing that users were installing and using it, we knew that nothing major was broken, but we had no good measure of value. How could we know if it was good enough to sustain a growing business? If the answer was no, we had to go back and figure out where we went wrong.
We diligently continued developing the product while measuring its performance. We looked at a variety of metrics for optimization including usage, engagement, retention and user feedback. But above all, the answer to the question of value involved two main factors: first — start monetizing, second — measure product/market fit.
In our case we found that the best measure of value is this: are people getting enough value that they are willing to pay for the service? That’s why we started developing our subscription infrastructure and monetizing the app as early as we could.
But to make sure that we’re not optimizing for a fake initial perception we wanted to make sure that those who pay are also satisfied with what they’re getting. That point where you realize that a product is satisfying a demand in a real market is called “product/market fit”. A term popularized by Marc Andreesen in his famous essay about startups.
But product/market fit is an elusive thing. We needed a leading indicator that could tell us if we have it or not. That’s where Sean Ellis’s product/market fit survey came in handy. For every subscriber that was using our product for at least 2 weeks, we sent a survey asking them how disappointed they would be if they could no longer use it. The industry benchmark is that if at least 40% of your customers answer “I’d be very disappointed”, you have a good indication of product/market fit. We got 50%.
At this point we never for a moment thought that Simply Guitar was great. We just knew that it was good enough. And ultimately, I think that’s the “one”.
It is knowing that your product is good enough that it can fulfill a market need. Good enough that you don’t need to go back to the drawing board. Good enough that you can start the process of optimizing and making it better. Good enough that you can start telling the world about it, and scaling it up. Good enough that you can begin the long journey from one to one-million, and beyond…
Want to hear more about our next zero-to-one opportunities? I’d love to hear from you! You can also check out our open positions here.
