Picking A Favorite Child
A Story About Product Focus
In 15 weeks I’ll be a parent for the first time, but I’ve often heard more seasoned veteran parents confess to having a favorite child. I suspect this is an oversimplification of an incredibly complex situation involving the constantly evolving personalities, maturity levels, and interests of children and their parents. I also suspect there’s a pretty solid translation of this dynamic to the business world.
In 2015, we launched a SaaS product to help companies collect, centralize, and share the data behind various activities users performed with their apps and sites. We called this product “Clickstream” and began building a company around it. We raised venture capital, went through Angelpad (a top accelerator) and built a great team to execute.
While Clickstream certainly wasn’t without its deep flaws, we have loved and cared for this child from birth through its painfully awkward adolescent years and into adulthood. Our Clickstream product now has a critical mass of customers and processes billions of data points with only occasional tantrums and meltdowns.
However, at the beginning of 2017, a new child appeared on the scene.
She was kind of an accident (though we’ll wait until she’s older to tell her that). In the course of evolving the Clickstream product for larger-scale customers, we stumbled across an incubating Apache project called Airflow. Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow orchestration tool that’s amazing for building and managing batch workflows using Python (a favorite programming language for data scientists).
As we discovered more about the power and broad value proposition of Airflow, we decided our customers might benefit from using it as well. Last fall, we built a very simple offering to expose managed Airflow to the market and quickly began to find success.
Where our Clickstream child was pretty bright and good looking, our next kid was a prodigy. We started to realize this fairly quickly and by mid winter, the notion was reinforced by the engineers on our team and eventually by our Board. At a young age, our managed Airflow offering was helping tech companies like Karmic securely sync their application database and data warehouse or large media companies like Penske Media automate workflows to feed internal metrics and power machine learning. The list of use cases and customer profiles was growing rapidly.
Though we wouldn’t admit it, we now had a favorite child and she was consuming more and more of our attention and time.
So, we had a difficult decision to make — one that many founders and business leaders find themselves facing at some point along their business journies. It’s certainly possible to build a company with multiple products, but it’s extremely difficult in the early days. You have limited resources and attention along with a shallow understanding of your market and customer. You’re a fragile parent who still isn’t sleeping through the night and regularly struggling with the basics.
The other major problem with a poly-product strategy is the ambiguity created by trying to craft messaging to cover everything. While you can certainly craft unique messaging for each product in most cases, there are times (e.g. homepage on your website) where you just need a single, clear message. We were forced to be broad and generic and that created confusion. Confusion is arsenic to an early stage company and its effects go far beyond customers and marketing.
Our team felt the confusion and warring priorities. Our Board and investors weren’t sure how to think about our market potential or key metrics. Forecasting and business modeling was extremely difficult. Everything slowed down and required considerably more effort to get to simple answers and action.
Finally, after much internal debate, we decided to acknowledge that we had a favorite child and broadcast it to the world. (The metaphor clearly breaks down a little here and frankly starts to feel inappropriate…).
On May 21st, we officially announced that Astronomer was The Airflow Company. We were going all-in on providing an incredible experience for Airflow users — from deployment, to interface functionality to administration.
It’s hard to describe how good that decision felt. We knew this child was special and the whole team was united behind giving it all we had. Since then, our product roadmap has been clarified and expanded. Our release schedule is accelerated (big new release for our Enterprise edition coming mid-July) and our involvement in the Airflow community has exploded (we had the top 4 “answerers” for Airflow on Stack Overflow in June).
So what about our other child?
Fortunately, Clickstream has built a great fanbase over the years and we received several inquiries after our May 21st announcement. Details are still being hammered out, but it looks like Clickstream will find a great (arguably better) home. We will continue to support that business and help it however we can, but I expect it to outgrow us fairly quickly.
Now that the dust has settled a bit, it’s clear we made the right choice for our team and business, and probably for Clickstream as well. Hard decisions are like that. Lot’s of pain and consternation lead to new freedom and growth waiting on the other side. Feel free to reach out if you’re ever struggling with the same challenge. We love talking about our kids.
About the Author:
Tim Brunk has spent the last six years launching venture-backed technology companies Astronomer, Cladwell and OCEAN Accelerator. Before that, he spent a decade producing network television for NBC and FOX, managed consumer research projects for Fortune 100 companies and led trading and analysis for a large hedge fund.
Twitter: @astronomerio
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