“Welp.... This is a massive win for Klaviyo. ”
Klaviyo Reviews became the #1 trending app 1 week post launch.
Setting up Klaviyo Reviews is easy and intelligently automated.
A new product
Despite its familiarity, Klaviyo Reviews is built for a smarter shopping experience. Consolidation of data, messaging channels and integration of LLMs means you can now personalize how you ask for and deal with customer reviews at scale, as if you personally read and understood each one. As a reviewer, you can feel that your voice is finally heard, not buried into a table and never seen.
Our mission is to help merchants listen to customers at scale, and to help customers feel heard when they share their stories.
A new business unit
Klaviyo’s founders wanted to experiment with a lean and nimble approach to incubate new products, called “Klaviyo Ventures”. We started with nothing but a rough goal, and built a brand new business unit.
Jeff and I, the co-founders of the new team, report directly to the CPO and work with unprecedented autonomy. We did our research, presented business plans and fundraising decks to leadership, and built a “startup within a startup”.
The project had 3 distinct stages: experimentation, build, and scale.
Stage 1: Experimentation
Jeff & Hansen — the founding team.
The idea is to innovate much faster by internally incubating “startup teams” — small, independent, and highly entrepreneurial pods that can build, fail, and learn quickly.
How long does it take to build a new SaaS product? What about a new product, complete with its own frontend, backend, pricing, and strategy at a scaling company with hundreds of thousands of customers across the world?
If you had asked me this question 2 years ago, I would’ve put on my product leader hat and said: “Probably 2-3 R&D pods who can own major components of the new app, each with 2-4 engineers, a PM, and a designer. Add to that researchers, analysts, and a GTM team spanning marketing, sales, enablement, customer ed, ops, finance, etc. Given the scale, you’ll want a Group PM and a GTM lead to coordinate everything. Expect a v1 functional product in about 6 months if you have good people.”
We had 2 people. Our v1 app went live in 2 months.
March: team formed, researched market and identified opportunity
April: Figma prototypes, coding, user testing.
May: App approved and live on App Store
June: First user
July: First revenue
Discovery & experimentation
Early concepts of the app, called “Fulfilled”
Identifying opportunity
We surveyed the market landscape of spaces adjacent to Klaviyo’s core business (eCommerce email + SMS marketing automation). We talked to customers, industry veterans, and colleagues, dug up available data and created our own TAM analyses for promising markets.
We picked the reviews space for 3 reasons:
It’s a natural and compelling fit with Klaviyo’s existing product.
It’s a sizable market (substantial TAM).
It’s something 2 guys can build quickly and experiment with.
Building fast
Over the next month, I hopped on calls with dozens of potential customers, getting scrappy with how I found them. From contacting existing Klaviyo customers to sending out gift card invites to prospects to meeting people at the Sunday flea market, I talked to anyone I could.
From there, I built out an architecture diagram, a marketing landing page, and a clickable Figma prototype that I could share with prospects. I worked hand-in-hand with Jeff to build and iterate.
Within a month, we had a working prototype. After another, we passed the rigorous review procedure and were live on Shopify’s App Store.
V1 app live on the App Store
The first iteration of the app was an embedded app in Shopify. It had 4 major components:
an onsite widget collection showcasing reviews on websites
a Polaris-based admin UI for brands to manage reviews
a Tailwind-based review collection UI to display forms for consumers to fill out
a backend that drove things like automatic review requesting based on shipment tracking updates.
Our first users would hop on a call with us, install and set up the app together, and from there the app did every essential task a modern reviews app could do: automatically monitor incoming Shopify orders, track corresponding packages and wait for package delivery based on tracking numbers, and, thanks to relying on Klaviyo for its CDP and messaging capabilities, automatically send customizable and dynamically personalized emails and SMS messages to collect reviews.
Customers loved Fulfilled. So we started charging for it, and it soon became clear that our app, despite its simplicity, was a winner. We could build something here…
Stage 2: Build
With clear signals that the market wants something better and simpler, and that we can build it and charge a reasonable amount for it, the question becomes what we should do next.
We interviewed more users, built financial models, and worked with Klaviyo’s leadership to determine a path forward. We set out to build a premium app that’s truly accessible, both in its simplicity and price point, that pushes the industry to do better.
What came next was an added set of entirely different challenges.
