All the support

When thinking about support, remember that different users like to get support in different ways.

1. Some users like to do their own research, searching for and reading your knowledge-base articles for themselves.

2. Some users will go straight to the chat box and try to get an answer from the chatbot or from a human agent in real time.

3. Some users will insist on sending you an email and waiting for one of your support team to do the hard work for them.

In all 3 cases, be sure you have a knowledge base system that supports a single repository of help articles such that...

1. Users who like to research can search and read articles.

2. Users who like to chat can get answers (ideally Generative AI style) that are informed from your knowledge base articles.

3. Users who like to email are first presented with recommended knowledge base articles BEFORE they're allowed to submit their support email.

Three birds. One stone.

How to become a Unicorn like Uber, Netflix, YouTube

I recently wrote a post about how too many startups who dream of creating disruptive consumer products, instead, compromise on their vision and build B2B software because they see it as a path to short-term revenue.

Imagine if Uber and Netflix built software for their competitors (Taxi and Blockbuster, respectively) instead of DISRUPTING them.

The post went viral (See a link to the original post in the comments)

But HOW do some companies do this while so many others can't?

To build disruptive companies, it takes...

1. Clear vision with first-principles thinking

2. Effective, high-quality execution with a take-no-prisoners attitude (which includes building an incredible end-user-facing product for end-users)

3. Smart capital to fund Research & Development and Go-to-market

Smart capital liberates companies from having to focus on small-scale, short-term revenue. Instead, they get to focus on full-stack disruption and owning the end user.

However, this can often feel like a Catch-22.

How do you get the smart VC money so you can be liberated to think about your end-user-facing business vision?

As a result, many founders give up before they even start. They compromise and pivot straight to a B2B business right out of the gate.

But it's not a Catch-22.

As a founder, you must have a clear vision rooted in first-principles thinking and demonstrate high-quality execution to THEN attract smart money.

If you pitch a compromised B2B strategy, you will raise money from compromised B2B minded VCs.

This is your reminder:

1. Craft a compelling narrative that fires the imagination - believe it!

2. Recruit a "coalition of the willing" - investors and advisors who believe in your disruptive idea

3. Build the product and business you want to see in the world

4. Knock on hundreds or thousands of doors until you get enough "Yes"s to unlock your dream and change the world

Don't be the one to compromise and kill your dream before you even get started.

Believe in it - and find others who believe in it too.

#startups #fundraising #startupsnippets #venturecapital #founders

Pricing strategy must be aligned with your business goals.

Just starting out and prioritizing growth? Pack your free tier with value.

Looking to prove early revenue? Start placing oft-asked-for features in a pro tier and seduce users to upgrade.

Fall in love with the whole problem

One of the cliches of startup life is “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”.

One of the implications of this philosophy - if followed to its logical conclusion - is to understand that the problem likely starts further upstream than you imagine; and goes further down stream than you imagine.

Consider that, once your initial wedge in the world begins to gain traction, you have an opportunity to expand into logical agencies up and down (and across) the value chain.

5 common ways you might be undermining your startup as a founder/CEOs

I’ve been doing startup advisory for a long while now. Over that time, I’ve noticed a lot of common founder behaviors that really hurt their companies. Here are just a few…

1. Lack of quality, consistent action over time

Some combination of: They jump from idea to idea. They burn out quickly. They waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. They don’t follow up. They don’t finish what they start. They don’t adjust and adapt quickly enough.

2. Small business syndrome

They say they’re running a startup; but they are actually making decisions like it’s a small business. Race to revenue. Not raising capital. Not raising enough capital. Partnering with incumbents. Etc

3. Lack of experience

They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what the right steps are or what great work product and outcomes look like. They are lost on the next steps or the best way to execute but they’re not asking for help from the right people.

4. Too focused on strategy

They spend too much time on strategy. They keep re-writing it and imagining a huge future. But they don’t pay attention to the details or understand how important the day-to-day details are. They think once the strategy is done then the rest is just busy work that doesn’t require constant strategic oversight and high-quality management.

