Because they think failure and anxiety are conditions to be avoided
Because they fail to understand that opportunities at first appear like hard work
Because they think that things are broken “for a reason”
Because they believe that the conditions and constraints of the world are immutable
Because they don’t understand how to sustain high-quality execution over time
Because they likely have some self-limiting beliefs, instincts, character traits, and/or behaviors and anyone who provides opposing signals will at first appear wrong.
Product & Startup Builder
The empathy advantage
Lately, there have been many books and commentaries on the advantage of empathy in leadership and the workplace.
I would argue that beyond empathy, bringing humanity - our whole selves - to work is necessary.
In either case - this will take a lot of practice and cultural change after centuries of top-down, aggressive work culture.
In the short term, though, it’s important to remember the power of positivity and praise in day-to-day leadership.
There will always be the next challenge and concern for you and your team to tackle. It’s easy - as a leader with more context or tactical distance - to fast-forward every conversation to aspects of the work that need fixing or changing.
However, I’ve personally witnessed the profound effects that regularly pausing to celebrate hard work, clever insight, and productivity breakthroughs can have on individuals and teams.
Given my job, I have small windows to engage with my startups and deliver massive value. Value can often mean focusing on what’s broken.
Even so, I try (often unsuccessfully) to first start a review with what’s working great and to ensure that hard work is acknowledged.
I recommit myself to doing this even more and more consistently.
I encourage you to do the same.
Are you really building a B2B company?
I've often written about the need to rethink your business model from first principles. Particularly the idea that many B2B companies and founders actually want to pursue full-stack disruption as B2C companies.
However, another critical mistake founders make is to confuse a B2B2C company with a B2B company.
B2B Companies build products to help companies operate more efficiently. Think Salesforce, Slack, Google Docs. Their products don't really touch the business' customers in any meaningful way.
B2B2C Companies, on the other hand, build products for end-users/consumers but happen to be purchased, re-branded, and re-sold by other businesses.
This is an essential distinction because while B2B companies may spend a lot of time focusing on enterprise features and support processes, B2B2C companies, in many ways, need to act more like B2C companies.
B2B2C companies and products (like B2C companies) must remain laser-focused on building incredible features that end-users love. Otherwise, why would other businesses buy your stuff and offer it to their customers?
But here's the real secret...
These days - the only thing that really matters is the C. Even in B2B, where it appears like there is no C!
Why?
Because in all cases - B2B, B2C, B2B2C, or Even B2D (developers) - you're actually dealing with human beings who need to use and love your stuff.
The massive and growing collection of incredible, product-led business tools (think Slack, Product Board, Calendly, etc) has taught users to demand more from the products they use - both in their personal lives AND at work.
The lines have blurred. The bar has been raised.
In short. Focus on users. Build beautiful products. The rest is mostly a distraction.
Affiliate deals come third
Don't race to affiliate deals.
Fix your product. Make it usable, delightful, retentive, and habit-forming first. Figure out how to sell it YOURSELF second. THEN think about affiliates third.
Product suites require strong mental models
One of the keys to moving from a stand-alone product to a suite of related products is having a strong mental model or metaphor for how they fit together.
This helps the product/design/engineering team to…
1. Design user experiences that more naturally and logically connect together (particularly if the team is broken into different squads).
2. Design user experiences that organically move users from product to product.
3. Design features that make your products work “better together” to ensure they’re not just shipping more stuff - but rather creating lock-in via a cohesive ecosystem.
4. Understand opportunities to create shared naming conventions, primatives, patterns and product surfaces that improve all your products at the same time.
Ultimately this all helps users to more easily and quickly onboard and broaden their usage across all your products.
Don’t just build more stuff. Figure out the mental model first.
#product #productstrategy #consultingconvos #startups #scaleups
Ideas for avoiding partnerships with incumbents
A friend asked me how to avoid partnering with incumbents when they have exclusive control of the supply side of your industry (in response to my previous post about incumbents).
Some of my ideas…
1. Don’t rely on them to promote you. Aquire users directly
2. Don’t build and sell software to help them run their operations - only build enough to facilitate a transaction. Give it to them for free and take a clip of the transaction. They are not a customer they’re a supplier.
3. Find other ways to grow your utility and super engaged user base that does not rely on their supply - so that you become a large enough center of gravity and source of qualified leads that they can’t ignore you. This will allow you to dictate some of the engagement model.
4. Engage with smaller players that are more desperate - related to point 3
5. Build products/processes that are so damned good that users and partners can’t ignore you.
Start from the ideal user experience and work backward.
Start with smaller or more innovative partners who are willing to innovate.
And/or give them equity or big $$ to play nice - i.e win them over with competence, equity and/or money.
Should you hire a CPTO?
