No, I won't sign your NDA before our initial meeting.

Like most professional investors, I don't tend to sign NDAs prior to a formal engagement with a company.

Why? There are a number of reasons that include...

1. Your idea is not unique. What's unique is the 10,000 decisions you will make to execute your idea between now and success and beyond

2. Even if people have the exact same idea, there are likely many, many ways to execute the idea producing many different kinds of companies each with a different niche/focus/go-to-market etc. Again, here, the execution is what matters.

3. Rather than people stealing your idea, it's more likely that you need to drag them kicking and screaming to it. The best people are too busy doing their own things to be going around taking other people's ideas.

4. Since I meet with a lot of companies in my role as investor and advisor, it's likely I've heard versions of your idea before and I'll hear many more versions in the future. If I choose to engage with these companies I could be accused of sharing your idea which - in fact - did not happen. This exposes me to unnecessary risk

5. It adds paperwork and friction to everything

6. It filters out Founders/companies that don't know what they're doing and refuse to be coached.

That being said, I will, of course, always act in a professional manner and treat the information I get as confidential and use it only in the best interests of the founders and the company.

Also, my formal engagement contract does have a confidentiality clause since, in those cases, I will be digging much deeper into execution details.

Your primary job working at a startup might surprise you.

• It is not to write code

• It is not to design beautiful pixels

• It is not to meet the needs of that strategic customer

• It is not to make revenue

• It is not to have a big launch

• It is not to raise capital

It is to ship products that a large and growing cohort of users love, use, and recommend.

That’s it.

Everything else is either a means to an end or an organic byproduct.

As a result, your “vision”, your “job”, your ego, your personal preferences, or even the contractual obligations of your biggest customer don’t ultimately matter.

Collaborate hard. Disagree. Commit. Put it in the world. Learn. Iterate. Create value. Win or lose.

In B2B Sales contract negotiation hell?

In B2B Sales contract negotiation hell?

Build such a powerful, delightful consumer-facing product with a simple onboarding experience and then ask them "did you red-line the Instagram contract before creating your brand page?"

Modern brands are more human

The modern era of digital products and businesses has moved away from grand, bureaucratic brands and experiences, and towards delightfully human and simple customer journeys that speak to us as individuals.

Think Lemonaid for insurance. Slack for collaboration.

No Latin. No acronyms. Fewer forms. Less jargon. Less pain.

This is one of the secrets of disruptive tech companies. It's not just about an app. It's about a more human, user-centric business model and customer experience.

MVP, MVP, MVP. Everything's an MVP.

MVP, MVP, MVP. Everything's an MVP.

An MVP is a design requirement. It is not the thing you release.

You release v1, v1.1, v1.2

The "MVP" you release is the start of a journey - not the end.

What is your strategy for turning your MINIMAL VIABLE PRODUCT into a WORLD CLASS PRODUCT?

Maybe let's coin a new term... WCP.

Don’t let pressure demoralize you.

Don’t let pressure demoralize you. Use it to focus you and elevate the quality of your execution. Crunch time is time to deliver, not time to fold.

You don’t need product owners.

You don’t need product owners.

Product managers own and run products.

You don’t need BAs.

Product managers triangulate an understanding of the requirements of the business and the market to make product decisions.

All these extra roles come from bigcos and only serve to add unnecessary communication overhead and dilute accountability.

Product managers: own and run your product. Don’t let others take pieces of the responsibility and accountability off your plate.

If you need help communicating with internal and external stakeholders, lean on your product marketing manager. If you need help with understanding the requirements of your customers then go talk to them directly and/or lean on designers, design researchers and customer support teams.

How do you increase the quality of your team and execution?

• Equity: Give them a piece of the pie

• Inspiration: Inspire action through the tone of your voice and the clarity of your vision

• Leadership by example: You and your leadership team need to act as you want your team to act. Don't boss people around from the sidelines.

• Cultural Values: Ensure your cultural values celebrate efficiency, effectiveness, fast-forwarding to the future, truth-seeking, etc.

• Performance Reviews and other tools: Ensure your cultural values are embedded in your performance rubrics, hiring evaluations etc. Hold people to account to the values on a day-to-day and quarter-by-quarter basis.

• Bar raisers: Ensure that interview loops have someone outside the hiring team looking that evaluate candidates from the point of view of cultural values and raise the bar on the average quality of the existing people on the team.

• AAA players want to work with AAA players: Once you have great people acting in great ways it will get easier to hire great people.

• Autonomy, Responsibility, Authority: Retaining AAA people requires that you give them autonomy, responsibility, AND authority so that they feel like the CEO of their thing.

Leadership is about precision and room

One of the keys to leadership is being extremely precise in how you speak so that there’s no room for confusion, while also creating lots of room for your team to do their best work.

Careful about the granularity of your planning

One of the common issues I run into with startups I advise is a problem with abstraction layers/granularity of planning.

Plans that are either too high level (E.g. Take over the world in 3 years) or too low level (E.g. ticket 1, ticket 2).

Remember to develop and maintain a mid-level plan that acts as connective tissue between high-level goals and extremely tactical tasks. This plan should represent milestones of meaningful, new value delivered to the market (E.g. "Introducing New Feature X").

One of the biggest business mistakes: "Conflation"

One of the biggest mistakes I find in my advisory work is "Conflation".

Conflating one problem with another, one business model with another, one word with another, and so on.

