We saw countless examples customers shared with us of internal presentations they gave where they had to “re-teach” Reforge material back to their executive teams and their peers.

For example, let’s say a company is pursuing growth and focusing on acquisition of new customers and not focusing on retention. There is a world where someone puts their hand up to say “I think we should focus on retention” and Reforge offers programs to help with exactly this type of analysis. We want our customers to focus on the impact for a company, “we will growth by X with our current strategy, but we could growth by 3X if we do my proposal”. That should be the takeaway, not things like:

Reforge is taught by leading professionals

They have a framework for analyzing acquisition, retention, and engagement

The terms they use (that we don’t) are X, Y, and Z

We felt that our incentives were perfectly aligned with our customers and that we didn’t need to incentivize guest invites. We didn’t need to say “get X off your member” or “get $10 dollars for every person you refer” since their success at work would be improved via this new feature.

One area that we never really nailed with this proposal (that may have helped us) is to quantify the impact long term given our historical growth rates and how it would improve customer acquisition economics, expansion revenue, and LTV of accounts.

There are likely great examples of metrics that would help to articulate things like: it would decrease CAC by X%, increase expansion revenue by Y%, increase LTV by Z%, and would generate Z million in revenue by the end of 2020.

We don’t articulate it in this PRD but it’s a perfect feature to use Reforge’s loop framework for how it helps to accelerate the business and compounds on itself. More guests → customers → more guest invites → more customers. There’s an analysis that shows how it compounds and gets stronger as the business grows and compared to linear channels that don’t compound over time in the same way.

This was something we received a lot of pushback on. What’s the right amount of content? A module? A lesson?

We wanted to err on the side of providing too much content rather than too little. We could always move to restrict it but we felt that we could slowly roll this feature out and observe behavior to see how much content people viewed.

A core belief on the team was that we should give away content because people are busy, they may not be motivated to read it all, and seeing all of the content on the platform would be a positive motivator for them to think “this is really valuable, I should apply”. Showing more would pique their interest and impress them and that was worth the risk of giving them “too much value”.

Why did you decide to frame the goal in dollars?

The CEO was very concerned about piracy and giving away too much value. We had to talk a bunch about how we were prepared to act quickly with bad actors and we’d look at the usage data to understand if this was a risk to the business.

Ultimately, we pushed for putting this feature out there with a small sample set, learning based on user behavior, and adjusting how the feature would work.

We promised to deliver read outs on the key metrics and ensure we were on top of any potential nefarious behavior.

Dan Wolchonok

When working on driving growth at Reforge, the team used this product requirements document to identify customer problems, business problems, and risks when pursuing a new sharing feature.

Our customers aspire to have a big impact on their company and want to leverage Reforge concepts in their pitches to their teams and company.

 This is challenging because the rest of the company may be unfamiliar with Reforge, an individual framework, or lack access to the material.

Our customers tell us it’s hard to keep up with attending our live events, consuming content, applying it to their own company, and doing their full-time job. In order to maximize their impact at work, they have to carve out time to think through the material at a deep level, apply it to their company and context, and propose new features/strategies/directions for their product.

“I want to change my team’s Q2 priorities to activation from a viral invite feature, but they aren’t taking Reforge with me. I feel like we are speaking different languages sometimes and I wish they had enrolled in the cohort with me” - Senior PM at Figma

It’s hard for our customers to convince their colleagues if their company isn’t familiar with Reforge terminology, frameworks, and the credibility of our material. Educating people inside their company with the concepts in Reforge adds more work and reduces their ability to drive real and meaningful change. 

If their coworkers already respect Reforge and know the terminology and frameworks they can focus on evaluating the proposal rather than “coming up to speed”.

Reforge customers love our cohort-based programs, our community, and our deep and thorough material. We have strong word of mouth from happy customers, but the only way today to truly understand how great Reforge is to pay for it and get started. We don’t have a free trial, freemium, or gated experience prior to paying. Reforge costs thousands of dollars so it is a big leap of faith we are asking users to make when they purchase Reforge.

It is challenging from a marketing perspective to understand who someone is, what they’re working on, who they’re working on it with, and what the urgency level is of that initiative. It is really hard to simply communicate the jobs and companies we serve, all of the programs we offer, and all of the content contained in our programs.

Customers are already sharing our material at their company when it’s most impactful: as they’re working on important projects that can benefit from our material.

This represents one of the strongest channels for our growth.

It does not rely on any other marketing channel (social, SEO, etc)

It is the only channel that can scale with our member base without an increase in headcount expense or marketing budget

We will allow customers to invite a guest to one module for free for 7 days. We will only allow guests to have access to one module at a time (across the entire library of content), and inviters can invite multiple people to have access at any given time. The seven-day limit starts from the invite time.

The guest will not have access to our live events, member directory, or our member forums. We want them to understand the value prop of the platform and that these features exist, but not to get to view/participate in them.

The user will have access to all of the content within a module.

 Typically programs have 5-8 modules, and each module represents hours of content (videos, text summaries).

 in 2019. The key variables for us to deliver on this goal:

The percentage of weekly active users that invite guests

The number of invites per weekly active inviter

The purchase rate for accepted applicants

There are two main risks associated with this feature:

This feature should not be a replacement for Reforge. This feature should create more interest in becoming a paid customer rather than allowing people to consume all of our materials over time for free.

We have recently built anti-copying technology into our platform so we will disable their guest access if we find them copying material en masse.

Can this generate enough impact for the company?

We built a simple model that predicts the revenue this feature could deliver in the second half of 2019 using our key input metrics. Given reasonable estimates for these variables, this feature can provide meaningful results this year and has the possibility to scale with our customer base as the company grows without additional investment.

We will not be publicly marketing this feature. We will be launching it within the app to see how discoverable it is to customers looking at our content and we will be taking the following steps to increase awareness of it:

Posting in the forums with use cases and examples of how it should be used / how people should think about gaining allies in creating impact at work

Creating slides and talking points for our live sessions to highlight when to invite guests and how the feature can help them create allies in creating change at their company

New feature product spec for viral invite at Reforge

Customer Problem

Business Problem

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