With only 20 people, how did they manage 20,000,000+ users?
In this article, Pocket founder Nate Weiner shares the huge advantages of a small team in company development. He also shares his experience on how to scale a product through platforms and users. I believe this will be of some reference value to all small-scale entrepreneurial teams. If you had to pick an animal to describe the read-later app Pocket, it would be the ant. Like ants, because they have one thing in common: the weight of the objects they carry is many times greater than their own weight. Ants can carry things that are much heavier than their own weight. The same is true for Pocket. It supports 20 million users with only 20 people, and these users have saved more than 2 billion articles and videos in total. Pocket's extraordinary capabilities and efficiency are all thanks to the company's founder and CEO Nate Weiner. Pocket has been in business for eight years, and for the first four years, Weiner was the company's only employee. He independently developed and designed Pocket's website, API, and iOS App. In addition, customer service support is provided to the company's millions of users. The size of a team is actually not proportional to the impact it creates. Pocket is the best example. In this article, Weiner explains why expanding your company doesn't necessarily mean adding employees. Instead, he shares two ways startups can scale their business without a marketing team. He also shared the huge advantages that small teams have in terms of focus, company culture, and trust. Any early-stage startup looking to scale from small to large could benefit greatly from Weiner’s experience growing a company. After running Pocket independently for four years, Weiner decided to raise funds and build a team to end his solo career. How big a team does he need to form? For Weiner, who developed the first version of Pocket by himself in just one night, a team of five seemed like enough. "I would ask myself, 'How much can a team of five people actually do?' When I first approached Evernote (who was in the early days of acquiring Pocket), they had a team of nearly 60 people, and I couldn't imagine having a team that big. What would they do? Why would a team of 10 do something that could be done by one person?" Now, in order to accommodate the growing size of the team (about 20 people at the end of 2015), Pocket is planning to move to a larger office. Pocket’s huge success has more or less changed Weiner’s perspective, but he firmly believes that the small team concept that Pocket has always adhered to in its early development has laid a solid foundation for the company’s subsequent continued rapid development. Even now, he doesn't want to do anything that might damage or dilute the two unique qualities that have built the company to this day: focus and trust. Below, Weiner shares how keeping your team small can be a valuable guiding principle as your company grows. Small teams help you focus There is a management concept that is highly respected: maintaining focus and sufficient flexibility is crucial for startups. But it is very difficult to actually put this concept into practice. Like many other startups, it is not easy for Pocket to stay focused while not missing out on development opportunities when faced with many external development opportunities. Unlike most companies, Pocket sees small teams as a way to ensure the company stays focused, rather than a limitation. In the first quarter of 2015, Pocket had more than 20 projects planned across the company, which means that the number of projects planned was more than the number of employees in the company. “For any size company, staying focused is a constant battle. If we were a larger company, we would probably appoint a leader for each project and assign engineers to each project to drive the project. But the reality is that we have very limited manpower, which forces us to think and prioritize projects frequently and invest limited manpower in projects that are really important.” Pocket ended up completing only a quarter of the projects it had planned for the first quarter of 2015. With so many projects running simultaneously, the team felt scattered and directionless. This feeling is very bad. Later we got a very big project: Mozilla wanted to integrate Pocket into every version of Firefox downloaded by all users. Because this project is so large and important, we have invested all of our company's human resources into this project. This reminds me of the time when there were only 5 people in the company. At that time, we only worked on one project at a time, and all staff would be committed to it. Our entire company was involved in integrating Pocket into Firefox as quickly as possible and in order to make Pocket's read-it-later service available to more people. In the end, we completed the project smoothly and quickly. If your company is a small startup, you might want to ask yourself this question: Putting aside the conditions, is this project worth investing all the company's resources into? If the answer is yes, then find ways to do it. We invested all of the company's resources into the Firefox project, which enabled the project to be quickly advanced and completed, and the quality of product integration was much higher, with rave reviews from users. After this project is completed, we will start working on the next one. Compared with advancing multiple projects at the same time, tackling one project at a time will make team members more motivated, collaborate more tacitly, and be more efficient. If your company has more than 100 employees, you must also find ways to keep your team focused. Think back to the time when the company’s team size could fit into a single room, and ask yourself, if it were at that time, would you be willing to devote all of the company’s staff to a project? If the answer is yes, then find a way to invest more manpower into this project from the existing team. Whether your team is 20, 30, or 50 people, you should make sure your team is focused on the most important project. I also understand that large companies may not be able to be as flexible in project investment as startups, but the most important thing is to maintain the instinct of focus. Personally, I know I need to be forced to focus on one thing. The larger your team, the easier it is to devote manpower to less important projects. For a small team, it is difficult not to focus. You should do your best to avoid failing to complete the work that needs to be done now in order to do something you want to do in the future. For