Like you, I've asked LinkedIn many times "please, fix the DM inbox...please?" And they said I should try their new puzzle games instead.

So I'm fixing it myself. Follow me as I share my bumpy ride bootstrapping a small SaaS business around a tool I love.

Life is 4000 weeks short. Reflections on my journey so far, and the road ahead:

1. I don't remember much of the first 364 dots. But now as a parent myself, I realize how much work that was for my parents. Hats off to them.

2. Wow!! I spent A LOT of time in school!! 312 dots went into training for academia. Didn't do it in the end. Was that a waste? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes you take a big detour in life. That's ok, I learned a lot and it was fun. 

3. My first job was really exciting at first. But I should have left that place 50-100 dots earlier, as soon as my learning and growth plateaued.

4. Got into startups during the pandemic almost by accident. Have been in it for 250 dots now. One of the best decisions ever. It's an exciting place to be.

5. During the first 20 pink dots I had no clue if they'd make me enough $ to keep doing more pink dots. I couldn't imagine it'd ever work out. Made some progress since, but the fear of failure will likely continue as long as the dots are pink?

6. Don't have that many dots left. Want to make the rest count more. How: 

7. Spend more time around people I like and less around people I don't. A lot of life is spent at work, so that means choosing carefully the people I work with. Got literally no time to deal with workplace BS.

8. Spend less time being upset. Can I go a bunch of dots without getting angry or stressing out over something ultimately inconsequential?

9. I should very intentionally try to have more fun and enjoy the dots while they last. 

10. I should very intentionally spend more time being with people I'll truly miss when either of our dots run out.

How else should I better spend the rest of my dots?

Mitchell Tan 📮

People keep asking me if we can make Kondo for comments too. The answer is still nope, but here's something we just shipped to help a bit. 

Few people know that you can actually build a "custom feed" natively in LinkedIn by filtering for posts from specific connections. 

We basically took this LinkedIn feature and souped it up a bit by generating a link to one based on connections you select in Kondo.

Simply go to the Connections tab, filter and select whoever you want, then hit P to open a custom feed of posts in the last month from all of them.

LMK what y'all think 🔻

All good things must come to an end

That's why we're shutting down

...our Black Friday promo at midnight eastern time today.

Just 7 hours left. 

In case you missed the news:

All existing Kondo users (including anyone on a free month) can share your referral link to give 2 free months to your friend and get 2 free months back when they sign up. Rewards stack up. 

Rewards go back to 1 month when the clock strikes twelve in Times Square. 

(protip: If you somehow have no friends who use Kondo and want 2 months free just hunt around the LinkedIn feed. Also, get better friends.)

--- 

UPDATE: IT'S OVER. but 1 free month is better than no free months so you can still harass your friends 😅

I had no idea how much to charge for my SaaS, so tried a bunch of different things. 4 things I learned that really surprised me.

1. Starting with a single price point was a disaster

Kondo is a new thing with no similar competitors, so people had no clue how much they should pay, either. We tried $20 a month and people said “that’s more than I pay for Google Suite or Netflix.” Those comparisons make no sense from a value standpoint because they’re very different things but it was the best comp people could come up with.

2. Charging for 3 tiers was our breakthrough moment

Once we changed prices to $30 (basic), $40 (business), and $50 (enterprise), people started comparing one plan to another instead of comparing us to some other monthly bill. Suddenly the $30 cheapest plan seemed like a deal. This is the IKEA effect.

3. When people are all-in, they will go for the priciest plan no matter what

We see people opt for the most expensive $50 plan even if they don’t use the extra features - as long as they use LinkedIn DMs to make a lot of sales and really like Kondo. They think “this is an important investment so I want to get the best - I don’t want to short-change myself.”

So merely *having* the premium option available helped us on both ends:
- People who thought we were too expensive suddenly thought $30 was cheap
- People who were using the $30-level features opted into the $50 plan anyway

4. Going to a reverse-trial worked

We used to have a standard free trial. When we switched to require people to pay for 14 days upfront, with the option to get a refund at the end, our conversion rate didn’t change. We do send a bunch of refunds, but the commitment makes others more invested in getting the tool set up.
 
Bonus: Referral links rule 🎁

Because we have a pay-upfront, referral links are more valuable because they give your friends 1 month free (and get you 1 month free back per friend).

On that note, our Black Friday deal is still live till Dec 10. Use your referral links before then to give get TWO months free instead. 🎁🎁



What else do I need to know about pricing?

Every startup founder is building an AI company. I’m going the other way because I have this crazy idea that people still want to talk with real people.

Before you come at me with the pitchforks, let me explain.