5. Too focused on tactics

They spend too much time on tactics. They get uncomfortable when asked to take a step back and figure out the big picture. They don’t understand the value of saying no. They don’t take responsibility for providing a strategy that creates clarity and context for their team.

6. Not focused enough

They change their mind all the time. Every new customer, opportunity or thought can derail their strategy and even the tactic they’re in the middle of executing. They fail to create a stable space inside which their team can do high-quality work.

Sometimes this comes from too much conviction about the cleverness of their own ideas. Sometimes it comes from bad advice they’re getting from scared/small minded people around them.

User good will

You have a “good will budget” with your users.

If you play too many tricks to force certain behaviors, the resentment will damage your brand. As a result. Users will only choose your product as a necessary evil and drop you as soon as possible. This ultimately limits the innovation and monetization you can deliver.

Focus on delivering delightful value over the long term and users will choose you more often and follow you on any journey you put in front of them - including to new products and revenue opportunities. For companies with great brands and user-centrality - the sky’s the limit.

Go get the capital

Good: Go get conviction on your sources of capital so you can get conviction on your disruptive growth business.

Bad: Use your lack of conviction to hedge and build a business that compromises on growth and disruption.

Some kind of communities can kill your startup

“Community” is such an interesting term.

It’s a little like the word “partnership”. People use it to mean all manner of sins.

Many of these meanings are very good for your young product-led startup.

Some are a dangerous waste of time. Read to the bottom to find out which one is unproductive.

✅ Support Community

Group of people who use your product & help each other be more successful.

This can reduce support costs & give users/customers confidence that your tool is well adopted and supported.

✅ Ecosystem

Community of entities (typicsllly other companies and products) that plug into your product & make it more valuable.

This can be a powerful (if not unstoppable) moat around your business

✅ Marketplace Participants

Typically individuals who are either providing services (supply side) or buying services (demand side) inside your own explicitly designed matching environment.

This is core business. You typically monetize the transactions by clipping the ticket.

✅ 3rd Party Community

People already discussing the problem your product solves.

Finding a way to organically & authentically engage this community can be a great way to learn. It’s also a great way to promote your product.

✅ Testing Community

People who have opted in to using early versions of your product & provide detailed feedback.

This can be valuable if you’re quickly & consistently shipping versions of your product with an intent to distribute it more widely in the short or medium term.

✅ Social Network

If your product is designed to facilitate the connection of people (typically around a social object like a photo or video or a topic like sport or cycling) then engaging communities of people to migrate or spend some of their time on your product is essential.

This is core for your product & business. You monetize through ads or premium experiences.

❌ 1st Party Conversational Community

People that you invest in growing and nurturing outside of the context of a real and usable product.

Their primary interactions are to talk to each other (and you) but they are unable (because it doesn’t exist) or unwilling (because they just like talking) to use your product.

This might work for more mature companies that have time to plan and execute over the long term.

For startups, however, building a conversational community that is only tangentially related to their business - particularly when they don’t have a product and are not focused/resourced enough to have one in the short term - can be a giant distraction.

As a founder, it’s seductive to spend a lot of your time creating a conversational community. There are many tools and there’s a lot of opportunity for instant gratification.

But if you are operating a young product-led startup, you are not a typically not a community builder. You are a product and business builder. Your interest is in users - not “community members”.

Stay focused

The 2 key C-suite levers to drive outcomes in R&D

As a C-Suite (CEO, CPO, CTO, CMO etc) you have two key levers with your R&D team.

Priorities and budget.

You can either

1. Deprioritize a business goal in favor of another one.

Or

2. Fund the expansion of a squad (or, often, the creation of a new squad) to work on a new priority/mission.

You cannot, however, just keep adding priorities and missions, expecting it all to fit into the same overworked squads and expect stuff to just happen “faster”.

In fact, everything will happen slower because the thrash and contention will bog everything down. Not to mention the tech and org debt that will be incurred.

10 reasons why killing your customers might be the best business strategy for your startup

Oftentimes, the companies you think are your customers or go-to-market partners can often be the companies you're supposed to be disrupting.