companies of any size, Weiner recommends focusing the entire team's attention on a single, most important project each quarter. Which project will be most critical to the company in the next 90 days? Once we determined this, we pulled together the entire company to ensure that this project was completed with excellence, and then moved on to the next one. Pocket has now reduced the development time of each project to 30 days, especially for those urgent developments. I can tell you what our goals are for the next 6 months, but we're only focusing on one thing each month. The reality of being a small team forces us to stay focused. Concentrate company culture and expand team skill sets In large companies, in order to attract more talents to join the company, there will be dedicated personnel or departments responsible for defining and maintaining corporate culture. In the early days of Pocket, as the company's only employee, Weiner was both the creator and the guardian of the company's culture. However, he also knew that in order to expand the company, he had to recruit people, but he did not want to lose the two magic weapons that made the company successful in its early days: drive and perseverance. It is precisely because of the small size of the team that Weiner can ensure that the company culture is concentrated and focused as the company grows. Pocket's corporate culture is not some trendy concept, but trust, hard work and a sense of ownership. Weiner spent years discovering and refining the right founding culture for the company, a time most other companies would spend only as they explore product-market fit. After all, there’s a saying in the tech world that 80% of a startup’s culture is about the founders themselves (their traits). When defining your company culture, cook it not like a salad, but like a stew. Start with a few ingredients at the beginning. Then taste it so you can better understand what flavors are already in the stew and what is missing, and then add any other ingredients needed. This method will produce much better results than just putting all the ingredients in to simmer at the beginning. Weiner came up with this idea through trial and error. This also allows him to more easily recruit and expand the team in the way he wants, while ensuring the diverse skill sets of team members. “For all startup founders, at some point in the company’s development you have to realize that you can’t do everything perfectly and to the same high standard. For example, there was a period of time when I was struggling with product design and needed help, so I hired Nikki (Pocket’s lead designer) as my first employee. Compared to her, I have more product and development experience, while Nikki is very good at product design. It is through our cooperation that we were able to develop a truly great product. Based on her rich experience, she transformed Pocket's original 'black and yellow' basic color scheme into the charming Pocket of today. It was important to recruit people from the beginning who would take the same ownership role that I did with Pocket. They were much better at their respective fields than I was and ultimately made Pocket a very good product. ” Keeping Pocket's team size at around 20 people not only allows Weiner to screen the people he truly trusts, but also allows him to gather a group of people who can make good decisions and operate well without him. Small teams do not have a strict hierarchical structure, which helps to form common values and a sense of teamwork more quickly. “As a technical founder, engineering R&D is the most difficult area of work to delegate. However, a previous experience convinced me that I could delegate the technical research and development work with confidence. The specific experience was as follows: We encountered a problem on the backend before, and I provided a solution to this problem. After the team members understood my solution, they went to another office to solve the problem, and later they found a solution in that office that was better than the one I proposed. That moment made me realize that I could completely authorize the R&D team to be fully responsible for the technical research and development work. A team that trusts each other and is recognized for their abilities goes a long way toward building a truly great product. ” Small teams can use their small size to drive focus and maintain corporate culture as the company grows, but these advantages are only the driving force behind the team's work. The product that is finally developed can also be expanded without expanding the team size. There are two main ways of product expansion here. “For a company with a team as big as ours, there are only two ways to grow and expand your product: relying on the platform behind your product or relying on your users.” One advantage of a small team is that you can find ways to make people outside your company part of it. Here’s how Pocket leverages its platform and loyal users to collaboratively develop, launch, and promote its products. How to achieve rapid development by relying on your own platform? In the early days of Pocket's development, Weiner's goal was to embed Pocket into every corner of the web page in order to provide a perfect product experience for as many users as possible, which meant that the Pocket product itself had to be flexible and scalable enough. With no marketing team, Pocket strives to make it very simple and convenient for other companies to embed its products into their products and services. This in turn helped Pocket's own user base grow exponentially. So far, more than 2,000 products have embedded Pocket's services, including Firefox, Twitter, Flipboard and Kobo. Pocket is working to grow even faster on its own platform, thanks to feedback and enthusiasm from its partners. Weiner has seen countless growth opportunities, but most of them would be impossible to accomplish with Pocket's current team size, even if the team size were doubled now. As a small, fast-growing company, you can choose to scale up quickly or stay small and leverage the platform to grow quickly. If you choose the latter, here are some suggestions from Weiner: (1) Make the product as simple and easy to use as possible The Pocket team asks themselves this question when making decisions: How can we make the product simple and easy to use for all users? For example, many startups now open their APIs, but Pocket goes further in this regard. The API we use to develop our own products is exactly the same as the API we open to our partners. But how much can providing a few