We are like a great email software i.e. Superhuman but for LinkedIn DMs. In theory AI could find the perfect people to DM, craft a perfect message, and close the deal all by itself while you sleep in until 2 p.m.

But we know that doesn’t work. The only way to sell high-value stuff like B2B services is to make a genuine connection first. And the only way to do that is to be a real human.

Even LinkedIn itself, despite its many suggested AI auto-complete features, says in its own Help section that its data shows effective DMs must be personalized and customized (yes I went to check lol)

And while inbox management could eventually be optimized by AI, right now it makes way too many mistakes. You don’t want a $100k client being pushed into the “low priority” category because AI mistakenly prioritized a college classmate you talked with 1 time 13 years ago over a founder you met at a conference but have no connections with. 

Yeah, one day AI might be able to do a lot of this, and we are thinking hard about what building AI into Kondo should look like, but even then most people still will want a human involved because human connection is a big part of what life is all about. AI can do a lot but not everything should be AI.

And for the bits that humans do, they'll want an interface for their work that helps them be at peak productivity.

Which is where a Kondo shows up to the game.

Is that crazy?

Recently my business partner Michael met my wife. They asked each other what I was like to be with.

Me: Uh oh...

Turns out, they both said the same thing:

“He's always constantly dissatisfied with everything" 🫠🫠

Michael said BUT that is EXACTLY what you want a cofounder to be, you want them to keep questioning everything find all the holes in the biz and relentlessly try to make the thing better every day, all day, on repeat.

Wife said UGH ITS TERRIBLE, he complains all the time about how we live in a city where trains don't exist, gets upset at $7 lattes for being mediocre, spends 2 hours researching whether its worth going to a museum we end up spending 1 hour at only for him to say how underwhelming it is...

I guess you look for very different things in a business partner vs a life partner. 

Thankfully they both still put up with me 😅

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the next 2 hours trying to make this post better …



(meanwhile you can watch Michael perfecting his rock tower)

The biggest mistake I made when I started my SaaS business 1.5 years ago: I told myself I could overcome fear of failure by making everything perfect ahead of time.

Where did that get me? I still wonder all day every day if I’m really cut out for this despite the business being objectively OK.

Oh, and none of the stuff I agonized over was perfect and I had to throw out a lot of that prep work. Because at some point the only way to make something better is to ship it and let the market tell you what’s right or wrong.

When I said I wanted to make everything perfect, I mean everything. I delayed each one of these steps by weeks and months:

1. Whether I should even do a startup
2. What idea to pick
3. When to launch the product
4. When to start charging for it
5. When to release the next big feature

I filled that time by analyzing everything, asking for advice, doing more research, re-thinking things … then analyzing again. I told myself at the time I was being RESPONSIBLE as a business owner when really I was AVOIDING the moment of truth.

Maybe that extra time did make some things better, but only in a roundabout, inefficient way. 

All the delays add up, and compound.

I now believe the best strategy is to get to a point where you feel >50% confident it will work, then just hit go, and see what happens.

Kondo is doing great for the most part, but I do feel like we’d be much farther along if I were more decisive.

For y'all out there who like to over-think everything like me, here's a thought:

You'll never be fully ready, so just buckle up, close your eyes and jump...

(...says me to myself as I'm about to spend my first big marketing budget 🫣 ... wish me luck friends 🫠)

Just shipped a new onboarding flow for Kondo. Notes:

- Previously had a 5 min video pop up of me talking at you 

- Now it's a 2 min "Practice Inbox"

- But unlike the video, you CAN'T chose to skip it (unless you know how to be very sneaky) 

- Yes, we took a lot of inspiration from the Superhuman Mail one (what else do you expect from an app that calls itself Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs tho)

- You STILL can book a live personal 1:1 onboarding with me if you want (I still don't bite, unless you show up telling me you hate keyboard shortcuts)  

- You might find some people you know in the practice inbox 👀

- Yet 1 more cat was snuck into the app by Anastasia

- If you already have Kondo, try it for yourself with Cmd + K -> Practice Inbox

- If you don't already have Kondo, ask a friend for a referral link to get 2 months free before December 10 

Tell me how bad it is in the comments.

LinkedIn doesn’t care to make a better DM inbox, or let you filter the feed for posts you actually want to read, because regular people with "premium" subscriptions make up just 11% of its revenue.

Access to profile data and your eyeballs is the reason recruiters, sales teams, and advertisers pay the other 89%. 

Meaning to say, you are mostly important to LinkedIn because:

- you exist 
- you updated your profile
- you scroll past ads (and sometimes stop)

It's actually worse than that if you think more about it.

If you pay $540 a year for premium, you contribute exactly 0.000003% of LinkedIn’s annual revenue. So you are both the product and the customer but with no say in anything.

