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How did you come up with the name Dribble?

It’s actually “Dribbble” with three b’s and I didn’t come up with it. Our co-founders Dan and Rich did. Rich has been a huge basketball fanatic since a kid and Dan is a celebrity in the design world.

When they got together to build a community for designers, the concept of a “Shot” (screenshot) started down the path of using basketball terms for features and Dribbble.com was born. Today we have features like “Rebounds”, “Playoffs”, “Overtime”, “Replay”, etc.

What does the typical product roadmap look like?

Our roadmaps follow a RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) framework for prioritization, mixed with a bit of Pirate Metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) sprinkled in.

Why did you choose a invitation-only model?

The invite system started as truly a VIP invite only system. It was personal friends of Dan’s who were invited to Dribbble in the beginning to kick the tires.

Over the years, we’ve kept the invite system in place to maintain quality. Anyone can create an account on Dribbble, follow designers, collect shots, become inspired, but to become a “Player” and have the ability to upload Shots and comment on work, you need an invite from another Player in the community.

This has actually been a huge growth strategy for us as invites have become a currency of sorts. Incredibly, there are after market exchange where people buy and sell Dribbble invites. It’s crazy, really.

What are some other products in your life that you absolutely love using?

We are a 100% distributed team across a dozen states and providences.

We have come to rely on Slack and Zoom to communicate, have face time and to work effectively. These tools have made us scale up our remote team successfully.

We also recently moved to Flow as our project management platform of choice. We’re really loving it so far.

Anything you use in particular for communicating roadmaps to stakeholders, and separately for tracking portfolio items and capturing their value?

Communicating roadmaps to stakeholders:

We use a duct taped gantt view in Google Sheets to communicate large projects scheduled for the quarter (Flow gets into the individual tasks, although they have a Gantt feature in the works).

We have a tab that pivots the projects by stakeholders so that key individuals know which projects they’re responsible for.

For tracking portfolio items and capturing their value:

We’ve recently invested in a BI team (of one) and Mode as our analytics tool of choice. We run the core Dribbble website, but we also operate Designer News, We Work Remotely, Crew, and Dribbble has an iOS app.

We plan to move from individual replicas to a single data store that we can use to join any data points into a single report. We recently built a client side tracking plan for Segment in order to standardize event names across properties and push them into the future Redshift data lake.

Mode has been a fantastic tool for building dashboards and queries across properties, KPIs and for digging deep to answer unknown questions.

As a marketing/growth expert, what methods do you use to calculate the amount that needs to be spent on marketing for a certain product?

To date, Dribbble has grown to become a top 1000 website in the world with zero marketing. No spend on ads, no SEO, no structured content marketing strategy, etc. It’s been all word of mouth.

We are however starting to look at paid marketing for Crew and we recently ran our first SEO technical audit for Dribbble proper.

Generally speaking though, any marketing investment should have a calculated ROI. Paid is the easiest channel to track. The old adage is for every dollar you spend you need a dollar earned. In reality though, it should be for every dollar you spend you need 4 back, because you have expenses to cover.

These days however, paid channels have become very competitive, expensive, and harder and harder to see that ratio return.

Other channels should see similar return, but are harder to track the direct ROI. SEO for example takes many months before you see an impact. Viral loops are near extinct.

Referral channels can work and are easier to track, but only when they’re designed like an affiliate program and not to send invites for invites sake.

How do you start building a community around a new idea?

Slowly.

To add to this, how do you keep a community engaged and interested where catering to everyone’s needs could be disastrous?

Through the nature of being an invite-only community, the work that’s posted is very high quality and has kept the designer population much smaller, and higher quality as well.

Since the community is high quality, and invites are rare, we tend to see the community take care of itself.

We have a support team that handles abuse, of course. We have a Dribbble Team account and we proactively post our work to the community and we like and comment on others work. Though, this is really out of our own enjoyment, not as a tactic to stimulate community. The community does that for themselves.

What’s your go-to research methodology and how often do you do competitor analysis to stay ahead of the game?

I do competitive research really only when entering a new market/ product space. I’m rarely looking at competitors and playing the “keep up with the Jones'” game.

I find it much more valuable to talk to our customers and learn about their needs than to worry about what other companies are up to.

I pay attention, but really just because I’m personally interested, not because I want to be reactive with our roadmap.

How do you think design and analytics collaborate most effectively? I’ve observed in my career times when the intuition of design and product can sometimes slam against the reality of data, particularly where controlled A/B testing can be tricky or you’re attempting to measure something like the quality of a user experience? Curious for your thoughts on the balance and the trade-offs.

I started my career as a web designer. I have a formal design degree. I still consider myself a designer first and foremost even though I’ve been in various growth roles for the past 15 years.

My first job out of college was on a marketing team spending over a million dollars a month and it was my job to make those creative units convert. I quickly learned data-informed design and fell in love with multivariate testing and data.

However, it’s important to understand that we’re dealing with people with all the products that we build. While I’ve had massive success on nearly all the major marketing channels within my career, my biggest successes have been product design wins.

Data is great for understanding a historical pattern for how users use a product. Design thinking is all about coming up with new ways to solve a problem, new ways for users to interact. It’s future building.

My biggest wins were data informed gut instincts about the future.

What challenges do you face in making sure the designers and designs on your platform are discoverable?

This is something that is at the top of my list. We’re actively working on it. More improvements for discoverability coming very soon, starting with aesthetic recommendations when onboarding new users.

How would you define UX and how has UX contributed to enhancing the value of a product so we can get a better price/retention goals etc for the product? Is top-grade UX now being recognized as a key feature that customers want and perhaps even a differentiator that separates the wheat from the chaff in a competitive apps marketplace?

Design is having it’s golden era. Designers were once considered a commodity. Today they are as valued and in demand as engineers.

5 years ago you could get away with launching a scrappy (crappy) looking site as an MVP. Today that doesn’t fly.

In a recent study conducted by Stanford, it was revealed that 75% of users make judgments (made in 1/20th of a second) about a company’s credibility based on the visual design of its website.

Big companies are paying attention as well. 5 years ago, the ratio of designer to engineer at IBM was 1:72. Today it’s 1:8 (1:3 on mobile teams).

Technology has flattened the competitive landscape, lowered the barrier for entry. The cost of starting a business is lower than it ever before. The ability to scale globally can happen faster than ever before.

Great design is table stakes. The start of a good experience is a well designed experience. Design is the new competitive advantage.