RIP Templates

Why we killed a core concept of June

In B2B SaaS a small amount of customers always contributes to most of the revenue. Because of this a small amount of customers has a disproportionate impact on what you build.

The risk of doing this is that you build things that are too specific or too general. If you're too specific, you build something that only works for a small number of customers. Too general and you build hundreds of toggles that no one understands.

At June we fight these incentives. We do this by setting goals around the number of customers we want to have - not around revenue.

It's counterintuitive but it works. We've been able to build a product that is simple and easy to use and that works for hundreds of customers.

So instead of adding more features to make more money out of a handful of users. We work on making June easier to use - so that it's easier for the next 1000 customers to get started.

How? We list out all the things you need to know to use June. Then remove as many of those things as possible.

Great products do a few things very well. So as much as we ship new updates every week, we try to make sure that over time, June gets easier to explain and use.

If a product does something specific it becomes easier to market it too. As we can be more specific about what value we create. We can decrease the friction required to get started.

We've been doing this a lot in the past 6 months.

Our sidebar now has half the features it used to have. The core of our product is now 5 auto-generated reports that are useful to every Saas company.

We removed the idea of templates and replaced it with a simpler "New report" button. This week and next we'll be taking this even further.

We now re-organized all our report types into three categories, with 4 report types in each category:

• Product usage - Reports that help you understand how your product is being used, that we can't set up for you. These are 4, the Feature Audit, the Feature Report, the Funnel, and the Explorer report.
• Activate users - Reports that help you activate users.
• Retention - Reports that help you retain users.

We also removed the idea of user and company-level reports. Instead, we now have a single report type that works for both users and companies. You can switch between the two by toggling a setting within the report.

Creating a report is now less overwhelming - you don't need to browse a long list of 24 templates to find what you need.

These ideas come from a simple insight. Every concept in the product should be there to solve a problem.

In the products you love templates solve two types of problems:

1. Discovery - they help you discover what you can do with the product

2. Education - they help you learn how to use the product

For example, in Airtable the product is a super-powered spreadsheet. The templates show you the use cases you can build and how specific features work together.

No Airtable customers use their templates, but they are still there. Because they solve discovery and education problems.

Most companies should measure common metrics in the same way. That means that we can build these reports for you without any setup. And if we do the work of building the reports for you then you don't need to discover or learn how to use them.

There are still some ongoing or specific questions you want to answer that we can't answer for you. For example, you might want to compare the usage of different features. Or you might want to measure the effectiveness of a specific flow in your product with a funnel.

These are the 4-5 reports that we can't build for you. We want these reports to be two clicks away - not buried in a huge directory of templates.

So we're saying goodbye to templates to make June more powerful and easier to use than ever before!

Our goal is to build something that gets out of your way and lets you focus on the things that matter.

We don't want to force you to learn the June way of doing things.

We want to make it easy for you to do things the way you want to do them.

Let us know what you think of these changes.

Other improvements

• The onboarding question on "How did you hear about June" is now mandatory
• We started a private beta of our Slack user qualification bot built using the new Open AI GPT model
• We added a "Show new companies" switcher to the active companies report
• We improved the data in our demo workspaces
• We fixed a bug in our onboarding that made people skip steps in it