How June Grows: Winning By Doing The Opposite
6 Zero to One tactics, including June's stacked strategy of opposites
👋 Welcome to How They Grow, my newsletter’s main series, where I bring you in-depth analyses into the growth of popular companies, including their early tactics, current strategies, and actionable business-building lessons we can learn from them.
Friends, it’s good to be back with the deep dives. I know it’s been a minute.
We’re returning with a breakdown of June: The new kid on the analytics block that is growing with such a neat strategy.
We all know the saying…Keep It Simple, Stupid!
I’ve known KISS for ages—we all have—but it’s one of those things we know yet easily and often forget.
I’ve been passively thinking about startup ideas, and one of my main criteria for an idea is a solution that can lean LESS, while everyone else has indexed on MORE.
Something that cuts the frills and just excels at solving some fundamental need in a basic way.
We’ve covered many times in this newsletter how platforms (MORE) always win. But my definition of winning has been changing, and I’m warming up to the idea that simple and elegant tools (LESS) that are cash-flowing and profitable (perhaps with smaller valuations) are a fantastic way to win.
Of course, you can still be incredibly valuable with simplicity. The ceiling, as it is in June’s case, is very high by indexing on LESS.
There’s a lot June is doing right to wedge in and grow in a crowded market, and we’ll cover all the actionable stuff, but the big play that differentiates them from pretty much every other analytics company out there is that they’ve built for simplicity. And to be more specific…simplicity for generalists.
It’s such a sharp strategy, especially when you zoom out and realize they’ve stacked a series of micro tactics together to shape one cohesive play.
Expectations and snackable insights 🧠 🛠️
I’ve packaged 20 hours of research/analysis into a 32-minute read. Here’s the gist if you’re short on time:
Founder-led marketing is the future of brand building. June’s founder/CEO, Enzo Avigo, turned his personal brand into a narrative-first marketing engine—an engine driving millions of monthly impressions on LinkedIn. In short, faces (employees) beat logos (the company) because we trust people over brands.
Key insight: As icky as you might think it is, go and invest in building your personal brand. When you have a product to market, it will be your lever for authentic and value-driven content.
Radical simplicity (generally) beats radical flexibility. Most of the analytics tools you can think of are geared toward specialists with complex and customizable features. But June zags while others zig, and they obsessed over simplicity through an opinionated product that makes data accessible to generalists. This strategy has allowed them to capture a large and underserved segment within an entrenched/mature market.
Key insight: You can grow not in spite of, but because of stripping your product down to focus on the core, and constant, needs of your market.
Strategy doesn't have to be one big thing—you can stack a series of micro strategies. June combined three key chess moves—simplicity, company-level insights, and targeting generalists—to build a unique and defensible position in the analytics category. I like to call it a holistic strategy of opposites.
Key insight: Stacking complementary strategies can amplify your product’s impact and unlock a compounding advantage that’s more than the sum of its parts.
Focus on Minimum Remarkable Products (MRP), not MVPs. June challenged the outdated idea of shipping bare-bones, buggy MVPs. Instead, they focus on shipping polished, remarkable products that delight users from day one.
Key insight: The bar for "viable" is higher than ever. People have no time for subpar experiences. And by making something aesthetically remarkable from the get-go is how you can catch and keep people’s attention…setting you up to create long-term relationships
Let’s get cracking!
Part 1. Starting June
Why so serious?
Analytics, as boring as it might sound, has been behind decisions since the days of the ancient Egyptians. They used early forms of measurement and tally systems to track goods and resources for trade. And build the pyramids?
Fast forward to the 1800s, and analytics makes a big progressive leap with the introduction of the Tabulating Machine and the punch card—that little piece of paper with holes in it developed by Herman Hollerith to process data for the US Census.
This step change in analytics laid the first piece of groundwork for the rise of computers, which of course led to modern digital analytics.
Now, as users of software, we can’t escape having every interaction we take tracked, and as builders of it, we can’t escape the constant fire hose of data coming at us. So much of it we don’t even know what to do with most of it.
That’s just a basic problem that many teams face: Tons of data; very few people able to use it effectively.
I literally see this all the time at my company. We have the best tools and so much analytics in place, but overall we tap into just the tip of what’s possible, meaning we pay for a lot more than we use.
