Does it feel like you’re not shipping great features at a regular cadence? You likely have a product management problem.
Product & Startup Builder
Sell Your Own Product!
In the early days of a b2c startup, doing bizdev activity for b2b2c distribution can feel so fun and gratifying.
It can feel like high-momentum, effective work that allows you to lock down glossy brands and partnerships who might get you big batches of users through the door. It also feels great to announce them to friends, family, media etc.
Often times, though, the reality is much, much different. Why? Because...
They often move very, very slowly.
They demand new features and behaviors that are tangential or orthogonal to your core product and business strategy.
They change their mind mid-stream
If you eventually get to ship the partnership/co-marketing program the results/conversion are often much, much smaller than you expect
If the results are marginal (which they almost always are at the beginning), your partner will often give up quickly and not put in the effort to optimise
For all these reasons, and many more, bizdev partnerships for a b2c app is really something to push off for later as a long-term bet and moat.
Instead, there's an axiom that says "Sell your own product'
Often times this feels like a harder, more data driven grind. However if you crack it (and you need to crack it!), it's high-scale, repeatable and has a huge, huge upside. It also forces you to really polish your product so that the user acquisition and retention really works.
Why Do You Raise Capital?
You raise capital to trade money for speed & effective execution.
Are you Executing Daily Tactical Necessities Without A Strong Product Vision?
Executing a series of day-to-day tactical necessities without a strong product vision can only get you so far. At best it produces a confused and ineffective user experience. At worst it causes your team to spin their wheels, never quite shipping anything meaningful or polished.
So Many Startups Need To Stop Inventing Tech...
So many startups need to stop inventing tech and instead start building product. Others need to stop building product and start selling product.
What does MVP Really Mean?
An interesting phenomena I’ve noticed when advising startups is the shallow understanding of what MVP means. Almost everybody uses the term now, but few understand how to successfully operationalize it.
It’s often difficult to determine exactly what the MVP is. It’s partly science and it’s partly art. The answer often requires a mix of experience and taste.
Often, after building the MVP, they continue to build more and more product without going deep on user acquisition and feedback.
Sometimes they build multiple MVPs of multiple major product areas leaving much of the product surface area in a largely broken state.
Remember, the purpose of an MVP is to get it into customer’s hands and learn and grow with your shared understanding. You need to continue to iterate and polish it until you can see your own face in the reflection.
Remember it’s “ship and iterate”, not “Build, build, build”. Shipping doesn’t mean just putting it on production. It also means putting it into customer’s hands at as much scale as possible.
When Is Advice Mandatory vs. Optional?
Founders sometimes ask me if some piece of conventional wisdom they've heard or the advice that I'm giving is "necessary" or "mandatory".
I always try to explain that almost all of the tactics and advice I'm sharing can only increase the probabilities of success. It can't guarantee it. There's also always a chance you can succeed without following any given piece of "best practice" advice.
That being said, if you start bending or breaking too many of these guidelines you really start to diminish your chances of success.
Funny enough, many of the lessons I share day-to-day were not learned from a book or from someone else giving me the advice - I had to learn them the hard way by ignoring the advice in the first place (thinking I had a better way) and finding out I was wrong.
How To Deal With Conflicts
When dealing with conflicts or things that don’t go the way you wanted
Take maximum responsibility
Go out of your way to communicate as clearly as possible - your original intentions, current feelings and hopes for how to move forward
Think deeply about how you can mitigate the situation happening again
Selling A Company Sometimes Requires Radical Candor
When needing to sell your company, there's a point when you need to let the posturing go and find a home for your investment of blood, sweat and tears
Buying A Company/Team Has Many Hidden Benefits (vs. Building)
When considering build vs buy on M&A, never underestimate the value of a small team who’s already passionate and thought deeply about the problem.
How Do You ‘Land’ In A Team As An Advisor
Sometimes one of the hardest parts of Advisory is the way you initially “Land” in the team. Particularly if you’re coming in to assist with some friction or poor communication.
It’s essential that you introduce yourself well and position your participation as an opportunity rather than a corrective measure.
Sometimes You Gotta Quit
Sometimes the best advice is "stop doing that and move on"
On Revenue vs. Scale, Helping Incumbents vs. Disruption.
Revenue vs. Scale
One of the biggest challenges many young startups with global disruption ambitions face is an addiction to revenue.
In the early years, a startup’s job is to grow - fast - not to make revenue or profit.
This might sound counter-intuitive. So let me explain.
An undue focus on customer revenue forces you to pay too much attention to what your first paying customers ask you to do for them for fear of losing them (and your only source of cash). These are often feature requests that might be good for their business, but not necessarily good for yours.
Why? Because existing customers will typically ask for advanced features designed to solve more and more of their particular needs. These needs are often either very specific to the quirks of their operation or are very hard to polish and scale. Making things worse, the requests also tend to come thick-and-fast meaning that you end up developing a broad product surface area without taking the time to really polish everything that’s getting built.