It's very common to find young startups attempting to create new user experiences and business models that change how an industry works - while also choosing a go-to-market or sales strategy that relies on legacy players in an industry.

In these cases, here's what's likely to happen when dealing with these players...

1. They are unlikely to understand your innovation.

2. If you are lucky enough to find some stakeholders to understand and champion your innovation, the people they work with are likely to slowwalk or kill their initiative.

3. If the initiative gains some momentum, it's highly likely to be killed due to priority changes (due to changes in KPIs, market conditions, management whims, etc.)

4. Even if you squeeze through the eye of the needle to get *something* out to market, they are unlikely to implement it the way you want.

5. Even if they implement it the way you want, it will take *forever* to ship it.

6. Even if they ship it, they're unlikely to market and/or sell it how you want/need it.

7. Even if they were to do all of the above, you would be unable to rapidly test/iterate on the implementation details and marketing messages (essential for disruptive new products) - which can cause your product to suffer or fail.

8. They will likely change their mind when market conditions change or the intial rollout “fails” to live up to its potential - particularly because you have been unable to iterate and experiment.

9. Even if it finally ships and starts to get marketed correctly, making any changes will be painful if not impossible (see: all of the above).

10. If you are implementing a white-label solution (often the case): Even after all that, you won't own the user. Which is the most important thing

Instead...

• Go straight to the end-user.

• Disrupt legacy players - don't partner with or sell to them.

• Later: Maybe give them a little SDK or API to adopt some of your incredible innovation.

• See: Youtube vs. Media companies, Instagram vs. Brands, Twitter vs. News, Uber vs Taxi, Netflix vs Blockbuster, etc etc

Are you using the right analytics?

There's a big difference between the analytics that are most useful for business decisions and the analytics that are most useful for product decisions.

Business analytics tend to focus on absolute numbers and growth rates.

They typically answer questions like...

• "How many active users this month?"

• "How much revenue this month?"

• "How many new leads in the pipeline?"

The Product team should be interested in these kinds of questions, but they are not actionable at the product ideation and management level.

Instead, the product team needs to answer questions like...

• "What is the conversion rate of users that do action A, to the users that perform action B?"

• "Which conversion bottlenecks are most likely to have the biggest impact on the business objectives?"

• "What is the number 1 reason, more people are not being more successful with my product, more often"

That last one is my favorite.

For these kinds of questions, funnel analysis is best.

Make sure you use the right analytics for the job.

Make sure you're asking the right questions and getting the correct answers!

The essence of Product: reducing the complex to the simple

Pretty much the whole point of modern products is to eliminate pain, suffering, and waste from a users life. 

Often, like genius, this means reducing the complex to the simple.

Don’t make the mistake of simply translating legacy processes into digital forms or, worse, passing on complexity from multiple suppliers, billing models, etc to your end-user.

Instead, find a way to…

1. Reduce input complexity through negotiation and/or excellent process engineering
   

2. Figure out common denominators and breakage models for the remaining complexity
   

3. Give users a simple mental model for the user experience and billing model

This kind of radical simplification is not just important for great products, it is the essence of disruption.

The essence of great Product Management: turning chaos into craft

You are failing at product management if...

1. You treat your job as an exercise in “managing chaos”
   

2. You primarily interact with engineers all-day
   

3. You believe your primary activity is gathering and documenting requirements

Instead, great Product Managers… 

1. Mitigate chaos by having strong, reasoned opinions about a narrow set of target customers, use cases, and problems
   

2. Coordinate and align all functions in the business
   

3. Use narrowly defined problems and insights to generate requirements for all functions

Tips for building, selling and deploying software for enterprises

Building, selling and deploying software for enterprises is really, really hard work.

This is for many reasons. 1 key reason is that they have a lot of "Enterprise requirements" that small and medium businesses typically do not. For example...