I’ll be the first to tell you that I love Amplitude. I use it all the time, it’s a fantastic product, and I’ve praised them widely. But it’s advanced, and only a handful of folks at the company are able to use it well enough. Amplitude, like many of the other analytics companies, are geared at data-ish specialists within an organization.
It’s ironic because you’d think with such sophisticated software more people would be diving into the data. But most teams are still sitting on a mountain of info they never fully leverage. In fact less than 10% of employees in most companies actively use analytics.
And even though the number of data points is exploding (for better or for worse…maybe worse…), we’re still relying on the same small set of specialists to interpret it all.
It was this insight, spotted as a direct point of frustration while working at Intercom, that compelled Enzo Avigo and Ferruccio Balestreri to build something that flipped the script…something that could empower everyone on a team to be data-centric…something refreshingly simple and fun.
Extrapolating out an insight
So, in a very crowded space filled with more features, more graphs, and more complexity, June said, “Let’s build for the other 90%.”
But as Enzo experienced this first hand and observed it across Intercom, he didn’t rush off to immediately build something. Instead, he focused on honing his insight to see if more people experienced the same problem, as well as to try to connect what he was noticing to broader market inflections.
There’s a great lesson in that: Spotting an opportunity requires you to not only understand the problem but to attach it to a broader shift—the best insights come when you can align a personal frustration with an external inflection, allowing you to see where the market is heading before others do.
Here’s how you can do as Enzo did…
Hunt for 1st or 2nd degree frustrations. We all know the advice of following your own problems, but if you’re working for a company, another source of startup ideas could be actively hunting for inefficiencies that your colleagues/team might experience. You know your team isn’t a 10/10. So whatever the delta is between your ranking and a perfect score, what’s a problem people are ignoring because it’s simply a mission to solve? Once you find it, ask yourself, “Is this unique to us, or could it be more common?”.
Study the ecosystem: Before you can have an opinion on how to win in the market, you first need to know where to play. And that’s not just picking a market that looks promising; it’s about deeply understanding the landscape, the players, segments, the segments within segments, and what the opportunities potentially sitting right beneath the surface are. The only way to do that is to immerse yourself in the ecosystem and ramp up on knowledge. People often say founders who build in a domain that they are familiar with is crucial, but the opposite can be equally true. Being unfamiliar means you’re not jaded to schleps and inefficiencies, and if you learn the state of things correctly, could well be in a better position to spot opportunities. All you need is a framework for learning fast and smart.
Map out the market inflections: We’ve spoken several times about the shifts that create a new wave of opportunities. For June, one of the biggest inflections was the rise of product-led growth and the increasing importance of being data-informed. Yet, the tools to support this shift were still tailored to specialists, not the broader teams who needed access to insights. One tactical thing you can do here is to…
Look for contradictions: What’s something that everyone believes, but might be wrong? The idea that analytics had to be complex and tailored to specialists was a core assumption that June challenged. Finding these contradictions in your market can often lead to the biggest opportunities.
Gaps in the market…markets in the gap
Just because you find a gap in the market does not mean there’s a market in that gap. Or less poetically said: solving a problem doesn’t mean people are willing to pay you for it.
So, with a seemingly strong insight and a sound vision/mission to follow through with, June’s next step was to increase their fidelity on what the product to get there would look like—a product that resonated with the market and that people would pay for.
They started with a series of smaller, lower fidelity, bets—testing their assumptions with quick low-effort-high-learning prototypes. Each experiment wasn’t a pure linear progression of the product, rather they approached the problem through a different lens. Each time, giving them a sharper focus on what the right framing was.
Here’s a breakdown of what they did. A simplification, of course…
The first prototype: Their initial product was a no-code layer on Google Tag Manager. It allowed teams to track events without needing a developer. While it was a step in the right direction, the feedback was clear—it solved a small part of the problem but didn’t offer the simplicity they were aiming for.
The second prototype: Next, they built a plugin for Figma that allowed users to annotate design files with tracking events. Another experiment focused on improving collaboration between design and product teams. It solved the problem through a different lens, but it still didn’t resonate with their core audience.
The third prototype: The inflection for them came when they built a Google Analytics-style tool, specifically designed for startups. This version simplified the data, offering clear insights without overwhelming users with unnecessary complexity. It resonated deeply with their audience.
