Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, we're live.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: We're live.
[00:00:01] Speaker A: All right. Hey, welcome back to Gregory and Paul Show. I'm Gregory.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: I'm Paul.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: And we break down the latest SaaS, startups, AI, whatever the Internet is talking about. And of course we love memes way too much. All the old memes.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I love memes. Every single week there's something new.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Speaking of memes, tell us more.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: What is.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: I'm showing you Red Lobster. I know, it's cool. The hotel looks cool, right? I'm at this hotel in.
Yeah, Mountain View.
I'm actually in Mountain View, California. This is maybe 30 or 40 miles from San Francisco, but it's the town where Google headquarters is. And I went to an event last night.
It's an AI event. It's quite popular, locally called the Llama Lounge. I've been going to it for, I've been going to for years, dude. I was the first one, like maybe three years now. It started out as like eight. It was a pizza shop. It was at the bottom of the market. It was during like the Silicon Valley bank bankruptcy or bank failure. People were kind of depressed. People thought Silicon Valley was over. And a buddy of mine like threw this event at like a pizza shop in downtown San Francisco, like not in a nice neighborhood. And you got a bunch of nerds to go there. And we got all excited and it was like, I think literally the week that chat GPT 0.5 dropped and he went all in on AI and now those events have like become huge. They attract thousands of people.
Last night was at Google, DeepMind was hosting and the founder, this is super interesting, he was actually investor in the company that created Malt Book, the AI agent social network. That was so.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Social network. Yeah.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: And so people were all excited. Yeah. About lobster.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Did the founder show up of Malt Book?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Of Malt Book.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: I actually don't know. They could have been there. It's a company called Octane AI.
I did not meet them. I met one of the people who's an investor, met a lot of other cool startups. It was really fun. Yeah.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: What kind of, what kind?
[00:02:06] Speaker A: All kinds of interesting AI companies. An LLM ad network. So people that are putting ads inside chatbots, inside LLMs. That's hot.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: That's hot.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: I met a company that had a kind of. They're called Ambiguous and they have an AI agent, kind of like a Claudebot perhaps. There's a lot of people that are launching cloud based agents that are similar to what cloudbot does.
Yeah, I'm excited to try this one. He was telling me about how he's able to automate a bunch of stuff with like, creating Luma events and everything. It sounded really interesting. I'll give that a shot. A company called Glam AI was there. They presented at my event last week. So they have a AI avatar app. We played around with it. He took my photo and then he put my face. Actually, I have him here. He put my face onto like an.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: No.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: And then we did it. We did an anime one. Yeah, the. The, like in sync, like, Boy Band 1 was pretty funny. We did. We did it. We took a girl's face too, and put it on this and it makes it like, it. It changes the gender and stuff. It's wild.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: That's amazing. So it's like synthetic around a printer to the event?
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, they had a printer. It creates like synthetic Instagram influencer content, I guess is what people are doing with it.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Like this one. As hilariously embarrassing as this is, it looks very real. Like, I look at this photo like, like, wow. I like. I think it's real.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: So, yeah, that's awesome.
A lot of cool. A lot of cool stories.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Thanks for showing me that. That's awesome.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I. I have no. I have no embarrassment at all. That was fun.
So today I want to talk about.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Founder. Founder LED gtm. Yeah, I want to do a special episode.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: We want to do something special right away from the news items. Tell us more. Where should we start? I. I've always wondered about this. Right.
I've always had this key question, or I've always had this question is how do you start selling things to people who might not want to talk to you? It's hard. Sales is hard.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah. I think for early stage founders, they all struggle and you hit the nail on the head. Right. Particularly when you're like, you're early, you don't have a lot of traction, you don't have a great brand, you don't have a lot of awareness. You and you're trying to sell a product and people maybe don't want to talk to you.
Yeah, it's a challenge. I mean, that's why I think marketing exists and why I think Go to market exists. Because the trick is to, like, figure out a way to create enough noise in the marketplace so people do want to talk to you. I think that's the whole goal. That's why you need sales and marketing. That's why you need awareness. That's why you need a brand. It's cause like you need to have something where people feel comfortable and do want to take, take your call, have a conversation with you. And at the highest level they already understand your value proposition, what you offer to them, why they should even have that conversation. Right. That's like, it's really interesting. I haven't thought about this in a long time, but the highest level, like beyond, like, like things like awareness, traffic, you hear a lot of these words in the startup world about like what you're trying to get out of go to market. Right. We want traffic, we want awareness, we want investors to know who we are. But the highest level, like what you want is you want the sale to already have been won before you get on the phone, before you get on the hangout, before you go on the road. Yeah. You want them to know who you are, know what you offer, know why it's valuable to them and that they are interested in buying it before you even show up. So that's actually the goal of marketing.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Okay, so that's really interesting. Maybe the question is, Ron, in the first place, it's not that you're forcing people to talk to you, it's really how do you get people, how do you convert the sale already when the, the first time that they've talked to you?
