Reforge started off in the Product Management and Growth functions. As we grew we were trying to decide what function we should expand into.

It was a complicated decision as there were many different factors that went into choosing. Deciding to go after a new market had a ton of implications across how we develop content, to marketing, to product, and more.

When we first started to talk about the decision, it was clear there were many different opinions and the conversation got muddled and confusing really quickly.

Given that we used the Decision Matrix by Darius Contractor to help us focus the conversation.

As you can see the benefit of using this tool that Darius points out is that the best/worst options emerge visually pretty quickly.

That is what happened here. Marketing emerged as the best option mostly due to the distribution and creation adjacencies.

In hindsight, one of the factors we did not consider that did impact us was what happens to these functions when there is a market downturn. Marketing typically gets very hard (along with recruiting and sales) whereas engineering and others can be more durable.

Engineers are notoriously tough to market too. We just didn't feel set up to do it in a high quality way.

We came up with a list of a lot of factors, but at the end of the day these were the most important.

Other ones that we considered were things like willingness to pay and product changes we had to make.

Given things were "equal" for those factors across our options, we decided to just cut as it created "noise" in the decision.

The big discussion was if we should do Engineering or Marketing first.

The main reasons for Engineering was due to market size. There are just a lot more engineers vs product managers/designers or even marketers.

But we decided at the end of the day that all the markets were big enough and that the fastest path to growth would be to lean into the places we could create and acquire users the fastest.

We were most surprised by the lack of competition in design. There were tons of "Design bootcamps" helping people get entry level roles. But we couldn't find much in helping mid level IC's and above.

We felt well differentiated in the market given Reforge is focused on more modern topics. But there was so much noise that we'd have to break through that it didn't feel like enough to give this a "green" score.

Founders were very intriguing for us. By pure number of people, it is very small compared to something like engineering. But founders were super viral from the small # we already had in our user base.

When choosing a market I think people over focus on market size and don't think about other factors like virality, magnitude of pain, etc.

Fareed Mosavat

Akshita Ganesh

Brian Balfour

When evaluating which new markets to enter next, at Reforge we used this decision-making matrix to structure the conversation around each option and the relevant decision-making factors.

Decision-making matrix for new market selection at Reforge

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