lines of code help them? A few years ago, I started trying to solve the sharing problem using ShareKit, an open source software development kit. I try to enable other companies to embed Pocket and other popular services into the products they are developing with just one line of code. Other companies can simply write this line of code into their apps and they can share the content in the app to platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. If these companies develop this feature from scratch themselves, it would usually take several weeks. I want to make this work simple. This is also a principle that Pocket has always adhered to. You should try to make it as convenient as possible for people who want to build your product into their products. It is best to make it plug and play. The simpler the better. If Twitter came to us and said they wanted to embed Pocket into their product, they wouldn't do it if it took them a month to embed it into their product. In this case, I wouldn't blame them. If you want people not to reinvent the wheel, you must make sure your product is a wheel that is simple enough to use. If so, they will use your wheel and there will be no need to reinvent it. (2) Make product integration completely self-service Pocket's platform philosophy is an important reason for the company's rapid growth. Making it very easy for other companies to integrate Pocket is the first step, but if other companies can complete the integration work completely by themselves, it will help Pocket scale even more. Without any business expansion, we have completed thousands of integration services, most of which were completed by our partners themselves. Simplification makes it very easy for partners to complete Pocket's integration work, but Pocket's small team size forces Pocket to do so. Kobo and Firefox partnered with us because Pocket integration is so simple that they could easily do it themselves. Initially, Kobo wanted us to complete the Pocket integration within two months, and if our team of 12 needed to integrate it from scratch, we would not be able to complete the task on time. Fortunately, we have a ready-made API, which allowed Kobo to complete the integration of Pocket in just 14 days. Ideally, other companies would be able to do the integration themselves without having to ask Weiner or his team for any help. Pocket also found that many of its users hope that other apps can also integrate Pocket's read-later service. User demand has forced these companies to learn more about Pocket. The most important feature request that users have made for other apps is the ability to integrate Pocket's services. I have encountered this situation many times. These app developers were overjoyed when they found that they could meet users' requests for Pocket integration themselves. This is what Facebook Paper did. Without our knowledge, Facebook Paper quietly integrated Pocket into their service. I discovered this by accident one day. (3) Use your platform to attract large companies to become partners and be transparent with them Having a simple integration platform and self-service integration methods does not mean that startups can stop working hard to actively seek partners. Pocket has been keeping an eye out for big companies that could benefit from its product. For example, when we first started working on Firefox, our product was called Read it Later. We started out as just a plugin for the Firefox browser . We’ve been working to build a culture where we continually share our stories, data, and product updates with our partners, so companies know what it’s like to become our partner from the beginning. We want them to really understand that we are always available to work with them whenever they are ready. One day, Mozilla contacted us and said that they had now fully integrated Pocket's read-it-later service into the Firefox browser. Remember: once an app or company successfully joins your platform, it means your transaction is over, but it also means that your official partnership has just begun. For Pocket, being completely transparent with its partners is a way to retain them, and it’s also a way to continually improve the product with a small team. We share as much as possible and never try to hide anything. As Apple and Google improve sharing capabilities in their own products, we'll share with them everything we learn in this market. This way, when these companies need to integrate the read-later feature into their products, they will easily know who to contact, and we can easily close deals with partners. For startups with smaller teams, it is important to build a platform to allow external partners to become external aid to the team: allowing them to contribute to the company in sales and development. Take Pocket as an example. The platform it provides allows you to easily complete service integration, even self-service integration, and at the same time provides you with rich data. When this data accumulates to a certain level, all its partners can benefit from it. Next we will look for ways to make full use of our large user base. With thousands of partners integrating Pocket services, we also have millions of users. The question now is: How can we provide them with better services and use them to grow faster and go further? How can your users help you? Think about what it was like to watch TV before DVRs or streaming, or what it was like to take a taxi before Uber. For users who are used to using Uber to take taxis, if you ask them to stop using Uber and use the original way of taking taxis instead, they will definitely not be able to accept it because they have already experienced the convenience brought by Uber. The same thing is with Pocket, which we think has changed the way people browse content online. We have encountered such users, every time they find an app does not integrate Pocket's read it later service, they will complain: "What's wrong, is this app still living in the primitive era, why doesn't it support Pocket read it later?" If small startups encounter users who are so passionate about their products, they must find ways to convert the love expressed by users into something valuable to the company. Every time Pocket encounters such a user, we will try to find ways to let the user assist us in product development. Here are two ways Pocket relies on its users to improve its product: (1) Change the way of product development and testing: From developing and testing alone behind closed doors to collaborative development and testing of products through communication with users When Pocket