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Yeah, good question.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Would you say that the sales happened way before the first time that they've talked to you?
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Well Paul, I'm so glad you asked because like I prepared a bunch of notes for today and I'm gonna take everyone through my ideas.
When it comes to what I like to call founder led gtm, I think this isn't a, like, let's call it an iteration on founder led sales, which a lot of people in Silicon Valley are an advocate for. My buddy Arjun Partners with me on, he's always been an advocate of founder led sales. When I first met him, he was the best. He was like maybe one of the first 20 years ago who really pushed this idea that like if you're the founder, if you're the CEO, no matter how technical you are, no matter what your background is, like you need to be leading sales from the very inception. No one else is going to be able to do it for you. So when I think about founder led gtm, let's break it down into a couple of different stages.
So I think there's like the early inception, like you're trying to get to product market fit, you're trying to understand, you know, who is a great fit for what you're working on and like, once you have some sense of that, like, you won't ever have like it finished, but we have some sense that you're really going after the early adopters. Right. And that's a very unique phase. And I even have this slide here that we can share. So it's, it's all about the adoption curve. And so, yeah, yeah, this is for
[00:07:10] Speaker B: anyone that might not have seen this. Could you just like walk us through what this adoption curve means for the founder, means for the marketing, for the user. What does, what are we looking at here? Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: So we should use this to, to, as a guide to take people through the whole process. Right. So this is, this has been around for a long time. This isn't something I invented. It's quite old. Either Gartner or some consultancy invented this and it's a life cycle of like, let's call it a startup, let's call it a new product. Right. And really early stages. You're selling to innovators. So these people are really forward thinking. They're very different than people in the next phase, the early adopters. So the innovators are really risk taking. They generally like to be the first person to use it. I'm like this guy, I'm like the first on the block to use something. Anybody that's setting up their own cloud box probably falls into that.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Right? You're, you're the person who lines up to buy like the first iPhone.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I, yeah, I sat online to buy like PlayStations and stuff when I was a kid. Absolutely.
Then you get the early adopters, which is like the next phase. Right. So it's like all these crazy people, they go out there, they buy the first one and then they all tweet about it, they write about it, they make videos about it, and then that attracts the early adopter group. Right. So those people are like, they heard their cool friend is doing it, they want to do it. So a little bit different, they're a little bit less risk taking, but they like to be on the cutting edge. They like to feel like they're doing interesting things.
Um, you know, and feel the emotional aspect of this, I think is quite important. Right?
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm an early adopter, not an innovator. I, I have to. Everything that I buy, I think about what's in it for me. Maybe the innovators might not think about that.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Um, so, so eventually, I think most startups, particular startups, you and I talk a lot about and talk to are in those two stages. And then the goal is to get to the last stage, the early majority, and that's where you like, maybe have, like, won the market.
So I think this first three phases, that's maybe the life cycle of like, most of the startups that we think about.
Because once you get into, like, the late majority, that's usually on the tail end. Like, maybe the company has gone public, maybe they've become a unicorn. There's usually only a few key players at that point in the, in the market. And a completely different strategy is appropriate at that stage. Right, right. So I'll take you through the first three. Three phases here.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah, please, yeah.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: And the other thing that I want to keep in mind is, like, within those stages, I think there's three different elements I want to make sure you and I hit on. Right. So the really important things for go to market in the first couple of stages is content, distribution, pricing, and of course, sales.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Very important. If you don't have sales, right, you
[00:10:00] Speaker A: can do all the marketing, get all the leads in the world. If you can't close them because your price is too high, your price is too low, it's a, it's going to be a challenge. Right, so in the innovator phase, I mean, you and I have been working from the inception too, for your business, right? So at the innovator phase, I would say that, like, it's in some ways the hardest one because you have to have a lot of conversations, and I think each one is unique, perhaps, like when you're bringing on an innovator to your company, to your product, to your. To your service. And I would advocate for, like, having maximum flexible flexibility at that point too, which is why it's really important that the founder do that. You and I have talked a lot about this, right? Like, maybe you're able to, like, get some traction on Reddit or you post some tweets somewhere, you got a landing page and like, lo and behold, you've got a lead, someone's interested that conversation, in my opinion, like, the founder should, should of course be leading that and they should do whatever it takes to close that person.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: So, okay, so just to double click into that, what does your content at the innovator stage look like? Is it just all of your content should be focused on starting new conversations with people, random strangers on the Internet in person. What does that look like?
