Listen, Prioritize and Scale to Build a Winning Product with HockeyStack’s Arda Bulut

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0:58Welcome to Built Right, a podcast by Hatchworks where we help you learn to build the right digital product the right way. In each episode, we'll deconstruct the layers of successful product development, break down popular trends, and offer real advice to help make sure your product is built right. We may not have all the answers, but we've built a lot of digital products across a lot of industries, and we've seen a thing or two. Let's get into it.

1:32Today, we're chatting with Arda Bullett, co-founder and CTO of HockeyStack. And HockeyStack's a SaaS analytics and attribution platform that unites website, CRM ad data so that marketing and growth teams can actually measure marketing's ROI, know where to invest more, and see account-based intent signals. And y 'all have been experiencing substantial growth as of late, attracting notable customers like Airmeat, Lavender, Cognizm, to name a few. And I'm pumped to get into this story of HockeyStack today. It's a story of multiple pivots on their journey to product market fit, the holy grail of product market fit.

2:15So many great learnings for product and engineering leaders in this episode, including some insights towards the end. You're not going to want to miss with Arda and what he's learned on his journey of building HockeyStack. Welcome to the show, Arda. Hey, how are you? I'm so excited to be here as well. Yeah, excited to get into it. HockeyStack's doing some awesome stuff right now. And HockeyStack, I've been following you all as of late, and it's such a great example of a product that's built right. And the way we kind of think about that, you got to build the right thing, right? That's valuable for your end user, viable for the business, feasible from a technological perspective.

2:56And then you got to build it the right way, which is a lot into your wheelhouse on the CTO side in terms of being maintainable, scalable, secure, and usable. and the problem that you're solving is a big one, especially now in recession, hyper attention on budget. I know I'm feeling that and you're going after a major problem in the market. But to start though, I want you to take us back to the beginning. When you started, it was kind of the height of the pandemic. You all had an initial vision of what you wanted to build, which is actually different than where HockeyStack is today. But take us through that first part of your journey?

3:33I mean, you have a great description there, but you know what they say, it hasn't always been like this. The first year, especially, it wasn't easy. As you said, there has been a couple of pivots, and the first product, even though it was always an analytics product, wasn't anything like this. When we started, it was at the height of the pandemic, and we were trying to do other projects, And one of the key things that we noticed there was we can't really measure product usage. And we tried to mix panel amplitude, those kind of classic product analytics tools. And maybe it was our fault, but we couldn't really get them to work.

4:13We couldn't really set them up easily. So the initial, the very, very first idea that we had was actually building a product analytics tool that focused on ease of use, that focused on actually giving insights automatically so that you won't have to look at anything yourself. We want to use artificial intelligence, which was like, it's weird. It was always at the height of AI as well then. It's also trending right now as well. A new height, right? That we're going into with generative AI, right? But it's interesting going back to that point, you mentioned you built an analytics tool with the focus on ease of use.

4:54I think this gets into part of the learning, Like nowhere in that statement did I hear like the target customer or the problem you were going after. But maybe go deeper there on the initial kind of thing you were building and where you hit some roadblocks. Yeah, I guess like you also had a great point there from the beginning. One of the key things that we want to do was build a product that was easy. That was like from the setup perspective, from the usability, it had to be like intuitive for whoever we were selling to. The AI was just a way for us to just say that there's going to be some magic there that's going to give you the numbers easily so that you won't even have to analyze the data yourself.

5:35But like the actual first product that I mentioned now, we tried working on it for about five to six months. We were talking with people, like the usual talk with your customers, talk with people, potential buyers, etc. We thought we were talking with them. We were getting all these great feedback. Oh, that's a cool product. That's a cool idea. You should do that or something. But as we were building, one thing we noticed was no one really wanted to put the script on their website to actually track the data. No one wanted to share their current data stack with us. So even though they were saying cool product, et cetera, it didn't really mean much when you had to talk business with them.