Even with amazing product discipline (where you are translating each specific ask into carefully designed, future-proof and generic product capabilities), it’s very, very difficult to avoid falling into this trap when you are capital constrained and dependent on revenue. 9 times out of 10 it will ultimately be massively distracting, undermine your focus, create overstuffed products and stunt your business growth. It can, and often does, kill your company.
Instead, high-growth startups typically need to raise enough capital to invest in growth without being beholden to the needs of any particular customer or customer segment.
This typically means focusing on a number of key things. They include…
A focused product that initially does only 1 or 2 things really well
A clear marketing message delivered on a beautiful website
A polished self-serve onboarding funnel with standardized pricing
UI and UX that is simple and clear to understand for new users
Well oiled operations (sales, support, biz dev etc)
Referral and viral mechanics
With these features (and many others) you will hopefully be able to win and onboard many, many customers quickly.
Why is quantity better than quality? Because making software is relatively easy. The world is littered with small-scale software projects that were essentially custom-built for a few customers. That’s not building a high-growth startup. That’s building a small software business. The hardest thing in the world is getting broad (even monopolistic) adoption of a product by a whole category of users. It’s hard, therefore it’s valuable. Once you have that market position, you have a captive audience to which you can up-sell and cross-sell a range of new features (with attached fees & charges) over time.
Helping Incumbents vs. Disruption
Another important (and often overlooked) aspect of reducing your focus on revenue is that it allows you to consider disrupting rather than partnering with incumbents. It’s very easy to make the decision to run to big customers and partners to try to get big money and/or lots of distribution. However, oftentimes, a tech startup should be killing - not helping - some of the legacy players in an ecosystem. Or, at the very least, forcing them to play by new rules. This is the very definition of disruption.
To be even more concrete: Often times your first instinct will be to build some great b2b software for the existing players in a market where, perhaps, instead, you should be building a direct to consumer alternative to what’s gone before. A clear example of this is Uber. They didn’t build dispatch software for Taxi companies. They built a new kind of mobility business that dealt directly with riders and drivers - making Taxi companies obsolete. Had they tried the other thing, the story would have gone very, very differently.
Execution Is Not All About Action
One of my colleagues on ‘execution’:
“People always hear that execution is everything in startups.
The problem is that they think “execution” is all about more action. But that’s like an amateur running onto a pro basketball court and running around throwing the ball in the air.
Execution is about getting the ball in the hoop and all of the skill, experience and muscle memory it takes to make that happen”.
Avoid Shipping The Org
When working on product marketing (how you will brand and merchandise your products on marketing materials like your website) you want to be sure to avoid “shipping the org” (i.e. describing things based on the way they were built by internal teams) or doing things for the sake of appearances (e.g. trying to show more products than you have).
You’re number one priority should be to think through the problems and use cases your customers have and describe your product in those terms as clearly and simply as possible.
You Need To Be Talking VC Partners
If you're meeting with VCs, make sure you're meeting partners, or make sure the associates you're meeting with are ultimately introducing you to Partners. If that's not happening, you're probably not getting anywhere.
Brand And Product Design Is Often Underestimated
Brand and product design can be such an important yet subtle aspect to your business success. It's easy to dismiss it as unimportant frosting on the cake, but investors, customers and partners can so often make split second decisions based on subconscious cues like pixel alignment and colors.
Corporate Conferences Must Be Part Of A Larger Marketing Effort
Conferences are good, but must be supported by other marketing activities like a campaign/topic specific micro-site, Webinars, Blog posts and other materials to maximize impact and conversion from the "oh wow" moment to the "sign me up" action.
Most Platforms Should Start as a Killer Product First
As someone who's tried, too many times, to build a platform first product strategy (leveraging 3rd parties for distribution with a white label infrastructure play) I strongly suggest you DON'T.
Unless you're building extremely primitive services (think Twillio, AWS etc) you should instead build a killer user-facing (consumer or business user) app (hard!), and then offer APIs, Widgets etc for 3rd parties to adopt once they have no choice but to play along.
Think FB Social Plugins, YouTube Player, Twitter Tweet Embeds etc.
How To Evaluate And Compensate For Your Weaknesses
When evaluating and compensating for your weaknesses, I suggest taking a multi-faceted approach:
Be sober and honest about your weaknesses - but also be fair and kind to yourself too. Don’t, however, allow yourself to be crippled by neurosis (i.e obsessing).
While you may never turn them into strengths, lean into improving your weaknesses. At the very least you will understand them better and minimize your blind spots.
Don’t minimize the importance of things you can’t do just because you can’t do them. Recognize their value and...
Don’t obsess about turning your weaknesses into strengths. Focus more on your natural and unique abilities and surround yourself with people you trust who make up for your weaknesses. Be explicit with them about their role in your life and in your business. Ask them to help you handle or advise on those aspects of your life and work.
Listen to the people you hire/surround yourself with! Their advice may, at first, appear wrong. That's because it's not what you would normally do. Do it anyway.