I mention all this because I hear every day from people frustrated with the basic usability of LinkedIn:

- DMs feels like Hotmail on Windows 95
- You keep seeing bland “thought leadership” garbage posted 2 weeks ago 
- The same 8 random jobs keep showing up as suggestions

LinkedIn could go about solving these problems but it has no incentive to. So it never will.

Instead, the new features we get are:

- Mini Sudoku
- More ads on your feed from 'Boost'
- AI suggestions to auto-comment gibberish

“OMG WHY HASN'T LINKEDIN BUILT THIS THING ALREADY?!” - is the number one comment I get when people find us.

And the answer is they don't really listen to you. But we do. 

Because each customer matters 1000x more to us than they do to LinkedIn. 

That's why I've personally gotten on 1:1 calls with thousands of our users to learn how we can make Kondo better for their messaging workflows.

The number one reason to use a tiny SaaS app is that the team building the thing actually listens to what you have to say : )

As a kid I wondered why Black Friday was black. 

TBH still have no clue, but I needed an excuse for a Kondo promo so...

From now till Dec 10, referral bonuses DOUBLE!! 

Give 2 months free to every friend you refer, and get 2 months free yourself. 

Bonuses stack, so you could refer just 6 friends and get a WHOLE YEAR of Kondo for free yourself. 

We've NEVER done this deal before, so don't miss out. 

Now, can someone explain to me once and for all why it's black?

Since the people building Arc decided to stop building it, it got buggy, so I am sadly back on Chrome now. 

It took all of 5 minutes for me to open way too many tabs than I knew what to do with. You know what I mean...like SO many that you can't even see in the top bar which tab is which. 

The only thing I felt like I could do is close the whole thing and start from scratch. (Or just open yet another tab since I can't for the life of me find the one I had)

I absolutely had to go figure out how to solve this.

So I v̶i̶b̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ went shopping on the chrome store and found this nifty thing called Tab Wrangler (thanks Ross Allen for keeping it going 🙏)

Basically it helps you close the tabs you haven't used in a while, and you can tell it how long counts as a while. 

I set mine to 1 hour so if I haven't touched a tab in that time it wrangles it away for me.

Honestly I don't even notice what it closes since I just open new ones all the time anyway 😅

Somehow I'm really vibing with this thing, I think it's because I really like the idea of wrangling stuff.

Kondo gives you the tools to self-wrangle all your runaway / missing / lost / wandering DMs. 

But, maybe we can also wrangle some of them for you like the tabs?? 

Thinking...

PSA for anyone who sends a bunch of Sales Nav messages

If your prospect replies with an image, you will not see it. 

To be clear this affects chats like this:

- you start a chat from your Sales Nav
- your recipient sees it in their regular inbox
- they choose to reply with an image / send an image at some point
- you will NOT see it in your Sales Nav inbox
- you will NOT see it anywhere else either, it just goes into the void

When I first saw this I thought it was a Kondo bug. 

But then I realized it is actually a *LinkedIn bug*. 

Who knows if / when they will fix it, they seem to be busy with more Mini Sudokus instead.

I commuted to an office the financial district in Singapore for my first job out of college.  I liked going in REALLY early, like 6.30-7am. 

Because there were zero distractions at that time. No small talk, no compulsory meetings, no 'extra urgent' requests from the boss. Even the coffee shop I liked getting breakfast at downstairs was barely open yet. 

So the only thing there was to do was get cracking away on the project I was working on, doing analysis or writing some slides. 

At 10am a bunch of colleagues would show up and ask what I was working on today and I would smile at them knowing I was 70% done with my work for the day and they were 0% done : ) 

Some days I even left the office at 3pm because I got to 120% done for the day by then. (We didn't have rigid hours, but I sure got some looks 👀 as I waltzed out the office door)

I think it's that rewarding feeling of having a lot of stuff done by brunch time that has kept me a morning person through my career.

I don't commute anymore, but I start around the same time these days, my first calls go as early as 630am to get overlap with customers in Europe. 

The big differences now are that if I stop working at 3pm...

1 - nobody will give me any weird looks
2 - my startup will probably die a horrible death 
3 - my cofounder will yell at me when he finds out (he is 16 timezones away doesn't read my posts thankfully) 

Are you a morning person? And why?

I asked Solomon Kahn what I had to do to get him to STOP using Kondo tomorrow. 

He said "I don't respond well to threats." 

And that was that. 

So I went boring instead and asked why he got it when we first launched more than a year ago, and why he's kept us around in his stack ever since. 

(he even renewed his annual subscription after we raised prices 2x but don't need to remind him about that part ok?)

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