While the initial observation and insight remained consistent (the gap in the market), it was only through these iterations that they learned what people really needed (the market in the gap)—an analytics tool that provided value right out of the box, without complex setups or overwhelming dashboards.
Key Playbook Insight: 🛠️ Just to reiterate a broader lesson from that, it’s really important to not get too attached to a specific product/feature idea early on. Use quick experiments (that are not necessarily linear) to create a map for yourself within your thesis area about what the product could be. With this map, connect the dots to see what clear pattern/product emerges.
Part 2. How June Grows
The other day on YouTube I came across this excellent Mint Mobile ad. In 30 seconds, Ryan tells us that Mint does the opposite of Big Wireless.
It’s such a crisp narrative that paints a clear picture of how Mint differentiates itself. Give it a watch below.
Ryan says…
“They charge you a lot” → “We charge you a little”
“They put their names on arenas” → “We put ours on my lower back”
“They’re raising their prices due to inflation” → “We’re deflating ours due to not hating you.”
There are only a few words to shove in an ad, but I was thinking afterward, What else does Mint do differently from the other carriers? E.g:
They have physical stores → Mint is digital only
They have longer post-paid plans → Mint offers short-term prepaid plans
What I noticed was that Mint was threading together lots of little inversions to create a more substantial: “Our differentiator is doing the opposite of what the market has come to expect.”
June has done the same thing.
It’s a strategy that isn’t just a single move—rather, it’s how they’ve stacked these opposites together to create a larger, cohesive offering that stands out in a market that’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
Let’s cover three of their main “opposites”, plus 5 other takeaways from their growth story.
June has been an ongoing sponsor of our 5-Bit Friday’s for a while. So I’m giving them another punt here (because clearly I think they’re doing something very right). As a HTG reader, you can get 25% off June.
1. Simplicity, opinionated software, and growing with less
🫰 Why it matters: There’s too much complexity in the world. I think for a long time, the tech ecosystem has indexed on more flexibilty. But, having an opinion as a team and turning that into opinionated software for your audience is a great way to make a happy customer. Just think about how you (probably) like it when a waiter gives you a recommendation at a restaurant and the menu is a single-side print, saving you from an overchoice spiral.
🥇 Applying it: Unship features, rethinking your UX/UI, and regularly ask the question: How can we help customers get what they want with fewer steps and clicks? Simplicity isn’t about doing less; it’s about doing what matters most better.
Let’s go deeper…
Most analytics tools are built for people who are comfortable working with data. They’re dense on features, can be customized in so many ways, and have complicated and timely implementation phases to even get to the point of seeing value.
This has made using data for the majority of users who just want actionable insights more difficult.
This is where June zigged while the rest of the market has been zagging.
Simplicity, to state it simply (🤘), means being easy to understand, use, clear, specific, and actionable. It’s where the confusion is low and intuition is high.
And simplicity sells. Here are some numbers for you to prove it:
Simplicity drives love: 64% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand because of simple experience.
Simplicity drives growth: Since 2009, a stock portfolio made up of the simplest publicly traded brands (as defined by Siegel+Gale) has outperformed the market by 686%.
Simplicity drives sales: 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for uncomplicated experiences.
It’s not just because it always works, but more fundamentally, we crave it. Our brains always opt to use the least amount of energy to understand something. So when we’re fed jargon, confusion, or complexity we resist them.
Like it or not, we’re apes that look for simple alternatives.
“Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication”
— Leonardo Da Vinci
One of the most prolific examples of success through simplicity is Apple.
Jony Ive, Apple’s Design Guru, spoke about how Jobs pushed relentlessly the iPod to be free of clutter and complexity.
Apple has continued this core tenet and makes its UX engaging by eliminating features. Features are always added with thought and consideration in updates, only once the user is ready to receive more. It’s a strategy that allows users to get comfortable with the current experience and then train them to be fluent in using the product.
I truly believe simplicity should be the metric that drives brand, design, product, and business objectives. It is probably one of the most reliable levers to pull to bring about consumer happiness and loyalty. IMO, simplicity deserves a place in strategies.
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so the necessary can speak”.
— Hans Hofmann, German Painter
In June’s case, by eliminating the unnecessary and building for intuitiveness and structured opinions across the product, they’ve crafted a product that offers equivalent or even more value by zeroing in on the fundamentals.