Business Requirements
- Deep configurability of some key features/workflows
- Integration into existing enterprise tools
- Co-branding considerations
- Analytics/reports
- Enterprise pricing plans
- Customer support and system SLAs (and methods of measuring)

Technical Requirements
- API for integration into custom systems
- Security (surviving PEN test)

Internal Concerns
- Threat/fraud modeling at scale
- Scalability (including 3rd party rate limits)
- Resiliency/uptime
- Monitoring for all of the above

But here's the thing.

Most people's intuition and experience would lead them to try to find the "Venn diagram overlap' between the requirements of all their enterprise clients and get those requirements done first.

This might seem intuitive and logical, but it is wrong.

Instead, you should...

1. First, ensure you are selling to the SAME kind of customer, trying to solve the SAME use-cases for the SAME reasons. You should define 'Same" very narrowly. Uncomfortably narrowly. This is because customers, use-cases, and intentions that might seem similar can actually be wildly different in terms of product and business requirements. If you get this wrong you will never properly productize and scale your offering.

2. Recognize that, for each customer, their circle of blocking requirements are all blockers for them. They don't care about the Venn Diagram Overlap. They care about their circle. Also, recognize that you want to get customers up and running as fast as possible (to get case-studies, revenue, and momentum on the board.

Given this, work diligently to...

a) Stack rank your clients and choose which will go live first, second, third, etc

b) Work closely with your clients to make their circle of blockers as small and precisely scoped as possible

You need to push HARD here. Question their real concerns/pain vs. what they THINK they need. Be careful about requirements that might break your business (E.g. Whitelabel for a b2c/b2b2c product should be a non-starter)

c) Work closely with your clients to try to make their circle of blocking requirements overlap as much as possible with other clients - not for the purposes of prioritizing those overlapping items, but for the purpose of minimizing the total set of items inside all the circles.

d) Work on one circle at a time and get each client up and running one by one.

e) Manage expectations with everyone and keep clear and constant communication. Use project plans and Gantt charts if you have to.

How much should you pay for top talent?

There have been significant layoffs at all the major tech companies, the economy has softened, and valuations are plummeting.

Now's the time to get a bargain on talent, right?

Not so fast.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that the "Laid Off Tech Workers Quickly Find New Jobs" - the reality is that "A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players" (Steve Jobs).

I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had with founders and executives who - once identifying a rockstar hire - shared some version of the following sentiments.

- "Wow, they're way too expensive!"

- "Their salary expectations are way above everyone else on our team!"

- "I'd rather hire three engineers over there than just 1 over here for the same money!"

These kinds of comments are rooted in a false assumption - namely that, generally speaking, individuals and their impact on your company are roughly comparable.

This is false.

Talent is rooted in a long-tail distribution.

In other words, a very small number of people can have a massive and disproportionate impact on the productivity and success of your company.

Why?

Because a small number of people have the experience, talent, and hustle you need (combined) to make a huge impact. And a huge impact at the early stages of your company can have a massive, disproportionate impact on your outcomes over the long term.

So to the sentiments above, I'd ask...

- Are you sure they're too expensive? What is the value of increasing the chances and scale of your success by 100x?

- So what if their salary expectations are way above everyone else on our team? Are the other people on your team as good? Are the other people on your team getting it done? Is this a game of keeping things fair for the other staff, or is it about having an outsized impact on the world?

- Are you sure you'd rather hire three engineers "over there" than just one "over here" for the same money? What if I told you this one engineer could do the work of five of those engineers - and the outcomes will be better?

In addition to all of this, AAA players want to work with other AAA players. Start hiring amazing people now, and you will start increasing the overall quality of your team and further have an outsized impact on your success.

When it comes to talent, The goal is simple. Hire the best people you can find. Incentivize them well. Hold onto them for dear life.

This is one of the many ways that Startups are counterintuitive. If you want to get more content like this, subscribe to my free newsletter at https://www.chrissaad.com/startupnewsletter

The great big mystery of tech startups

The great big mystery of tech startups

1. Build a product that solves a real and embarrassingly narrow problem
2. Put it in front of the right users
3. Learn and iterate
4. Rinse and repeat

That's it.

The faster and more efficiently you do that, the better.