I’m still hearing about CPOs/PMs reporting to CTO or "CPTO".
Stop it.
Regular reminder:
Some individuals can be very, very good at Product AND Engineering, depending on which role you place them in. But that is rare.
It is an extremely rare unicorn that can juggle both product AND engineering thinking at the SAME time.
You are setting yourself (and the R&D team) up for failure.
Why? So, so many reasons. Just a few top of mind today...
1. Engineering is like a soldier in the trenches - getting stuff done. Product is the like the General at the forward operating base - they have a higher-level view of the battlefield.
2. Product needs a first-class seat at the leadership table.
3. Product and engineering need creative tension in order to function correctly.
There are many, many other reasons - check out my latest Ebook about being a product-led org for more details.
You won’t succeed at VC fundraising
Your small business won’t raise VC
And that’s ok.
I just saw a post from a successful small business operator who has built and operated a solid service business for over 12 years.
In it, she lamented that she had always been bootstrapped and never raised capital, which always made her feel like she never quite measured up.
This is heartbreaking and frustrating for so many reasons.
Regular reminder: Small businesses are not startups, and startups are not traditional small businesses.
They are designed to operate completely differently on pretty much every level.
Startups can raise Angel and VC capital because they are powered by software and can (hopefully) experience exponential growth with incremental cost to serve.
Small services business are not designed to do this.
Neither one is better or worse, but they are completely different “games” with different rules. If you don’t understand which game you’re playing, you will ultimately create a lot of frustration, pain and suffering for yourself and your stakeholders. It will also likely undermine the success of your company.
I’ve shared thoughts about this in many ways and in many forms. Not the least of which is the first episode of The Startup Podcast and the first book in the start up scale ebook series at chrissaad.com/startupscale. Link attached below.
#business #growth #experience #startups #scaleups #consultingconvos
Ingredients for conviction
Conviction takes vision, constraints, data, intuition, taste, experience, leadership, trust and courage.
Properly testing your conviction takes high-quality execution at speed.
The only thing worse than conviction about the wrong thing is failing to make decisions and learning/iterating quickly.
What’s the difference between B2B2C products, and Channel/Affiliate partnerships?
Channel/affiliate partners send users to your branded site or app, and users sign up to YOUR service and become YOUR customers. You have the right to up-sell and cross-sell to them. You get to establish cross-partner network effects. They don't typically pay you. You might even pay THEM commission for leads.
B2B2C products are typically when your product is white-labeled or embedded into a 3rd party site or app. Users sign up to the OTHER service and do NOT become your customers. You do NOT have the right to up-sell or cross-sell to them. The 3rd party site or app typically PAY you as your CUSTOMERS.
Don’t confuse the two.
Don’t accidentally stumble into B2B or B2B2C when you really want to do B2C and/or affiliate.
Your pivot will result in lost clients
This is true of startup pivots and “focusing” exercises as well…
“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.
It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of direction.
It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.
It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.
It doesn’t matter.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward.
Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen.
All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are.”
― Brianna Wiest
Fundraising requires competition
As a founder, the moment someone starts sniffing around for an investment in your company that looks even mildly interesting, you need to start talking to other potential investors.
This gives you more negotiating leverage and may even help you find a better investor+deal
Disruption and incumbents
Startups are about disruption.
Disruption, by definition, means that legacy players (otherwise known as incumbents) are having their world changed/disrupted in some way.
When dealing with incumbents...
You want to: address their concerns and overcome them with better products, user experiences, and business models. Along the way, focus on those who get it and ignore the rest. They'll either jump onboard later or die.
You do NOT want to: Compromise your vision and work around their fears. You don't want to waste too much time trying to convince those who resist change.
Better: Whenever possible, go directly to the demand side (end-customers) and control the transaction end-to-end. Cut incumbents out or - worst case - come to them with deals/$ (not hat-in-hand asking them to change their business with a clever new product).
What to do when your colleagues don’t like you
Once people decide they don’t like or trust you - it’s very difficult to convince them otherwise.
Everything you say and do from that point forward will be filtered through that lense.
This makes advocating for yourself and personally changing the tide of sentiment difficult (if not impossible).
In a business environment, it takes a strong and articulate leader/manager to push back on false narratives and elevate truth and justice.
But that’s hard and rare to do because the manager risks their own alienation.
The solution?
For leaders:
1. Work intentionally to create a culture of truth-seeking that minimizes personality/emotion-based decision making. Conversely be vigilant about signs of fragility and easy intimidation (ideal case).
2. Encourage direct communication between stakeholders rather than games of telephone.
3. Defend unjustly criticized employees (This reenforces point 1).
For individuals:
1. Ensure careful and diplomatic day-to-day execution so as to avoid crossing the point of no return. (However be careful: too much of this runs the risk of undermining a truthseeking culture of honest communication and rapid improvement).