6:18No one gave any money to this product. Yeah. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business. And that's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity Finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact, tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry. No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the ranked by ROI potential. It takes about three minutes to run and it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free. If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI dash opportunity dash finder.

7:00That's a key piece too, right? Is that this concept of, you know, you can get customer feedback and they may say how awesome it is, but when push comes to shove, when it comes, like you mentioned, putting the, with your tool, it's putting a script on their website, we're actually paying for the solution. You know, if you're not getting those positive signals, it may not be actually good enough to replace status quo of how they do it today. Right? Exactly. I mean, the actual validation comes when people use the product, not when they say that they can use it or that it sounds interesting or something.

7:36That was the first key learning. We tried to get that to work, as I said, for like five to six months or something. but at the end like we realized it wasn't going anywhere like plus us three like we didn't have any linkedin presence or something back then so it was like three unknown people coming from turkey like how are you going to trust that basically so after that like we realized we had to change something about the product like we so let me let me pause there actually so you're you're in turkey It's you and your other two founders. And you're at this inflection point, right? And so many folks, when they get to this point, they kind of scrap it and go find a day job, right?

8:19So, you know, you're kind of like, what, maybe early 2021 at this point. And you're at this inflection point of, do we keep going? Yeah. Yeah. And what was the trigger for y 'all to keep going? Was it somebody in the founding team that's like, all right, we're going to keep doing this? Did you have an insight that kind of led you to go down another angle? What pushed you to keep building? Yeah, I think it was just blind faith, you know? Sometimes you need that, right? Sometimes, yeah. I mean, we weren't sure if it was going to work. We weren't sure if we were actually tackling the right problem, the right audience, whatever.

9:03but we just want to build something and we like working together. So it was just like a matter of, okay, what are we going to do? Like, what are we going to build actually? So it never even like crossed our minds to at that stage, especially like find another job. It was more about like, what are we going to do? Like, I remember we had some notion docs where we were doing like pros and cons list of each idea that we have, like what's working here, what doesn't work there. And we had some very terrible arguments around that time on like everyone wants to go in some different direction. But during that stage, one of the ideas that we had was a web analytics tool.

9:47Instead of focusing on product analytics and saying that we use AI or something, we realized that no one really cared about the technology that you're using as long as you are providing some value to them. So around that time, we tried focusing on a web analytics tool that's kind of like a competitor to Google Analytics. You can think of this as the second iteration of the product. The idea there was basically tracking the same way that we were tracking the product analytics part, but for web analytics and actually showing people the journeys of all the visitors that they had, giving them easier to understand dashboards rather than going to Google Analytics and and going through all their complex data visualization methods.

10:32That was the second idea. Around that time, there were a lot of simple web analytics tools, like privacy-friendly tools that were coming out as well. So we kind of rode their wave along with them at that point. And one of the key things that we did around that time I was actually applying to a website called AppSumo. It's like a lifetime deal platform. Have you heard of it? Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah. We applied there. And it was, I think, like Emir actually applied there, but he didn't really think much of it. He just filled out an application and forgot about it. And we just left the product there to kind of chill on its own for a while.

11:17and then after like a month or so like as we were still like deciding on what we were going to do next we realized that there were like a little traction there that maybe like means something so you didn't even realize it was getting traction it just it was kind of something you did that's that's what i love about so many journeys and stories it's kind of these random serendipitous moments that happen so you started to get traction um which you know gave you another kind of nugget of insight of okay there may be something here right yeah yeah exactly i mean i think around that time like it's made about one one k like one thousand dollars on its own without us doing anything there we we saw that like we saw okay maybe there's something here so like we decided to invest more in the app small channel there are like some facebook groups or uh other like communities that they have for the buyers there so basically we just like tried to be more active, like talk with the customers around there.