It’s been the basis of their GTM. And just looking at other onboarding experiences, you can see how they’ve nailed it:
Setup in 30 minutes. June asked the question, “How do we save companies hours of typical instrumentation?”. And the answer was to give companies a single snippet to add to their website. It takes just a few minutes. That’s all they have to do.
Automatic dashboard: June asked the question, “How do we show companies valuable information ASAP?”. The answer was to take the onus of chart building off the user and give them instant dashboards and reports, showing them insights without them having to navigate any product learning curve.
In short, June saw an underserved segment of users who were frustrated/limited by the unnecessary bloat and leaned into it to create their first opposite position.
A quick look at emerging disruption strategies
I’ve touched on the broader playbook here already—disrupt by doing the opposite of what incumbents are doing.
It’s about spotting the things that the major players are either unwilling or unable to fix and then countering by offering a product that specifically addresses those pain points for either a smaller niche or a larger majority.
I wanted to call this out again because as I was writing the above, a few other examples of emerging ways startups are differentiating via opposites came to mind.
Chrome → Arc: Chrome dominates the browser market with mass appeal, but Arc disrupts by counter-positioning itself with bespoke design norms and craftsmanship. Arc isn’t for everyone—it’s for innovators and tech-savvy users who crave something radically different.
Gmail → Superhuman: While Gmail serves the masses, Superhuman disrupted by going premium, offering a luxurious, high-speed email experience for CEOs and busy executives who can’t stand the inefficiencies of traditional inboxes.
Pendo → CommandAI: Where Pendo does onboarding by pushing information to users, CommandAI inverts the use case norm by pulling users to information when they need it, becoming the ideal product for teams who hate disruptive pop-ups.
Amplitude/Mixpanel/Heap → PostHog: PostHog is another incredible analytics company that I’ve been learning about, and their differentiator from both the incumbents and June is they are open source. A similar play to Meta and beehiiv countering Apple and Substack’s closed ecosystems.
In June’s case, the first opposite is simplicity. Let’s move on to the second.
🔑 Bottom line: Customers appreciate, and really do pay you at the end of the day, for you opinions. That often means keeping what you sell them simple and making the right recommendations for them. Just minimize any thinking or their part.
2. Inverting the use case norm
🫰 Why it matters: Pretty much every analytics tool you use focuses on behavioral data at the individual level. AKA, the expected use case is understanding users. June (surprise) has done the opposite. They’ve prioritizing company-level insights. And for B2B SaaS companies, understanding how a company behaves—rather than just individual users—is often far more actionable.
🥇 Applying it: Consider what the standard workflow in the market is. How does, at the fundemental level, the core JTDB get solved? Then consider whether this is because it’s the perfect way, or whether inertia has just kept the status quo in check and nobody’s thought to invert it. Often by taking the usual approach and flipping it, you can address underserved needs and unlock value where others aren’t looking.
Let’s go deeper…
In the golden age of B2C, companies like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel created a culture where understanding individual users—what they clicked, how they navigated, and where they churned—was the holy grail of insights.
But as the shift toward B2B SaaS accelerated, this model showed some cracks…and Enzo saw them
As you know, selling to businesses vs consumers is a different beast. When Notion the company is your customer ($100K+/year), vs Joe who works at Notion ($100/year), you need to understand the whole picture through a different lens.
Rather than looking at isolated user actions, you need to understand how entire companies, or accounts, are engaging with your product. The dynamics are different when you have multiple stakeholders, decision-makers, and users all interacting with your software in different ways.
But you need to know how the company as a whole interacts with your platform because, without that clarity, it’s more difficult to drive expansion, reduce churn, and increase the customer’s overall success with their team using your product.
But that lens is tricky to get right when the paradigm is individual-level data first.
Round peg; Square hole.
This is where June saw an opportunity to invert the analytics use case. For instance, their platform automatically creates profiles and reports on each company customer. These reports give rapid instant insights into activation, retention, and expansion at the account level, making it easy for teams to understand which accounts are doing well, which need attention, and who’s ready for an upsell.
Also, instead of overwhelming people with endless graphs and dashboards, June just cuts to the chase with a one-click feature analysis that provides a curated set of graphs telling the story of how an account is engaging with the product.