Building at Klaviyo scale
Being scrappy and fast startup is fun. However, the next stage had 2 different challenges:
Creating a product that is “Klaviyo quality”, differentiated and reliable enough to succeed in a competitive space and serve a large portion of Shopify’s merchants
Building effective teams and processes to do R&D and global GTM at an IPO-ready company scale
To ensure quality of the whole product (not just the code, but also the sales, marketing, service, etc.), we needed to rethink everything from the product roadmap to the staffing, resourcing, teams and processes. Organizing over a thousand employees to launch something that serves hundreds of thousands of merchants and millions of consumers was a whole different scale than our 2-man team.
Designing a new org structure
We staffed up an R&D pod and organized existing GTM teams into our “launch team”, a hub-and-spoke model for managing dozens of important teams including Sales, Marketing, Success, Support, Onboarding, FP&A, Accounting, Legal, etc. Our day-to-day responsibilities expanded beyond the IC work we still owned (Jeff still wrote a ton of code, and I’m still responsible for product specs) into leadership and enablement, making resourcing, hiring, organizational decisions. We worked across dozens of teams to keep his major initiative — the 2nd major product launch in Klaviyo’s history — on track.
I was no longer just the Product Manager. I was now the business owner / founder / GM. It became my job to evangelize the vision, making resources and spending time telling the story across the company and to our partners, so everyone can work together towards this goal. Here’s an example:
In a few short months, sketches on a whiteboard became detailed Figma designs and massive Monday boards that drove project execution across a dozen GTM teams. What was once a general vision materialized into a working product and a burgeoning sales pipeline. To say that the months were busy and filled with challenge is an understatement, but we pulled through and had fun along the way. Through solving hard problems, the team was no longer just me and Jeff. It was the dozens of R&D and GTM launch team members, over a thousand Klaviyo employees who were trained to sell and support Reviews, and many more partners outside of the company. Jeff and I often joked about how “real” everything is starting to feel.
Lots of designing, building, testing, and coordinating a dozen key teams later, we were ready for prime time.
Stage 3: Scale
We launched Klaviyo Reviews at our company conference “K:LDN” on June 27, 2023. Shortly after launch, our app organically popped up to the top of Shopify’s trending app charts:
With Klaviyo’s IPO, we are now running the fastest-growing product at an industry-leading public company. We’re rapidly expanding our user base and feature set to push the industry forward with a data-driven, AI-first product that helps brands scale their digital relationships with their customers.
Responding to feedback, instantly
Almost as soon as we launched, customer feedback started pouring in. I kept a close eye on all data sources: NPS survey results, customer calls, sales and partner feedback, churn survey results, and more. We quickly realized that there are a few clear pain points:
More people around the world want to use Klaviyo Reviews, but lack the necessary language support
We shipped 12 additional languages in 2 weeks.
Customers really wanted to finely control the look and feel of their widget more
We built an extensive editor UX in addition to CSS support over 2 months.
No matter how busy things got, I rarely said no to customer calls — doing sales, support, onboarding, post-churn follow-up myself and bringing along the team.
Transitioning from speed to scale
Early on, we made deliberate choices to accelerate product development massively given a very small and nimble team. Like a rocket booster stage, these choices served their purpose, but we must transition away from some of them as the product quickly grew. Our system was originally built to handle millions of events per day, while Klaviyo’s customer base demands billions.
We migrated several key systems from our own infrastructure to Klaviyo’s shared one, including our backend databases, how we serve onsite javascript, and more. This was a complex engineering undertaking, and with it, we significantly improved our scalability and security.
Running like a startup while aligning a large company
Beyond the technical challenges, running a startup within a company poses real challenges. As the Head of Reviews, I lead a “leadership team” that meets regularly with the CEO and CPO, where we review business results, product feedback, and our plan of attack. We present cases, including a Series A deck, to acquire additional funding and runway. There’s a high degree of accountability and independence.
At the same time, our dedicated resourcing is only in R&D. For all GTM resources, we depend on our partners across the company — Sales, Marketing, Success, Finance, etc. We frequently navigate the challenge of justifying resourcing for a still-small and growing new business in the face of the much larger, well-established, highly-efficient core business.
My role also evolves with the team: part “mini CEO” and founder, part product leader, part GTM coordinator. It’s a unique learning experience.
What’s next
We’re 1% done. We never try to build a new tool that just competes with what’s out there — we build products that show the world where we think things will go, and how great things should be. Others can follow, compete, or become obsolete.
We’re just getting started.