12:19And as people trusted us more, we tried to actually gain some traction from the AppSumo part with this easy-to-use website analytics tool. This is before any attribution, before B2BSS, any of the current things that we are working on right now. So who is your target customer at this point? Or did you really have a target you were going after? At that point, we didn't even choose a target audience. It was whatever Epsoma basically showed us. Mostly agencies and e-commerce people though. Their audiences, usually those people, the Facebook groups are full of them. But yeah, we started gaining some traction there.

13:00People really liked the product. I think one of the key things there was playing the underdog against a big tool like Google Analytics because when you become that big, there are going to be a lot of people that don't like it. There are going to be a lot of people that really hate it. That's also one of the things all of those simple web analytics tools kind of use. And we kind of tried to use it as well, like the alternative to Google Analytics, like the analytics that you'll actually want to use. That was the messaging around that time. People got behind that, like they were sick of Google Analytics.

13:36we also tried to fight with session recording and heat map tools a little bit as well. That was a time where we were trying to position us based on other tools. That kind of works for a while, if you're going for that kind of a while. But I think in the long run, it wasn't going to really work out because at some point you have to change your messaging so that your product is at focus of it instead of some other product. If you have another tool in your header, in your website, in your main page, I think that's going to be a problem later on that you should probably think about. But it's worked for a while.

14:18The money we made from AppSumo is probably the pre-preced round that we did there, just from the buyers, just from the calls that they bought there. That really helped us going for at least another year also, that money alone. So at this point, you're at this next inflection point. You're starting to get some positive signals. You actually have got some kind of revenue coming in. You mentioned these agencies are kind of interested, but you still haven't gotten to click. This is it. We've got product market fit. What's that next inflection point that got you? I think this is where you actually start to get to what HockeyStack is today.

14:57What was that next inflection point? Yeah, basically, we got the money from AppSumo. We were kind of doing good. But the problem this time was the customers and the features that they were requesting wasn't really aligning with the vision that we had for the website analytics tool leader. They were asking for white labeling features. They want to basically use our product, show it as their own to their own customers, especially the agencies. And we didn't want to go down that road. You know, your product then wouldn't have like any brand or something. We, as a SaaS ourselves, like we kind of felt closer to other SaaS businesses, but we didn't really have a way to validate the idea to actually focus on that.

15:43So around that time, like the second pivot that we were about to make was more about like an audience problem rather than like the actual product, because we were kind of like happy with the product. But it was usable, like people were getting value out of it. So we didn't really think about the product aspect that much around the pivot. So what we did there to actually decide on what we're going to do next, how we're going to execute that, is talk again with a lot of people. But it isn't just like talking about some abstract concept or a problem that they might be having that they just say to you in a call.

16:18They actually had something to show to them, the actual product. And we could ask them, this is the product. This is how can you use it? Would you use this? How do you think this works, fits in your workflow? That was the big question that we were asking around that time. And we tried that with e-commerce people. We tried that with agencies. And we also tried that with SaaS people. And what we realized that SaaS people were generally a lot more responsive to our messages. They were like, they really wanted to help us out as well. And they were also interested in the product. But the key thing is most of the people that we talked to weren't interested in like 90 % of the product.

17:02Like I remember one person just said like, I'm not going to use this. I'm not going to use that feature. I'm not going to use this page. All I want is this specific thing. And that specific thing that they wanted to see was actually attributing revenue back to blog posts. That was like the big insight that we had. Yeah. I love that too, because some people may hear that, that, oh, I'm not going to use 90 % of your product. And they walk away with their tail between their legs. But what that customer just gave you is the biggest insight of all. Here's the gold. This 10 % right here is what I care about.

17:40And not only what I care about, it's what I would pay for. Props to y 'all for actually now focusing in on that area. So now you've started to understand who's that core customer, that kind of B2B SaaS marketing person looking for attribution. And you're getting to what is their job to be done, which is beautiful. And now you've gotten to what's that core problem that needs to be solved at this point. Yeah. At that point, we started the messaging with the same thing that they told us at Debuting Revenue Back to Blog posts. And the fun thing is like around that time, we didn't even know that much about attribution.

