This 'One' Secret Can Skyrocket SaaS Growth #saas (Assembly)

Do we build one-on-ones next? Do we build an announcement tool? Do we build surveys? Do we build a daily stand-up tool that hyper focuses on that one thing? Well, we couldn't get conviction on anything else. So Josh Purvis, who's our CPO and co-founder, had this idea to take a form, like a normal form, like a survey form, but a form manipulated in a different way can do a thousand different things, can do a million different things. The permutations, each new form block you add, can create all these different use cases.

我们接下来是要建立一对一交流工具吗？我们要建立一个公告工具吗？我们要建立调查问卷吗？我们要建立一个每日站立会议工具，专注于一件事吗？嗯，对其他任何事情我们都无法确信。因此，我们的CPO兼联合创始人Josh Purvis提出了一个想法，就是采用一个普通的表单，像是一个普通的调查问卷表单，但通过不同的方式操作，可以实现千变万化的功能，可以实现无数种用例。每增加一个新的表单模块，都可以创造出各种不同的组合。

And so a form, when it goes out, when people respond to it, if the form comes back into a social feed, you really have a lot of potential. So instead of building one thing at a time and going deep into any one category, what we ended up doing is taking recognition, which was our core product at the time, breaking it down to its core components, which was a form. Who do you want to recognize? Do you want to give them points? What do they do? Tie it to a core value? That is literally answering fields in a form.

因此，当一个表单被发送出去时，当人们对其作出回应时，如果这个表单重新出现在社交信息流中，你就会有很大的潜力。所以，我们最终决定不是一次只建立一个事物并深入研究任何一个类别，而是将我们当时的核心产品Recognition分解为其核心组成部分，也就是一个表单。你想要认可谁？你想要给他们奖励积分吗？他们做了什么？将其与核心价值联系起来吗？这实际上就是在填写表单中回答的字段。

So we took that form and said, you could do all these things. So we built out hundreds of culture templates with this form. And we said, let the companies tell us what they want by giving them all these options. And some of the options can range from surveys, could be anonymous surveys and anonymous suggestion box. It could be one on ones. And we can not only create forms, but we can automate the cadence to which people are notified to respond to the forms. So you can send them to departments or locations or individuals.

所以我们拿到了那个表格，并说，你可以做所有这些事情。因此，我们使用这个表格创建了数百种文化模板。我们说，通过给予他们所有这些选项，让公司告诉我们他们想要什么。其中一些选项可以是调查，可以是匿名调查和匿名建议箱。也可以是一对一的对话。我们不仅可以创建表格，还可以自动建立人们被通知回复表格的频率。所以你可以将它们发送到部门、地点或个人。

So one on one started to be really popular. People started using us for company announcements, ugly sweater contests during the holidays, because we have a reward system where you can submit the responses, vote on it, and then reward people. The use cases were wild. In what we found is each use case, another company turns on. If you turn on another use case, in another use case, a normal HR experience when you use a product is you get a high adoption rate and then it declines over time. That is pretty common. It's like, I can't imagine anyone's ever said, I can't wait to do my annual review, you know, said by no one ever.

随着一对一沟通的流行，人们开始使用我们的产品进行公司公告、假日丑陋毛衣比赛等活动，因为我们有一个奖励系统，可以提交回复、进行投票并奖励他人。使用案例非常丰富多样。我们发现，每次推出一个新的使用案例，就会有另一家公司开始使用。在使用产品时，常见的人力资源体验是初始时会有较高的采用率，然后随着时间的推移逐渐下降，这是相当普遍的情况。就像没有人曾经说过“我迫不及待地要进行年度审查”，这是无法想象的。

But with assembly, when we turned on recognition, when they turned on surveys, when they turned on social channel, like a pets channel, or people can upload photos of their pets or dogs or whatever it might be, the more features we added, what we ended up seeing was doubling of participation and often tripling of participation every 12 months. So people kept coming back to the platform more and more, so that when you wanted them to give recognition, they were doing it with higher frequency. When you wanted them to answer a survey, they were already in the platform because their social elements lived there. Their friends were in it.

然而，通过组织安排，当我们启动了认可功能，启动了调查功能，启动了社交渠道，比如宠物频道，或者人们可以上传自己宠物或狗狗的照片等等，我们发现随着功能的增加，参与度翻倍，并且往往每12个月就会增加两到三倍的参与度。因此，人们越来越多地返回平台，以至于当你希望他们给予认可时，他们会更频繁地这样做。当你希望他们回答调查时，他们已经在平台上了，因为他们的社交元素就驻留在那里。他们的朋友也在其中。

You know, Instagram, I think the magic numbers like get seven of your friends to, or Facebook, get seven of your friends to join and then you're hooked forever. It's the same thing with our workflows. The more workflows you turn on, the more reasons there are to engage, the more collaboration and community you have. And so that was our path to getting massive adoption from a user perspective. Yeah, I think that's smart. Like building templates for forms has got to be a lot easier than building deep features in a whole bunch of areas.