What does Product-led mean?

Product-led means 2 things...

1. The product is the primary way that customers find and adopt the value of the business

2. The product team is leading the company. They develop a product strategy and take a leadership/influential role with other functions and processes.

I don't do one-off workshops. Why?

In my experience, the best way to help a company is to participate in the day-to-day decision-making and reviews of deliverables. To become a fractional part of the team.

Why?

Because while the first few meetings might involve some in-depth "workshop" style ideation, what happens after that is often as follows…

1. Realities on the ground change.

2. A million little implementation details need to be decided and the team will default to their muscle memory (i.e. their old way of doing things) or don’t know exactly what alternative implementations look like.

3. The above two things cause almost immediate strategy drift - meaning the strategic workshops result in no change.

Instead, I design my advisory work to be ongoing engagement with at least 1 weekly check-in. Often more.

During these check-ins, I help the team hold true to the initial strategy where necessary, implement the highest quality deliverables and navigate the nuances as the situation changes.

Stop talking to your engineers...

Stop talking to your engineers...

In software, almost nothing is that hard to build. It's only hard to build well and maintain over time. It's especially hard to turn it into a product. So pick wisely.

As a founder/ceo/sales team, stop asking your engineers "How hard would it be to...". If they're good engineers, their answer will almost always be "not that hard" - but it's the wrong answer.

Instead, ask your product team what it would take to develop new products. If they’re good Product Managers, their answer will almost always be "a lot".

How much money have you wasted?

Many leaders work to avoid higher comp for more experienced people, or tolerate low performers for too long.

I’ve seen high performing teams complete in days what others take weeks or months to perform. Often, the implementation is much, much better.

This applies to everything from a marketing web page to a funnel analysis to delivering new products.

I’m not exaggerating.

What’s the cost of this wasted time? Here’s a rough method for calculating both the operational costs and the opportunity costs…

A. Operational costs

Your monthly expense load

x

The number of months wasted

B. Opportunity cost

The revenue and scale lost from shipping late

+

The window of opportunity given to competitors to get a foothold against you

+

Loss of moral and momentum on your team

+

Loss of A players who leave because they won’t tolerate working with B and C players.

—

In short, the costs are astronomical. Often, they are catastrophic.

Hire slow. Pay high performers well. Fire low performers fast.

Work backwards

Rather than taking what’s in front of you and iterating on it, consider taking the time to figure out what’s ideal, and then work backwards.

Often times, when I walk people through this process, they either get very defensive (you can’t do that) or very confused (it doesn’t work that way) or very bemused (*smile* you’re so funny and nieve).

The reality is, however, it does indeed work that way.

There are many times when pragmatic iteration is important and necessary.

There are times (particularly when you’re creating a new market or trying to change the way the world works in some way) that the normal iterative process is slow or ineffective.

Take the time to clearly imagine the end state. What would it look like if everything worked the way it was supposed to? What systems, processes and patterns would be in place? What would the user experience look like? What deals and business models would make that possible?

Note: this does not mean that you keep your head in the clouds. Once you’ve imagined the ideal future you must quickly connect the dots backwards and start executing a series of pragmatic (but bold and well aligned) steps towards your eventual, ideal, goal.

You must live in two worlds. The ideal future tempered by an extremely focused and pragmatic present.

It’s not just about “ways of working”

It seems a lot of Product teams and scaleups in Australia think their product problems come from "Ways of working".

This is typically only partly true.

It typically comes from the way they are sales lead instead of developing an opinionated product strategy and roadmap.

It typically does NOT (primarily) come from the way that designs, requirements, stories, and engineering execution are "shaped up" and executed.

Constantly revisiting the "ways of working" is like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic without patching the giant hole in the side of the ship.

Why not write a book?

A lot of people have asked why I don’t create some kind of courseware or book about startups, growth and/or product.

Of course I have my newsletter and my consultingconvos posts on social media. But ultimately my perspective is that educational content is not the constraint for successful companies today. There’s plenty of content on these subjects out there already. A lot of it for free.

The constraint for successful companies is experienced operators with “wisdom” that can participate in day-to-day decision making.

My definition of wisdom is knowing when to apply the right approach in the right context at the right time. Wisdom also requires consistency over time (i.e the decipline to avoid strategy drift).

Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to scale this yet.

Go straight for the prize

I meet a lot of founders building the wrong product because they think it’s easier or more profitable.

How do you know you’re building the right product and the right business model?

Do you care about hotel managers? Then build a B2B SaaS product for hotel managers.

Do you care about the hotel guest? Then build B2C product for travelers.

Instead, I will often see companies and founders that actually care about the hotel guest but are building a product for hotel managers. They often believe they have to do this because…

A. They can help the hotel manager offer a better experience to guests

B. That’s where the revenue is

C. It’s easier to go to market that way (b2b sales)

These founders are likely building the wrong product and business model.

Focus on the right persona and tackle the right problem based on your passions and beliefs - not on your theory on what’s easier or more profitable.

Sometimes that even means disrupting the way legacy operators work (see AirBnB or Uber) or imposing prescriptive best practices on legacy operators (see Expedia and others).

The first step is understanding the truth

It’s difficult to act effectively until you understand the ground truth.

To know the ground truth you need to ask the right questions.

To ask the right questions you have to step back and understand your business and the product from the customer POV.

To understand the business from the customer POV you need high degrees of empathy, good intuition, curiosity and data.