18:19Like it was just like a funny word that we heard about. We didn't even like have that functionality in the product. It was just like a precursor to that. So just that weekend, me and like Bura just hacked away, built like the very, very first attribution feature onto the product and tried showing that to B2B sales businesses. and like with that it's actually like being able to show that they were a lot more like open to their problems we could really talk about like the core problems that you mentioned that they were having and we realized that it isn't just about like blog posts or like revenue either it's about actually unifying the data that they were getting with the rest of like the tech stack that the company is using because we thought that like the i think someone else just said that like Every month, they were praying that the blog post that they were publishing would have some kind of traffic, some kind of visitors, because otherwise they had nothing to show to execs, to C-suite, whatever.

19:22They were just praying to get that success. And they had no way to measure it. They had no way to optimize it. Yeah. When the alternative is praying for success, then yeah, you got a good... If you can solve against that. then you got an opportunity space there. That's such an awesome story. I'm curious, you're the CTO of this product, and I'm assuming it's built on a really modern stack being a new solution, but I'm seeing every week new features, new functionality being built. What do you attribute that to Yael's ability to quickly iterate and build and deliver, not only build the new features, but actually deliver and put them into production in kind of a safe and secure way?

20:09Yeah, I think it's about the mindset because even two years ago when we first started, deciding on the tech, the actual tech stack was just about, okay, which technologies do we know? Which are the technologies that we can actually push some code, some production server and what's the fastest way to build the MVP basically? that's what me and like Bora at first thought about and that's how we like built the first iteration of the product that like some parts of that code is still being used in production right now but like from then on it was about always choosing the simplest tech set that you can have for that stage of the company so that you can quickly find something to show to people and like even now while we are like pushing features it's about making like finding the simplest way to actually like build that feature and then push that and iterate over it over time to actually make it like the complex thing that it is now i think like base camp had a great example about this like while building their calendar feature they didn't just go out and build like this complex calendar but instead they tried to understand the core problem that people were having and then build future around that core problem instead of just saying like, okay, we should build a calendar or something.

21:32In our case, we don't just go out and build the most complex thing and see if that works for the people. We try to iterate over the process to make sure the first version works, second version, not that well, maybe. We improve it at the third version so that we'll have something to show to people every week. Every week, there's something new happening in the platform. I was just going to say, you're speaking my language. Basecamp is such a good example and use case of how to do this. And like you said, it's quickly iterating and not being afraid to put something out there so people can react to and you can continue to iterate on.

22:10right? Yeah, exactly. Like we have some features that not a lot of people use. Sometimes we remove features from the product that we know that no one's using. So like that's, that also happens, but you, you should invest like, uh, from the start, try to invest less than you would normally do. So like when you have to actually like, like remove it from the product, it will be such a big loss at the end there. That's kind of like the big thing there. And that's such a good nugget too. It's like everybody's always in the mindset of build more, build more features, put them out there. But what you just mentioned was critical.

22:48It was actually, you know, if a feature is not being used, if it's not adding value, remove it. Because at the end of the day, like you're only creating more complexity in the solution for your user. I like to think of it as you're forcing your users to burn more like brain calories with the more stuff you have out there. So I love that approach. Even early on, you are taking stuff out if it's not adding value to keep it lean and very focused on the problem it solves, right? Exactly. I mean, the simplest example for that is like in the sidebar, for example, we really think about how many things you have in the sidebar and like how much pages that you have.

23:27But just the other day, we had to remove one feature, the complete feature from the sidebar, because we know no one's using it right now. It isn't the key thing in the product right now. So you have to sometimes do those kind of sacrifices to actually make the product more intuitive. It comes back to the ease of use as well. If it's less complex, then people are more likely to use it more. Yeah, that's a great segue. And that's a big piece of what we think about as built right is, is the product usable? And it's more than just the UI. It's the actual user experience. And one thing I love about HockeyStack is y 'all don't just think about it in the span of I'm a customer, I'm in the solution.