你知道，Instagram和Facebook，我认为像是让你的七个朋友加入一样的魔法数字，你就会永远沉迷其中。这与我们的工作流程是一样的。你打开的工作流程越多，就有越多的理由参与其中，越多的合作与社区。这就是我们从用户角度获得广泛接受的途径。是的，我认为这很聪明。建立表格模板应该比在很多领域开发复杂功能要容易得多。

And so were you building templates for everything or were you building kind of like a no-code form that they could customize and use however they wanted and you weren't being too rigid about the use cases? Both. So we have the ability to create a customized form, however you want, a bunch of different blocks and all the different permutations of the blocks, literally give you millions of options. But we do have templates and most people ended up adopting the templates because what we ended up seeing is when someone adopted something new, if we saw a couple people do this thing, they're like, oh, creative. We ended up just templatizing it and adding it to our template library. That's how most of our templates came to be.

那你是为一切都建立了模板，还是建立了一种无需编写代码的表单，他们可以随意定制和使用，并且你对使用情况并不太严格？两者都有。我们有能力创建定制的表单，你可以根据自己的需求选择不同的模块，并以不同的组合方式有数百万种选择。但是我们也有模板，大多数人最终选择使用模板，因为我们发现当有人采用了新的东西时，如果我们看到有几个人都在使用这个功能，我们就会将其变成模板，并将其添加到我们的模板库中。这就是我们大部分模板的来源。

Like we see people do it. And so we just templatized it. That's very interesting.

就像我们看到其他人这样做一样，我们就将其模板化了。这非常有趣。

Let's talk a little bit about sales. One of the challenges that I think with a product like assembly, and we were chatting about this a little earlier, is this whole dynamics of like a buyer versus a user. You wanna obviously focus on the buyer when you're selling the product because they're the decision maker, they've got the budget and they've got their own set of goals in terms of what they wanna get out of the product. But those goals may not and quite often don't align with the goals of the people who are using the product.

让我们稍微谈一下销售。我认为像组装这样的产品面临的一个挑战是买方与使用者之间的动态关系，我们之前有过一点讨论。当你销售产品时，很显然你要关注买方，因为他们是决策者，他们有预算，并有自己的一套关于产品带来的目标。但是，这些目标可能并且常常与使用产品的人的目标不一致。

And the problem is that you might be able to sell assembly to HR folks, but if you're not also thinking about how to create usage and engagement with employees who actually wanna go in there, I mean, you can't force them to use this thing. But if they're not using it, then at the end of the day, it's gonna be like, well, it doesn't really work.

问题是，你可能能够向人力资源人员销售该工具，但如果你不同时考虑如何让真正想要使用它的员工去使用和参与其中，那么你就无法强迫他们使用这个工具。但如果他们不使用它，那么到最后，就好像它实际上是无效的。

So you've got this situation here where you've got to figure out how you can drive engagement, how you can make it easier, more incentives for the employees. But none of those things are that important to the buyer who is probably, well, maybe it is, but they maybe have other priorities as well.

所以你面临这样一种情况，你必须弄清楚如何促进员工的参与度，如何让事情变得更容易，并为员工提供更多的激励措施。但对于买方来说，这些事情可能并不那么重要，他们可能还有其他优先事项。

So what was your experience there? And how did you overcome that, those sorts of challenges?

那么你在那里的经历是怎样的？你是如何克服那些种种挑战的呢？

Love this question, and we can go super deep into this one. But my advice to the entrepreneurs out there are thinking and ideating on their business. If you can align the buyer and the user as close as possible, you really reduce the levels of friction. Because if they're totally detached, a buyer might want something different, as you said, eloquently than the user itself, which is why like consumer products, you're the buyer and the user. So it's like, I want this thing, I'm gonna buy it. It's like, you don't have to convince a separate person to do the thing, it's you, you're doing it.

我喜欢这个问题，我们可以深入探讨一下。但是我对那些正在思考和构思自己的业务的企业家提出的建议是，如果你能尽可能地使买家和使用者接近，你会真正减少冲突的程度。因为如果它们完全脱节，买家可能会有不同的需求，就像你所说得那样，与使用者本身不同，这就是为什么像消费品那样，你既是买家又是使用者。所以就像，我想要这个东西，我要买它。你不需要说服另一个人去做这件事，而是你自己，你在做这件事。

So the closer you can align that, and there's a lot of even in the B2B SaaS world, there's a lot of platforms and tools that do that, in which case, the purchasing intent, the decision-making power is much faster because the buyer is the user, it affects that person directly.

所以你能够更贴近这一点，而在B2B SaaS世界中有许多甚至有很多平台和工具可以做到这一点，在这种情况下，购买意图和决策能力要快得多，因为购买者就是用户，它直接影响到这个人。

We sell them to HR, and that is difficult. Who is your HR buyer? It might be an office admin who's climbed the ranks, who has this idea and this notion of what engagement platforms should be. But then there's the user, which is dynamically detached as a huge dichotomy between a buyer and a user. So if you just listen to an admin, they might say, I want these beautiful charts and graphs, I want this crazy reporting, I want this functionality and that functionality and this automation and that. And the truth is, some of that is absolutely valuable and would make the world a difference. But a lot of it, we look at the data, it doesn't make sense, it's like you can build out the most beautiful reporting in the world, but if people don't use it, what's the difference?