was first founded, our strategy for every product development and release was to launch a product to users that we developed independently and felt was perfect. Before a product is released, we will carefully consider every pixel of the product. At the beginning, Pocket was like a waterfall product, all output and no interaction. We hold a major product launch every year. We would spend 6 months polishing the product, developing features that we thought were great, and then launch it. This product development and release method has received good responses, but we believe that there is still a lot of room for improvement in the entire product development and release process. After ensuring that the product meets market demand, perfectionism is not only the enemy of making good products, but also the enemy of achieving rapid growth. Pocket has always been known for its excellent design, but to understand why it achieved rapid growth, our product development team shifted the focus of their work and debate from nitpicking about product design details to how to solve the product's growth problem. As a small team in a growing company, we need to transform our users into our collaborators, not just product beneficiaries. For all startups, at some point in their life, you have to choose between perfection and growth. The former is a static feature, and the latter is a dynamic process. When faced with this multiple-choice question, you must choose carefully. This means we need to interact with users more frequently, and involving them in product development is not just about opening doors, it also requires recalibrating the way teams work. In order to interact more with users, Pocket has greatly shortened the cycle of releasing new features. “We’ve released faster. In the sprint phase, we release every 5-6 weeks. For our team, it’s been a big adjustment from striving for perfection before every product release to releasing at such a fast pace. It’s also a cultural shift in product releases. Now, although we know there are bugs before releasing a new feature, we have a large number of users who help us find bugs.” This approach to product releases was especially important for the release of Pocket version 6.0, a prototype used internally by the company. At the time, the team predicted that it would take at least nine months to develop a complete user-friendly version. We really enjoyed the beta version of Pocket 6.0, so we didn't want to delay users from experiencing this great product due to our own limitations. So we decided to split the product release, changing the originally planned large-scale new product launch conference into 6 releases, an average of one release every 6 weeks. Despite being released separately, product usage feedback has been very positive so far. We quickly received a lot of feedback from users on our product. We carefully analyze and listen to users' opinions and respond to them, and further improve our products based on everyone's feedback. In addition, we will release the improved version as soon as possible to let them know that their suggestions are taken seriously and adopted. Users are like our remote work team. You only have one bow and arrow, and if you shoot without aiming, it will be difficult to hit the target. If you can constantly adjust your aim, your chances of hitting the bull's eye will be much greater. If used properly, new product testing can provide your team with a lot of useful usage feedback and allow users to provide suggestions for improving the product. This way, even if you don’t hire, you’ll have a lot of helpers to help you achieve your goals and achieve rapid growth. Since the completion of the last round of financing, we have made many important breakthroughs, especially in platform expansion. We knew we wanted to get the product to market quickly and get it tested in the marketplace. The faster we can get our products out the door, the better the results will be. Product beta is the best way to help Pocket move forward and keep users engaged. (2) Use questionnaires to learn from product managers among users From the beginning, I was struck by the passion and loyalty of Pocket users. Our users love this product. I am constantly struck by their enthusiasm and willingness to express themselves. We often receive emails from users, and many of them say, “Hi, I’m not here to report a bug, I just want to tell you that your product is awesome!” In order to get these loyal fans involved in product development, use appropriate tools to seek their support. Pocket uses a questionnaire approach, which not only collects user feedback but also provides direct guidance for future product development. “We just reviewed 600 user surveys we collected for the Pocket beta. Our customer support team communicates directly with users in the product. We get more user feedback through surveys than any other channel. Many startups view surveys as a tool to increase product activity, so they don’t take the user feedback they collect seriously. You can't rely on hearsay, you have to listen carefully to what the users say and how they say it. I often tell the team to work hard to understand users' most genuine feedback and not just stay at the surface level. Whenever users report a problem with a product, they often offer suggestions for how to fix it. When users give feedback, they don’t usually just say, “I hate this problem in our product.” If you continue to read their feedback, they’ll usually propose a solution to a problem. The solutions they propose may not be the ones that are ultimately adopted, but they help to better define the problem, which can help you find a solution quickly. For example, the Pocket app has two tabs at the top: My List and Recommended. The survey results show that users want to slide between the two menus, but many users' fingers cannot reach the top of the screen. This question has very insightful feedback. Of course, this interface distribution method is only one of the solutions. Another way is the standard UI interface in the iOS system, where you can put the tab at the bottom of the screen. This way you can easily reach these two tabs with your thumb. However, then you have to consider that many users on services like Facebook may not be able to discover this new feature, and these users may have the same problem. If you just come up with the first, second, or even tenth solution yourself, then you will miss the point of the user's need: a swiping tab bar. Here are three tips Weiner shares for conducting your survey:
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