24:07You take it further than that. And I see this with the interactive demo that people can use online. And I know that's an engineering effort to do that. there's all kinds of you know how quickly you can get it set up i think you'll talk about you can get set up in two minutes talk about that and how you think about the importance of ease of use yeah in the product experience i mean the thing there is like there's always going to be some effort to actually set these and use these tools but it depends on whether you are putting the effort on the customer side or the developer side and like as much as possible we try to put it on our side like put the weight on our shoulders so that for the customer everything looks automated everything looks like very easy to set up that means that we have to do a lot of like configuration out of like generalization on our side because we integrated a lot of tools we get a lot of data from like from these customers and they have different configurations of these tools we don't ask them to actually like provide us with all this information about their configuration like they don't have to fill all these forms to actually integrate the tool.

25:15For them, it's just one click. But for us, it's actually like making sure in the background that everything works according to the generalized model that we have for our data. So it's about who is it going to be hard for? Either you or the customer, and I will always prefer for it to be hard for myself rather than the customer. Yeah, I'm stealing that. I love that concept of putting the weight on your shoulders and not your customers. That's such a great way to think about it because it really, you have that trade-off, right? It can be on your customer's shoulders or it can be on yours. And one thing I heard you mention, like a big part of your product, your solution are the integrations and making that easy.

25:57How do you go about prioritizing and determining which integrations to add to the platform? Do you have any kind of criteria you go through when you're saying, let's prioritize this integration first over this integration within the solution. Yeah, that's a great question. And it has a very simple answer. Whatever we do, it's things that people, it's things that our customers ask us. It's things that we hear in the demos. So the simple metric that we use is like, okay, who is asking for this? How many people are asking for this feature? If we have just one person asking for integration, we still put that in the roadmap but like a little bit lower than the other things and if we get like a lot more people saying that we use this tool as well if they like kind of mention that that thing like that task kind of gets prioritized more and more until it's like in the cycle for this week in the cycle for next week so it's like very very simple but it works like for the last couple of months at least we aren't building anything that our customers aren't asking for us so many good insights here.

27:06And that's the thing. So many people, I think, overcomplicate this. What you just said is, does the customer need it? Have we heard them ask for it? And the big piece there is you're actually continuing talking to customers, listening to customers, which a lot of people overlook. A lot of the times people talk to users and customers at the beginning, but don't do it throughout. And you make it easy in that way because it's not some complex formula or prioritization framework. It's no customers have told us they want this, they need this. So we prioritize it in that way. Yeah, to wrap it up, I got one more question for you.

27:44You know, CTO of HockeyStack, y 'all are growing. Y 'all are, you know, we were just chatting before this. You're living it up in San Francisco now, meeting with all the folks there. But what's the biggest thing you've learned? Like if you could go back to your former self at the beginning of this, What's that one piece of advice that you would give your former self or another young CTO or engineering leader about building a solution that can scale and grow? Good question. I would say the biggest thing while building a product with limited resources is like the last thing you talked about, actually, prioritization.

28:25So, like, you have, it's like a very simple problem. You have about eight to 10 hours that you can potentially work in a day. And most of the day, even though you think that you are prioritizing the same things, if you actually drill down and actually see what you are doing at each hour, usually there are going to be things that don't really matter that much, but you still do because you think that they matter because you didn't critically think about those stuff but if you can actually prioritize your day as well as like prioritize the futures you can actually like have a lot more impact i'm like a big believer in the 8 to 8 to 20 rule where like most of the things is gonna come from that 20 of the work that you are doing the other 80 percent is just manual things that you can probably like automate or like just don't do at all so if you can actually crack the code if you can actually always try to optimize the process that way you'll be able to move a lot faster.