我们将它们销售给人力资源部门，这很困难。你们的人力资源采购员是谁？可能是一个在职场中攀升的办公室管理员，他们对参与度平台有自己的理念和观念。但是与此同时，用户处在一个动态的分离状态，买家和用户之间存在重大的差异。所以如果你只听从管理员的意见，他们可能会说，我想要这些精美的图表和统计图，我想要这种疯狂的报告，我想要这种功能和那种功能，这种自动化和那种自动化。事实上，其中一些绝对有价值并且会有所改变。但是很多时候，我们将数据纳入考量，这些要求就不合理了，就好像你可以建立世界上最美丽的报告，但是如果人们不使用它，有什么区别呢？

And so you have to actually blend when the buyer is different than the user, what do the users want and how do you bring value to the user and how do you keep the admin happy? How do you keep the buyer of this platform engaged enough so that they can renew, that they'll tell their friends that they'll be like, I'm gonna get promoted because I drove this, I crushed this out of the park. How do you make them so good at implementing the tool that they get poached to the next company? Those are the kind of tools that make you feel amazing in an organization.

所以，当购买方和使用者不同时，你必须实际上将两者融合在一起。你需要知道用户想要什么，如何为用户创造价值，以及如何让管理员满意。你要如何使得购买平台的买家对其持续参与，让他们愿意续约，会向朋友们推荐，并有机会晋升，因为他们在这方面表现出色。你要如何让他们在实施这个工具方面表现得非常出色，以至于被其他公司挖走？这些工具会让你在组织中感到令人惊喜。

So blending those two is really difficult. And it's something we've struggled with, there's a push and pull between, I'm sure this is not unique to assembly, but between product and sales. Sales, if you listen to the buyer, it's like, this is what I need, reporting, reporting, reporting. And product focus, look at the analytics of what the people are doing, let's double down on those features and let's make it even easier and simpler and add more features to make this more automated for an employee. It's a really tough conundrum to be in and you have to navigate those waters.

将这两者结合起来确实很困难。我们一直在努力解决这个问题，组装行业肯定不是唯一的矛盾点，就是产品和销售之间的拉扯。如果你听取销售人员的意见，就会发现他们总是强调报告，强调报告。而产品方面则要关注用户的数据分析，加倍努力提升那些功能，使得对员工来说更易于操作、更简单，增加更多特性以实现自动化。这是一个非常棘手的难题，你必须在这其中把握。

So give me one example of what you did for the admin, the buyer, to make them feel like a hero from for choosing and buying assembly. I hate to say this the way that I'm about to say this, but by not listening to the buyer, we made them a hero.

所以给我举一个例子，说明你为了让管理员和买家感觉他们是英雄而选择和购买装配做了什么。我不太愿意这样说，但是通过不听从买家的意见，我们让他们成为了英雄。

There's a whole new breed of HR, like a chief people officer, the title of people is something relatively new, it just used to be HR, HR manager, chief human resource officer, and that was people title that's coming out. And after COVID on, the emphasis on it has been great, it's been vast.

现在出现了一种全新的人力资源管理职位，称为首席人力资源官。"人力资源"这个头衔相对来说比较新颖，过去只有"人力资源部"、"人力资源经理"和"首席人力资源官"这些职位称谓。而如今人力资源职位的头衔有了新的变化。在COVID-19疫情之后，对人力资源的重视程度变得更加强烈、广泛。

And so how do you make them look like a hero? You launch a product that employees love, that if you took this away, would you be upset? If people said, yes, then it's like, okay, this is a win for my organization.

那么，要如何让他们看起来像英雄呢？你推出一款员工喜爱的产品，如果你夺走它，他们会感到失望吗？如果人们回答是，那么就可以说，这对我的组织来说是一次胜利。

And so by listening to the user, by understanding the data and interviewing the actual end user of the product, more so than the admin, you know, we were able to build features where our utilization and productivity inside the platform would double or triple in terms of participation over a year period, where most HR tools are declining participation dramatically.

因此，通过倾听用户意见、了解数据并与实际产品终端用户进行面试，比与管理员更多地与之沟通，我们能够开发出一些功能，在一年的时间内提高我们在平台内的利用率和生产力，使参与度翻倍甚至翻三倍，而大多数人力资源工具的参与度却在急剧下降。

But once again, you still have to keep them happy, you do have to build some forms of reporting, you have to give it, make it presentable so they can showcase the results to the CEO and whatever titles are out there that they need to showcase the results to.

但是，你仍然需要让他们满意，你必须建立一些报告形式，你必须提供并将其表现得更易展示，以便他们可以向CEO和其他需要展示结果的相关职位展示结果。

So you do need to blend it, but I would say the best thing we did was listen to the user.

所以你确实需要混合它，但我认为我们做得最好的事情是倾听用户的意见。