How to steal this tactic
Even more so than simplicity, inverting the use case norm is likely June’s biggest micro tactic within their larger Strategy Of Opposites.
Being simpler is great, but competitors can copy that more easily than changing the foundation of how they solve the problem.
Of course, it’s not impossible for others to, say, layer in a B2B portal like this to compete with June, but then they’re just making their already complex products more complex. Meaning, people will likely prefer June’s simplicity even more.
This is an oversimplification, but you can see how the one tactic supports the other to create deeper levels of defensibility.
This kind of inversion strategy can be incredibly effective in any market. Here’s how you can try it, even as a fun thought experiment.
Identify the dominant use case: Start by understanding the norm in your market. What are the incumbents focusing on? What is their product designed to solve?
Find the gaps. Reframe the problem. Look for underserved or frustrated segments of users within that market. You might find that the dominant use case in your market leaves out an important segment of users whose needs aren’t being met. Think about how the problem could be solved differently by taking the opposite approach.
Flip the script: Take the dominant use case and invert it. For example:
If incumbents are focused on single users, focus on accounts or teams.
If they’re focused on one-off transactions, build for ongoing relationships.
If they’re delivering complex, multi-step processes, streamline them into something that can be done in fewer clicks.
Build for the next wave: June didn’t just invert the norm for the sake of it—they did it because they saw the next wave of growth in B2B SaaS. Identify where your market is headed, and build your product around where things are going, not where it is today.
🔑 Bottom line: Inverting the use case norm is often a way to reach underserved, on the fence, customers.
3. Go narrower or go wider…and commit
🫰 Why it matters: When picking your target customer, you can can either niche down and specialize, or widen your aperture and build for a generalist. Whichever you pick for your GTM, the key is making that decision with conviction and aligning your product with it. Playing both sides is tough.
🥇 Applying it: After identifying a gap, you need to understand the scale of the market within that gap. The audience you choose defines your product’s complexity, messaging, design and brand, and growth strategy.
Let’s go deeper…
June’s decision to target generalists with soft data skills instead of specialists with hard data skills was very strategic.
Generalists have a different Job to Be Done. They’re often wearing multiple hats and don’t have the time to spend hours configuring dashboards or interpreting complex metrics. They need quick, actionable insights that are relevant to their role. They can’t be blocked by data when making a decision.
Most analytics tools (think Amplitude or Mixpanel), are designed for more technical PMs with solid data skills or entire data teams. Tools like Looker and BI platforms are aimed at professionals who have some technical savvy to navigate their complex interfaces.
Google Analytics is user-friendly-ish, but it’s more of a jack-of-all-trades across B2C and B2B that isn’t great for teams beyond marketing.
By widening their aperture, June expanded their TAM significantly. But more importantly, they catered to an audience that had been largely ignored.
Advice on when to Zoom In or Zoom Out on your target market
So, when do you follow the classic advice of defining an even more specific customer, vs being a more generally appealing product?
What’s the complexity of the problem you’re solving? If the problem is complex and unique to a particular vertical, it often makes sense to start narrow. If your product can be easily understood and used by a variety of roles without customization, a broader market might be the way to go.
What’s the current landscape? If a market is saturated with niche tools, there’s often room to zoom out and target a generalist audience that’s overlooked. The reverse also applies. This is similar to the concept of “innovating” by bundling (generalist) vs unbundling (specialist).
What’s the breadth of your product’s use cases? When testing your product in the market, pay attention to who gravitates toward it. If you’re naturally seeing traction with different types of users across various industries, you might have a generalist product on your hands. However, if adoption is strongest among a specific segment, lean into that and double down on the niche.
Think about scalability and product requirements. Going broad means your product will need to be versatile and simple enough to meet various needs without extensive customization. On the flip side, a focused approach allows for deeper, more specialized features, which are usually less scalable to a general audience.
Does your market scope match your resources?
Appealing to a broad audience can mean more resources for support, product iteration, and marketing. For earlier-stage teams, starting with a tighter focus can lead to tighter learning and the building of stronger relationships with a specific type of customer. Often, that’s a more sustainable path to early traction.
The power of stacking strategies
To put a bow on these three sections before moving on, we can see June combined three micro strategies to create a larger, cohesive GTM advantage.
