Co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and FYI; writes about product, SaaS and customer research.
If you use AI for competitor research, steal this rule. Every claim gets a date. Last week Claude answered a simple question about Linear’s competitors using an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. The skill forced the answer to show the dates,
Founders are doing product marketing earlier than they think. It usually shows up when a buyer says something you weren’t expecting. That gap between how you describe the product and how buyers see it can change the story you tell and what gets built next. If you’re a founder
The first thing I want from AI doing product marketing is the ability to say "I don’t know." If it can’t verify a competitor change, that uncertainty belongs in the answer. If a recommendation needs evidence it doesn’t have, the system should stop there. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m
If a customer conversation has ever changed how you explain the product, you’ve already done product marketing. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m taking one B2B product through 16 jobs like that with AI. I’ll run the same work with and without the matching skill and see which version I’d
AI makes bad product marketing look finished. That’s the part I don’t trust. A competitive brief can sound current while leaning on an old source. Positioning can sound sharp even when the logic underneath is a guess. A battlecard can look complete and still fail the rep who
If you work on a B2B product, product marketing is probably already part of your job whether or not it’s in your title. It shows up when something you learn from the market changes how the product gets explained or sends the team back into the product. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m
Founders are doing product marketing earlier than they think. The market starts teaching you how buyers see the product almost immediately. What they compare it to affects the story you tell. Objections and lost deals often expose something deeper about the product itself. That
We asked Claude what changed with Linear’s competitors. The first answer used an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. Then we gave the same model our competitive skills. It showed its limits up front. It explained how it ranked the changes and kept
We asked Claude what changed among Linear's competitors. No skills: an old source treated as recent, and a guess stated as fact. Same model, with our competitive skills installed: every claim dated, the ranking marked as its own view, and a line about what it could not see.
“I spent 15 months as an IC at Dropbox after selling my company. First real job of my life. Didn’t control the environment anymore. Someone else built it, and I had to live in it. That experience changed everything I thought I knew about leadership. Here’s what I learned. You’re solving the wrong problem. Watch this full conversation on YouTube:…”
Hiten Shah revisits his 2015 observation of "infectious enthusiasm" in founders and argues its source is not charisma but a prior, settled decision to pursue the work regardless of outcome. He contends that investors…
Hiten Shah argues that many workplace problems are simple to solve once they reach the people directly involved, but they become costly when routed indirectly through intermediaries. Drawing on experiences at…
Hiten Shah argues that a company's external surface area has expanded dramatically, from a few channels decades ago to dozens of channels and hundreds of instances today. This growth fragments coordination, measurement…
This essay traces how website heatmaps emerged from a blind spot in early web analytics, which counted page destinations rather than the actual interactions visitors made. Two identically destined links were merged into…
Hiten Shah argues that tech has long misunderstood marketing, treating it as decoration or a growth hack when it is really the translation between what a product does and what it means to customers. He notes that the…
Hiten Shah traces the idea of 'slop' from 19th-century pig feed and swill milk through naval slop chests, industrial refineries, institutional cafeteria food and today's algorithmic content feeds. His core argument is…
Hiten Shah argues that transformative technologies often look like toys at first, and that Wabi's playful mini-apps are an early stage of a new personal operating system. He compares this to the early personal computer…
Crazy Egg's team tested 19 AI website builders by generating 51 pages (product, course, and local service pages) and scoring them against 60 criteria covering usability, conversion design, and SEO. The author finds AI…
Hiten Shah argues that building in public began as a risky, honest practice where founders shared unfinished thinking to find like-minded people and sharpen their own conviction. As audiences grew and tools for…
The article argues that the old advice to ignore competitors no longer holds, since new SaaS competitors appear constantly and may encroach from adjacent markets. Competitor research, done properly, is a way to learn…
The author analyzed 51 Silicon Valley tech job postings, ranging from startups to large companies like Uber, Visa, and Amazon, to see what companies actually expect Product Managers to own. The findings show PMs are…
Hiten Shah recounts how his analytics startup KISSmetrics went from a near-breakthrough to a stalled company. After two failed products, the team did customer research and found a strong market, building features that…
This case study traces how Pieter Omvlee built Sketch, a lightweight vector drawing app for Mac, into a serious alternative to Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop. Omvlee started with a student project, charged for it…
This case study traces how theSkimm, a daily email news digest aimed at young millennial women, grew to roughly 7 million subscribers despite a crowded and hostile media market. The founders bet on a routine-based…
Hiten Shah responds to critics who call Net Promoter Score (NPS) harmful or overrated, arguing the metric is not the problem but how it is used. He contends NPS is useful only as one input among many feedback methods…
Hiten Shah surveyed practitioners about how they measure customer happiness and found that 55% rely on Net Promoter Score, a single-question metric in use since 2003. The article reports other methods, including…
This essay traces Snapchat's rise from a 2011 Stanford side project to a major social platform, and its subsequent stall after going public. The author argues Snapchat's early success came from turning a familiar…
Hiten Shah traces how Square went from a 2009 idea born of a lost glassblowing sale to a company valued in the billions, by solving the costly problem of card acceptance for small businesses. He highlights the simple…
This essay traces Medium's history from its 2012 launch by Evan Williams through its 2018 monetization struggles. It argues Medium's minimal design and long-form focus reinvigorated interest in in-depth writing and…