The latest with Rubric
Since my last update, I’ve had sales calls with five more potential customers — none of which converted to actual sales.
Based on learnings from these calls, I repositioned Rubric once again. I rewrote the copy on the landing page and rebuilt the product to be a little bit more focused and valuable.
On Thursday last week, I launched these updates to a different slack community of my target customer — engineering leaders. This led to 46 unique visitors on userubric.com and 10 new sign ups (or leads) in the past seven days.
After signing up, I email each new lead asking to schedule an onboarding call with me where I provide a product walkthrough and to understand their goals. This adds friction to the process, but each conversation helps me learn a lot about why a user is not choosing to pay.
Out of the 10 leads this week, four have already scheduled an onboarding call and I plan to continue following up with the ones that haven’t yet. So, more learnings to come!
The biggest risk is value
There are a lot of different things I did over the last few weeks that I’d love to share such as synthesizing learnings from sales calls, repositioning, and rebuilding the product. But in today’s post, I want to share what’s top of mind for me this week; the biggest risk with Rubric.
In his book Inspired (highly recommend), Marty Cagan shares a framework to think about the reasons that a product might fail in the form of four big risks:
Value risk, whether customers will buy it
Usability risk, whether users can figure out how to use it
Feasibility risk, whether it can be built
Business viability risk, whether it can be a profitable business
By identifying, categorizing, and sizing the risks, you can and should “tackle the big risks early”. With Rubric, as with most new businesses, value risk is the biggest one.
Derisk by identifying competitors
One way to tackle value risk when just evaluating ideas is to identify competitors.
For Rubric, a tool to create and use structured interview rubrics, there aren’t any established paid competitors. Greenhouse provides tools to create structured feedback forms but customers hire it to be an applicant tracking system first. HackerRank, known by companies for its recruiting product, recently launched a new “end-to-end hiring” solution called the Developer Skills Platform.
There are also a couple, relatively new entrants in the market called BrightHire and InterviewIA, which so far are aimed towards non-engineering roles.
This shows that this is a new and unproven market. And my belief is that it will become a proven one as more companies recognize their need to be inclusive in order to compete for limited talent and deliver business outcomes in a global market.
Derisk by identifying paid current alternatives
The other, arguably more important, way to tackle value risk is to identify paid current alternatives through customer conversations.
This list is usually very similar to the above list of competitors, but you also find tools that users use to accomplish the same goals but wouldn’t necessarily show up if you googled “interviewing platform” or “structured rubrics”.
In almost all of my conversations with customers, they were using a free product such as Google docs or sheets, Confluence wiki, or their personal note-taking app of choice. Notion also showed up, which some users were paying for but weren’t paying for to improve their interviewing process.
This was a red flag 🚩 and I have been concerned about this. This likely means that I will have to invest a lot to educate the market first, then sell to it. It’s not impossible. It’s the longer, costlier, and riskier path.
Derisk by launching
The most effective way to derisk is by launching a solution to users and asking them to commit to pay.
Since I launched Rubric’s alpha, I’ve had ~200 unique visitors to its landing page, resulting in ~30 leads, and exactly 0 paying customers. From these numbers and many customer conversations, I’ve learned that there is interest in finding ways to interview more equitably but so far managers haven’t been ready to commit dollars for a tool that helps them create and use structured interview rubrics.
I’m not done yet. I’ve got more leads in the past week, more sales conversations in the next week, and more value to add to Rubric. Excited to learn and report back!
I’ll leave you with this highly relevant and insightful tweet from today.
Thanks for reading!
🧠 Bonus: My good friend and former TpT’er, Mark Koslow, just launched The Middle Path. A newsletter where he’ll be writing about happiness and well-being, meditation and mindfulness, and exploring answers to life’s big questions. If you know Mark, you can see how this is perfect coming from him. Check it out!