Any one of these strategies could have been effective on its own, but by combining them, June created something much more defensible and unique. T
Move 1: Simplicity, not bells and whistles and deep customizations.
Move 2: Company accounts, not Users
Move 3: Generalists, not Specialists.
I like to think about this as a “strategy of opposites” which has given June a distinct edge. By stacking all three together, they made it difficult for competitors to replicate their approach and have created their own micro category within product analytics.
Another example that comes to mind is Slack. Their early micro strategies were:
Team communication: Slack didn’t invent workplace messaging, but they refined it with seamless, team-based communication that replaced email threads with channels.
Any team: Originally marketed as a team messaging tool for developers, Slack quickly shifted to focus on a more generalist audience: all teams needing better communication, from marketing and sales to HR and design.
Developer ecosystem and integrations: They created an open API that allowed third-party integrations, letting teams connect their workflows from different tools directly into Slack (e.g., Google Drive, Zoom, Jira).
Consumer-grade UX for enterprise: Slack prioritized a simple, user-friendly design that felt more like a consumer app than an enterprise tool, making it easy for teams to adopt.
Their Stacked Strategy: Together, these created a highly sticky product that not only solved communication problems but also became a hub for generalist team collaboration.
In short, whether or not you’re playing a game of opposites like June, Strategy Stacking can be a really helpful mental model.
One piece of advice here is this: Not all strategies stack well together.
You need to test for compatibility. How do tactic A and tactic C interact? Do they reinforce each other, or do they create friction? The goal, of course, is for your product strategy to feel cohesive and intentional
🔑 Bottom line: Commit to your audience, whether niche or broad, and align every part of your product and strategy around that choice. If you’re stacking strategies, ensure they’re compatible and reinforce each other to create a cohesive and defensible market position.
4. Obsesses with minimum delightfulness
🫰 Why it matters: While all analytics tools feel serious and “professional”, June has leaned into a playful and approachable design. Their focus on delighting users—through colors, fonts, and an overall fun factor—creates an emotional connection that competitors often overlook. This isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about ensuring that every interaction feels easy, light, and enjoyable.
🥇 Applying it: Easy, delight users. Delight users. Ask yourself before signing off on designs…How could we delight users more? It's not enough to have a functional product anymore; people want products that make them feel good while using them. This means investing in design, user experience, and overall narrative, even (nay, especially!) from early versions of the product.
Let’s go deeper…
From their vibrant colors to their friendly font choices, June has created an aligned brand tone and product experience that is very approachable—a quality that might seem minor but makes a huge difference in user adoption.
Another deliberate tactic that reinforces their larger stack of opposites (Serious/Dry → Playful/Lively).
This approach echoes an important concept from one of Enzo’s reflections as a founder…great brands are built on unrecognized truths.
One such truth is that analytics tools don’t need to feel heavy or overwhelming to be powerful. By focusing on making the product approachable and delightful, June is redefining what users expect from an analytics platform.
The commitment to being at least minimum delightfulness, as Enzo told me, reflects in every release. What goes out must a) Add value and b) Add joy.
That’s a philosophy that for sure sets them apart, and is something that has personally inspired me to push for more joy in my releases. As product leaders, don’t discount holding a higher bar for delighters.
You’ll build more emotional connections with your users.
Evolving from MVP to Minimum Remarkable Product
June’s product philosophy also challenges the outdated idea of shipping a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
The advice you’ve had drummed on you for decades has been if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve shipped too late
And that advice has created a huge amount of enterprise value. I’m not knocking it. But I am saying (in agreement with
over here) that advice gets dated.Scrappy first versions of a product worked great when the comparative solution was pen-and-paper, Excel, or phoning and waiting for ages to get a taxi.
No matter what you launch today, the alternative (at least in the consumer’s mind) isn’t something outdated, it’s a modern software product.
As Kyle says: “It’s increasingly easy to build software and increasingly hard to distribute it. It’s especially hard to distribute a product that isn’t ready for primetime. Once you lose someone’s trust, it’s nearly impossible to win them back – let alone ask them to share your product with a friend.”
This creates a new norm: The Minimum Remarkable Product (MRP).
As we saw already with June’s early days, this shift doesn’t mean it’s not important to move quickly and test hypotheses, it just means quality is now non-negotiable.