Ignore the noise. Set aside your ego. Avoid the bright shiny lights. And keep a keen eye on opportunity cost. They will all sink you before you even get to step 2.

But here are the real questions...

1. What is a product?

2. What is a real, embarrassingly narrow problem?

3. How do you solve only a narrow problem when you know the real issues are so big and complicated?

4. How do you put the product in front of users?

5. How do you know those users are the RIGHT users?

6. How do you learn?

7. How do you make sure you learn the RIGHT lessons?

8. How do you know exactly HOW to iterate such that the changes are as surgical and effective as possible?

This is what makes the simple 4 step dance of startups so hard. It's the definition of terms and the methodologies for effective and efficient action at each step.

The trick?

Find people with experience, intuition, taste, and talent. Bring them into your process. Put them in positions of authority. Hold onto them for dear life.

Do you have an ops problem? Some solutions from a former Uber exec.

Do you have an ops problem? Some solutions from a former Uber exec.

If you’re a scaling tech startup with a heavy operational side to your business (a group of non-R&D/corporate people who need to do physical things for your product or service to work), then…

Treat it like a machine with one major goal: increasing efficiency and repeatability over time.

Use techniques like…

1. Separate it into a distinct department

2. Hire a strong operational leader

3. Create very specific and tightly defined job descriptions, org chart, KPIs, and playbooks that tightly define what success and vectors or scalability look like

4. Make it everyone’s job to refresh and socialize the playbooks as they learn

5. Remember that you’re ultimate efficiency is to automate most things with software

6. Strongly consider a "Product Operations" role for each of your key squads that connects your product thinking and planning to your ops thinking (and vice versa)

7. Remember that when you automate most things - you may need to start creating and hiring for more junior roles that are less creative but more productive using your tools

As a result, your operations org should be…

1. Getting measurably more efficient all the time

2. Continuously self-renewing/refreshing as staff rotate out (because your ops leaders are continuously hiring at pace)

3. Infinitely scalable (and elastic) by just adding (or removing) bodies to a scalable org and process

4. Eventually able to 10-100x its capacity so you can scale globally

Go upstream to solve problems at their root

If you're experiencing daily thash, disagreement, hard trade-offs, etc then the problem is very likely upstream.

It's rooted in a lack of specificity in the business strategy, customer persona, core problem, product principles, key assumptions etc etc

It's very, very hard - especially as an individual contributor or middle manager - to encourage or even force leadership to take a step back and establish concrete agreement on these high-level concepts.

Why?

For many reasons...

A few that come to mind today...

1. No one asked you - it's not your job, and it can be seen as arrogant or out of band

2. Because companies with bad strategy and planning hate nothing more than making concrete decisions about their high-level strategy. They resist collapsing potentialities into realities. They resist saying "no" to pathways and opportunities in favor of a focused bet (but they must).

3. Because of point 2, the conversations are very, very hard to have. They feel painful and confrontational. And people try to avoid pain and confrontation.

However, if you don't confront the pain upstream at the high-level concepts/consensus once and for all, you will simply have to confront it day-to-day in your operations.

On Consistency

Probably the character trait least well adopted is consistency.

I’ve seen business strategies abandoned because VCs said so.

I’ve seen product strategies abandoned because a little time has passed.

I’ve seen product tactics abandoned because engineering said the implementation might be a little harder.

I’ve seen mental models abandoned on just a single data point.

I’ve seen peaks in initial effort abandoned after just a couple of days or weeks.

I’ve seen half baked pivots that fail to be consistently applied to all aspects of the product and business.

I’ve seen decisions unwound as soon as some of the pain of execution sets in.

It seems that one of the hardest things in life is making a decision. The next hardest thing is sticking to it consistently and methodically over time.

I’ve seen this in life, and in startups.

Related: People often confuse agility and speed for thrash.

Agile is about working on and releasing thin slices with learning along the way.

It is not about making a radical new choices on strategy and tactics every cycle.

Clever pricing tricks and product cheats

When trying to maximize conversion and revenue over the long term - making your product easier and better is a superior tactic to clever pricing tricks and brute force.