How Outlier scored big with product-led growth and community engagement

Evan Kirkham is the co-founder of Outlier. He's always been a sports fan, so he created a smart sports betting app for people like him.

Outlier attracted hundreds of thousands of users in only 13 months. With just eight team members, productivity and exceptional performance are a must.

Problem

Outlier is a product-led company. Naturally, user feedback is very important for Evan and the entire team. So, they focused on gathering as much feedback as possible right away, and they succeeded!

“We started getting too much feedback and didn't have a good way to catalog and triage it. We now get hundreds of pieces of feedback a week. We tried everything from spreadsheets to long Slack threads.”

Volume wasn't the only issue. Lots of feature requests were getting “lost in translation.” Finding and combining similar requests was also very time-consuming.

Finally, internal communication was affected too. The product team would plan the roadmap, but it was hard for marketing to know the status of each request. There was no visibility.

Solution

Canny checked all the boxes for Outlier. It could help with feedback management, prioritization, roadmapping, and update announcements.

Evan considers himself a non-technical person. Despite that, he found Canny very easy to set up.

“Sometimes, new SaaS tools can be a bit confusing. But with Canny, I could start using it right away.”

Having tools that help you align with your strategic goals is essential. Canny does that for Outlier.

Evan sees product-led growth in five steps:

1. Feedback collection
2. Thanking users for feedback
3. Triaging feedback
4. Developing the feature
5. Alerting the person about the update

“Canny helps with each step in this process, so it fits us perfectly.”

Linear and Intercom integrations speed up this process even further. When a user submits feedback via Intercom, adding it to Canny is super easy. Then, the team uses Linear and Canny to actually triage that feedback.

“Sometimes you get requests that aren't exactly duplicates, but they're pretty dang close. We can find and merge these two posts with Canny to keep the board clean. I find this very powerful.”

Results

Canny has become an integral part of Outlier. Their product team relies on numbers in Canny to assess their effectiveness.

“We discuss the number of posts, comments, votes, and status changes we receive weekly. We want to see each of these go up every week. That's an indicator of how well-greased our growth machine is. Status changes are especially great indicators of that. This tells us that we've handled the feedback in some way.”

Canny also helps Evan with community engagement. He primarily works in marketing, so staying in touch with customers is super important.

“We're pretty open about our roadmap. We often share Canny screenshots with our community on Discord and social media. Building in the open has built a ton of trust with our user base.”

Canny is helping Outlier save some costs too.

“If it weren't for Canny, we'd have to hire a product manager way sooner. The whole team and I save so much time by cataloging and triaging feedback so easily. I never want to go back to pre-Canny days.”

Before Canny, Outlier came across some communication issues. Keeping everyone up-to-date was becoming a challenge. Now, anyone on the team can quickly check Canny and see the status of each request.

“I think one of the greatest impacts of Canny is the improved cross-team collaboration.”

Evan leaves us with one piece of advice:

“Think through your business goals. Then, use Canny to coordinate between product and marketing teams. It's a great tool for that coordination (in addition to feedback management).”