If your product lacks polish, doesn’t feel dependable, or fails to delight, users are unlikely to return or recommend it to others.
How to elevate product quality without slowing down
It’s easy to read all this and feel caught between the need for speed and the pressure to release a polished product. But minimum delightfulness doesn’t have to mean scope creep and long development cycles.
You can raise the quality bar without delaying your product releases…and you should…
Start with delight in mind: From early planning and design, think about the emotional impact your product will have on users. When using some feature, what do you want the end user to feel? This doesn’t require perfection, but it does mean focusing on key moments that can delight users—whether through design, interactions, or quick wins. Prioritize those elements in early development, even if other features are still minimal.
Scrap quickly, build carefully: Use early, rough experiments to test your ideas (like June did), but don’t confuse those experiments with your actual product. Once you’ve validated your concept (say through iterative Figma prototypes), focus on building a version of your product that meets a higher bar of quality.
Polish selectively: You don’t need to perfect everything at once. Start by polishing the parts of your product that users will notice most. What’s the biggest surface area of your product that reaches the most people? That’s your biggest opportunity to leave a first impression. For example, focus on a seamless onboarding experience, clean user interface, and bug-free core functionality. Very small touches can raise the perceived quality of your product.
Invest in design early: If you’re a founder starting a company, hire a great product designer. Index very heavily on design as a first-class citizen—like Dovetail being a design-led company. And if you’re a PM, bring designers in as early as possible to your process to give them as much context as needed to think about how to add delight points.
Launch softly, iterate fast: Launching a polished product doesn’t mean you should slow down your feedback loops. It’s good to soft-launch to a smaller audience to learn some stuff, but users should never feel like they’re using an unfinished product.
🔑 Bottom line: “Good enough" just ain’t good enough! Delight matters more than ever, especially in early product versions where you’re trying to hook people in.
5. Going beyond metrics and truly caring
🫰 Why it matters: Metrics can only tell you so much about your customers.
🥇 Applying it: Build relationships better than anyone else in your market, and make yourself more accessible than any customer would expect. Then, be there and treat each one as a partner.
Let’s go deeper…
My buddy
from might slap my wrists for this one…but metrics like LTV, NPS, NDR, or CAC are not the determinants of customer success.These numbers have become the default for understanding customer relationships. But metrics can’t replace relationships. In fact CJ did say this: “I know I’m the metrics guy and all, but here’s something I believe: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
Anecodates come from interactions and interactions come from having relationships. But relationships often get deprioritized because it takes far less time to pull up a chart that tells us if our customers are happy.
Be careful of the numbers.
Reflecting on the past decade in the tech world, it feels like the vast majority of entrepreneurs (myself included) have overly indexed on some of these numbers—maybe losing sight of what makes great companies. Are all these metrics, definitions, and methodologies truly at the heart of what it means to create a business?
— Enzo
As an analytics company, you’d be right to guess June is incredibly data-driven.
But as I spoke more with Enzo, it became clear that it isn’t numbers and charts that drive June—it’s their obsession with customer care.
Enzo set out to take a radically human approach to understanding and connecting with customers. What stands out most to me is how Enzo and his co-founder share their personal WhatsApp numbers with their customers, extending them direct, ongoing access to the founding team.
It’s not about 24/7 availability though—it’s about building genuine trust and a constant line of communication that feels personal.
This is amplified on June’s “Customers” page, where they share stories from their customers in an interactive WhatsApp-style chat. A very cool design pattern that shows the intimacy of these behind-the-scenes conversations.
Enzo says this approach is based on a simple principle: caring more.
As a startup, you always have the power to do three things:
Move faster
Take bigger risks
Care more
Only #1 is a variable of how much money you raise, meaning anyone from day one can choose to win customers by caring more than the competition.
For June, it’s a mindset that goes far beyond the transactional dynamics most companies fall into. Enzo sees every customer as a partner and makes their customers’ problems their team’s problems.
One way they do this is with a customer map.
"Download" your Customer’s Map
At the heart of June’s approach is what Enzo calls the customer map—an internal tool that helps teams understand not just what a customer says they need, but what truly motivates and challenges them.
June’s team doesn’t just collect data on customer behavior; they work to understand each customer’s individual goals, fears, pet peeves, and broader business context.
