The importance of listening to your audience with HockeyStack

Hi and Hello, 

Jared and Karthi here from Audience Haus. 

We are back with another amazing conversation this week with Emir Atli, Co-Founder and CRO of HockeyStack and talked about how they took HockeyStack from a startup to a success and boy, was it an interesting conversation!

We kicked off our conversation by getting right to the good stuff! Emir once mentioned to Jared that he went through about a dozen companies before they set up HockeyStack and that was the point Jared chose to start the conversation with. 

Emir talked about how he and his co-founder built about a dozen companies before they started HockeyStack. And how HockeyStack itself started out as a Product Analytics software and then pivoted into a Google Analytics alternative because it was a more profitable product.

And then, Jared totally dropped a bombshell about how Emir was only 17 when he set up  HockeyStack! And while I am sitting there processing that information - Emir goes on to talk about how he just keeps getting these ideas in his head and they went on to a couple of SaaS businesses from that Google Analytics alternative. 

Emir described how the current version of HockeyStack evolved from this version by basically doing something we recommend here at Audience Haus - listening to your audience!

That’s right!

Emir talked about how once they refined their product, customers began to ask for more features and integrations with other applications like HubSpot and Salesforce so they could create a dashboard to track the data they had and so on. This gave Emir and his co-founder the information they needed to build out the product and test it. 

They tried out different ways of testing it - gave the product for free, at a really low price - 1/10th of the current price. And Emir shared how it took almost a year for about half of their customers to come on board. And how the company also moved to San Francisco at around the same time. 

The move to San Francisco also led to them cold calling an investor who agreed to come onboard as an angel investor. And then, HockeyStack got into Y Combinator and raised a formal $2.7 million seed round. Emir looks at it as a milestone in a journey that has spanned 11 years out of which it has been successful for about one and a half years. As he puts it, the business itself went through 35 different versions and even the current version failed 4 times before it was a success.

This is where I butted my way into the conversation, quite literally. And I asked the question I had been waiting to ask ever since Emir began describing the HockeyStack journey. How did he get his first 5, 10 or even 50 customers. So the other side of the journey - the front end, if you would like to call it that. How did he build his audience?

And then, Emir really brought out the secret sauce. This is your time to pull out your pens and paper and start taking notes, people!

Emir laid out a step by step process to how they built the brand on LinkedIn to the point where they onboarded their first 5 customers. How they started with posting 2 LinkedIn posts a day and just did that consistently for about 6 - 7 months. This helped them build an audience of people and then they brought in the big guns. 

They started posting 15 - 20 second videos of the product on LinkedIn on an almost daily basis and how they sent out many connection requests. Between the videos and connection requests, they built out their initial audience base. And that audience base eventually expanded leading them to a bigger audience base.

And then in addition to the connection requests and daily video posts, they also reached out to their audience for feedback. And this trifecta of posting, connection requests and asking for feedback got them their first 5 customers!

Emir says he believes that there are 2 ways to get to this stage - one for companies building a product for their network and another for companies that either don’t have a network or are building something that’s not for their network. And the first method is…

Nope, not so fast! Emir shared many more amazing insights about building a brand and influencer partnerships and a lot more…

And to get access to all that awesome information, you cannot keep reading this newsletter. Well, because the newsletter ends here.

So, to watch the whole podcast and watch Emir go through the entire journey of HockeyStack and his thought process behind the entire journey - you know what you got to do. That’s right! 

Join the Audience Haus community and get access to not just this podcast, but the amazing lineup of podcasts that we got planned for you. 

Until next week, this is J and K signing off!