2. Hyper-vigilance to share your perspective and contributions as you go using a range of communication techniques (clear roadmaps, group status updates, metrics, etc) (taxing but often necessary).
3. Building political alliances that will support you (yuck).
4. Grit and perseverance (but don’t spend too long banging your head against a wall - sometimes it’s better to move on).
In short, it takes hard, intentional work from good faith actors on all sides.
Marketplace Marketing
When building a multi-sided marketplace, consider that each persona in the marketplace has different needs.
Sometimes those differences are subtle, and sometimes they are dramatic. But in either case, the differences matter.
With this in mind, try to avoid making the home page a mishmash of different messages for all your personas. Instead, you typically need a landing page (along with value props, case studies, pricing, onboarding flows, etc) for each persona.
Typically (but not always) the primary home page should be focused on the demand side of the marketplace. This serves not only to tell the story to buyers but also helps potential supply-side partners to understand how they will be positioned if they join your marketplace.
A row towards the bottom of each persona-specific page can make a callout to the other personas and guide them to the right page.
Product-led failures are like Climate Change
Fixing a scaleup's failures in terms of product-led, efficient ways of working is much like dealing with Climate Change.
Things don't look too bad.
Symptoms are subtle and seemingly unconnected.
It always feels like compromises can be made "for now".
The costs are hidden.
The ultimate fate is unknown.
However, the reality is...
Things are very, very bad.
The various symptoms ARE related.
The costs are massive.
The compromises and indecision are destroying morale, momentum, and competitive advantage.
The ultimate outcome is that a better, smarter, more effective competitor will disrupt the business.
The only question is, how much pain are you willing to tolerate - and for how long?
Leaders add context and clarity
The best leaders (at every level of an org) take confusion and indecision and add context and clarity by asking good questions and using good judgement.
How to organize your squads
Organizing your squads is a puzzle game, not a pinball game.
Product changes/features shouldn't fall through the cracks until it lands on a squad.
Product changes/features should clearly and obviously fall within the mission of a squad with minimal room for debate.
The trick is designing the org with minimal gaps and minimal overlaps.
Sometimes, only the founder can get it done
There are some motions/tactics that only the founder can do.
Winning first customers
Closing early partnerships
Raising money
Hiring key employees/leaders into the business
Making key strategic decisions
Going from zero to one
These things simply can't be farmed out to the team.
I've seen founders who had an 80-90% conversion rate on sales calls while their best salespeople couldn't exceed 50%.
I've seen influencer outreach activities that went nowhere for months that instantly started gaining traction with founder attention.
I've seen big decisions go around and around in circles for weeks until the founder joined the conversation, elevated the thinking, and made a decisive decision after a 1-hour meeting.
Why?
Because - right or wrong - the best founders command a unique level of influence, salesmanship, operational latitude, and creativity that can't be matched by employees.
It might be harsh, but if those employees could do what the founder does (have a vision, start a company, raise money, bring a team together), they likely wouldn’t be employees.
As a founder, be careful about delegating these critical "founder-only" tasks too early. Lean in, and use your superpowers to fast-forward your company to the future.
#founders #fundraising #zerotoone #consultingconvos #startups #scaleups #growth
Is your team burned out?
Is your team burned out? Some ideas…
1. Do they have a vivid and powerful vision to motivate them? Or are they driven by a tactical business goal, by fear of competition - or worse, no goal at all
“Help 1 million people by doing X” is a vivid and powerful vision. This is ideal.
“Raise money” is a tactical business goal.
“Beat company X” is fear or competition.
No goal is when leadership is chasing shiny objects - whatever investors or customers say.
What is your vision? Is your team excited about it?
2. Are you making decisive decisions or letting them linger for too long? Are you allowing confusion to make day-to-day decision making by the team painful or impossible?
Worse than making a bad decision is not making any decisions at all.
Don’t wait for full conviction. That’s impossible. Instinct, passion, experimentation and informed iteration/pivots are essential parts of the startup journey.
3. Do you meet with the team on a regular basis to inject authentic enthusiasm and celebrate the wins?
A little genuine praise and celebration can to a long way to boost morale and help the team focus on what matters.
4. Can you add a new leader or advisor to inject clarity, enthusiasm, cadence and accountability into the team?
The right kind of fresh blood can change everything.
5. Is the team suffering from a lot of incompetence? Fire low performers! Show the team that quality work is valued and rewarded. Be careful about jumping to this conclusion though - bad perform is sometimes the result of bad leadership.
6. Have you tried giving everyone a vacation. Stop everything for a week and encourage everyone to refresh and come back with renewed enthusiasm!