To build these maps, you need to listen deeply to get to know your customers as people, not just users. This is what makes their approach so effective.
So many teams rely on support tickets or feedback forms to speak to customers. But as June does, the teams who care more do so by keeping the conversations flowing, be it through Slack, WhatsApp, or some other dedicated channel. And better yet, give key customers access to leadership—this builds a ton of trust and shows that you’re there for them.
If you’ve ever watched Better Call Saul, this was how Kim Wexler won her first big client, Mesa Verde, from the big dog, Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill (HHM). She showed her 1:1 personal dedication to their needs, contrasting it with the impersonal nature of a large firm like HHM.
Besides using “care” to win business, maintaining this kind of access to your customer, selfishly, means you get continuous feedback that’s much more nuanced than a simple NPS survey.
🔑 Bottom line: True customer-centricity boils down to caring more, and using that care to build real relationships. Metrics matter, but parternships with customers matter more. These are the kinds of interaction that transforms customers into co-creators, helping shape the product they rely on.
6. Make your founders face your brand
🫰 Why it matters: The future of marketing is people-based, not brand-based. We trust individuals over companies, and startups that start putting an actual face to their brand have a massive advantage. June is Enzo. Enzo is June.
🥇 Applying it: Founders and their teams should invest in building personal brands and authentic thought leadership. Rather than hiding behind a corporate logo, put the people behind the product front and center. This builds trust, connection, and curiosity, and ultimately draws people to the product through the value of the content they see from the team.
Let’s go deeper…
Traditional marketing is losing its impact. The song “Distribution is what matters”, and “Distriburion is what’s becoming more expensive” has been played on repeat.
Looking at emerging startups like Athyna (with Bill), beehiiv (with Tyler), Carry (with Ankur), and of course, June (with Enzo), and one commonality is the founders brand is a key marketing lever.
In the past it was always and only about building the company’s brand. PR played a big part of this. But increasingly, building an audience first is what the cool kids are doing.
While that might have been unreliable in the past (because if building an audience was that easy we’d all be paid travel influencers), it’s becoming more achievable especially thanks to owned channels like newsletters.
These channels, including LinkedIn, are leaning a) person-centric rather than brand-centric, and b) story-centric rather than information-centric.
That work super well because it captures the founder’s personality. It humanizes the company. And it’s far more authentic and real than a logo telling you what’s going on.
In short, people heavily gravitate towards founders being honest, vulnerable, and humerous/light.
Instead of relying on corporate accounts and promotional content, Enzo’s posts focus on sharing actual value—insights, stories, and behind the scenes lessons from building June—without constantly pushing the product. Enzo sees his content as a means to build curiosity around the product and establish some level of being helpful before people head over to see what June is about.
“People see the content and think: ‘If the content is this good, the product must be great too'. It’s an approach that has helped us pull in millions of LinkedIn impressions a month.” — Enzo
If you ship it, post it!
What’s more, when you ship product regularly and you building in public, you’re flexing an absolutle growth superpower. By just telling people online what you’re shipping (because most companies don’t)…it’s an incredible way to show off your ability to execute.
It shows your momentum, and that will attract customers, talent, investors, and help motivate/retain your current team. Why? Because when people see you’re consistently improving, they start to to believe in your ability to deliver value long term.
Take Tyler Denk from beehiiv…this dude is a savage when it comes to using social media to build hype.
It’s all about reputation—a reputation for reliability and innovation, which feeds back into your marketing efforts.
For June (and these other new startups creating their own playbooks) every new launch becomes a moment to deepen relationships with customers and show that they are listening, adapting, and growing.
🔑 Bottom line: Use your face to market your product (softly).
Adios, muchachos🫡
And that’s a wrap on our June deep dive.
A small startup making very big moves. They’re definitely one of the companies I’m watching in this new era of emerging startups that are having to be more resourcesful in how to grow in these increasingly more crowded markets.
If you want to learn more about how June can help your company grow—if you’re selling B2B SaaS—and save time and money, you can learn more here. 🤝
If you have any questions for me or Enzo…drop them in the comments!
As always, thanks for spending time with me here today.
Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️
Maybe the best entrepreneurship post on SubStack this year. Your component approach to strategy is very consistent with complex adaptive systems, which is a framework that explains both natural and manmade systems.
Great collab y'all