Removing friction points, one at a time

The average ThoughtSpot transaction three years ago was about $250,000. Today we are doing a limited release of our Team Edition with In-App-Buy capabilities for $250. In the past, it took a customer almost six months to go from purchase to production. Today, our customers begin to see value within six minutes of logging into ThoughtSpot.?

Our perception of companies' evolving strategies is often associated with a sudden and massive pivot.?

In reality, it is never one-and-done. Today's software companies constantly assess, evaluate, and adjust. When companies change directions, it's often due to one of two things: product-market fit issues or friction in distribution.

When your demo and sales pitch go smoothly but the deal stalls, it usually is from distribution friction. Friction in distribution is a silent killer in many companies. It is difficult to diagnose—and even harder to fix.?

Looking at the screenshot of our In-App-Buy product, it's easy to underestimate the company-wide effort involved over the last two years to fix our distribution friction. It was intense, exhilarating, and very, very rewarding.?

Here is a six-step template we used to make it happen.?

1. Ask a hundred prospective customers who explored your product, gave out all the buying signals but did not buy it a simple question: why didn't you buy it?
2. Get all the responses together, sort them by most common answers, and re-sort them using our own heuristics. This is important since customers may not always know what is right for your business.
3. Determine the most significant friction-point by applying your internal logic to the answers from non-buyers.
4. Throw out everything else for the moment. This is very important - you need clarity and focus to make a significant change.
5. Solve for that one identified friction point.
6. Rebuild this list from the beginning by going back to point number one.

After every stage, interrogate your data to determine when your leading indicators have shifted. Luckily, I have access to our product, so getting that information is always just a search away.

Friction #1: I don't need yet another database

From the very beginning, ThoughtSpot's concept allowed business users to freely interact with data by building a sophisticated yet straightforward search engine, similar to finding information with Google.

To create this Google-like experience before cloud platforms had gone mainstream, the company had to build a robust yet proprietary back-end database that would be installed on top of the customer's data warehouse.

This need for a specialized database was the number one reason customers did not want to deploy ThoughtSpot. We addressed that first.?

How? We removed the back-end database and replaced it with Embrace, a scalable, high-performance live-connectivity layer for every significant cloud platform such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, or Databricks.?

Friction #1: Business users find it challenging to search data even in natural language

It is challenging to have to create new answers every time you have a question, especially for casual users. After four weeks of using the platform, users told us that almost 80% of their questions had already been asked and answered by someone else in their business. As a result, we rebuilt the application to make it simple for users to discover and modify existing answers. With a Google Drive-like experience, this new application is called "Search Answers." Finding and modifying these answers is much easier, so users can focus on taking action, not just creating analytical content.?

Friction #1: Dashboards are safety blankets people hold onto out of habit

Another big issue was that customers liked their dashboards, and they couldn't buy big with us until we helped them replace Tableau or PowerBI. Building better dashboards wasn't enough. We had to reimagine them entirely. So, we went back to the drawing board and created Liveboards with Answer Explorer and KPI charts to take dashboards from dead and static to interactive and engaging. Seeing customers stop using Tableau and PowerBI and switch to ThoughtSpot made the work increasingly exciting and fun.??

Friction #1: Executives want insights without doing any work

We found that most executives wanted the information they needed to reach them at just the right time, without looking for it. Therefore, we built Monitor, which lets you subscribe to specific KPIs and get alerted when anything changes to unblock executive buyers.?

Friction #1: We don't want to run our own software instances

That's why we launched our SaaS platform. TS Cloud is all about no hassle, just answers.?

Friction #1: Data analysts thought we had nothing to offer them

It is well known that data analysts wanted to get off the hamster wheel of making, tweaking, and altering dashboards. They want to work on solving strategic business problems. I'll be the first to admit we did not listen to their needs or explain how ThoughtSpot could help them. That's why we launched the ThoughtSpot Modeling Language (TML) and the Data Workspace, so they enable self-service analytics at scale through code.

Friction #1: I do not want to log in to yet another tool!

People were already inundated with more business tools than they want. One more was not necessary, no matter how great. We knew that it was on us to unblock this by delivering the fruits of ThoughtSpots's labor to where business people already live. We built ThoughtSpot Everywhere, a delightful embedded experience, so product developers and product managers can bring the goodness of ThoughtSpot into their apps, products, and services.?

Friction #1: Your pricing isn't predictable

Since we wanted the most transparent pricing strategy, we never tied our licensing to the number of users. However, our capacity-based pricing proved to be a barrier for our very large enterprise customers. Our new pricing system, with flexible ceilings and predictive analytics, measures query consumption instead. You pay for what you use.??

Friction #1: I can't buy if I can't try

Our customers told us that doing a proof of concept with ThoughtSpot was difficult. It required getting sales involved and moving data to the instance. Our solution was to build a free trial. Now, customers can test our capabilities without talking to us. They can even try these before their cloud data warehouse sandbox is ready since we enabled CSV uploads.

Friction #1: Mid-market and mass-market customers ask, "Do you know we exist?"

Since its inception, ThoughtSpot has been designed to handle complex data on a large scale, which naturally led us to help large enterprise customers. However, data-native customers also create complex data at a vast scale, even when small. There was no appropriate Go-to-Market (GTM) model to assist them. To scale our sales and service offerings, we rebuilt our GTM models with separate sales segments, built a community for support and enablement, and re-architected our partner program to deliver high-quality professional services.

Friction #1: Okay, I tried, I liked, now what?

This brings us to today. Over half of our free-trial customers are happy with ThoughtSpot but aren't ready to engage a seller. Five months ago, we began a sprint that produced this In-App purchase experience. We had to make massive changes to track, report, Monitor, segment, discount, and process payments.?

There has been at least one near-death experience in every company I've worked for. They say death and taxes are the only two certainties. The question is, how do good companies survive those near-death experiences to grow even stronger??

Successful companies don't follow a printed map on their never-ending innovation journey. Instead, they use GPS and continually course-correct.

Please join us at Beyond to join the community and be part of the revolution.?