[00:11:11] Speaker A: All right, so when it comes to content, we're assuming that they're mostly B2B, right? So yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's like two or three channels that work well. LinkedIn X is still a platform that I would encourage people to do, depending on the audience. And then of course, you have things like Reddit, right? So when I launched Even vibe your SaaS, I had a bunch of stuff on Reddit that went way viral, that drove a bunch of inbound leads.
Those are three things I would focus on. You could throw in a few other things like product hunt or something like that. I think the problem with product hunt is, like, unless you're selling to other developers and founders, you're probably not going to find a lot of customers, right? So those are the channels, which is really important because you want to create content that works on those channels, right?
[00:11:53] Speaker B: So for, for the founder that's doing content, most likely they'll have a marketing person, right? They're doing content themselves at this stage. What would that actually look like? Is it personal stories? Is it just like. Right. If they've recently quit their job and doing this, should they talk about. Hey, everyone, I recently left my 9 to 5, I'm now founder of XYZ. What do you say?
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, great question. They need to do a mix of content. I think you mentioned something really important, like the intro post. That's something I don't see as much anymore. It was really popular on X at one point to do. Like, and you and I both have done this. Like, hi, I'm Gregory Kennedy. This is who I am. This is what I'm thinking about. Like, those are super fun and I've gotten great responses from those and I'll do them periodically. I'll say, like, hey, I've got a load of new followers I want to reintroduce myself. So I would definitely encourage people to do that. Particular, if your thing is new and you're excited about it and you've like registered a URL, you have a landing page, you're like, hey, I want to introduce my new offering to people. This is who I am. This is my background, this is what I'm, what I'm working on. But you also need other content, right, to just keep people engaged, keep people focused on what you're doing. I recommend people actually do a lot of content, like Post at least three or five times a week on LinkedIn, post at least twice a day on X. And engagement also matters. So you need to like, respond to people, comment with people, right? Reply to people who reply to you. The reply stuff works surprisingly well if you get good at it. And yeah, you need a. You need a variety of content.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: What do you think is like, so, like, for people that's. That knows they need to do this right. Post two, three times a week on LinkedIn X, wherever the platform is, what do you think, like, their biggest mistakes are? Or what's do you think? If they know this but not doing it, what's stopping. What's stopping them?
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a. Let's. Let's break it down a couple of different categories, right? Sure. So if you're really early, there's some people that like, don't have their narrative figured out. And so I think that, that, that scares them off. But what I would say is, like, doesn't matter if you have your narrative figured out or not. You need to have an audience, you need to engage with people and you need to drive awareness for just for who you are and for your career, for your job. So you should be posting anyway. Right?
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: So I wouldn't let that stop you that, like, we haven't totally figured this out and we're still trying to experiment with it. That's fine. There's lots of other things that you can talk about that are within the realm of your product and ideas. You can also just talk about the industry in general that you're planning to go on. You can even ask people for feedback and questions and on what you're working on. Right. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you like it?
And use that as a way to drive engagement? I think, I think the reason that most people don't do this is time. So it takes a lot more effort than people think. Even if you have AI. Like, I use AI to create all my content.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: It's not. It's not. It doesn't create great content and it doesn't come up with ideas. So if I say make me 10 tweets, it doesn't, it doesn't make 10 good ones. It doesn't even maybe make stuff that, like, is appropriate. Right. So it's. You need to spend some effort and energy with it. And I think also the ideation piece, so most people, I think, have like 10 great ideas and then they run out of ideas. So they start posting, they get really excited, and like two weeks in, six weeks in, they kind of like run out of steam and then they slow down and then they come back and then they become very inconsistent. And everyone knows that that's like a death sentence when it comes to any of this content creation.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Got it.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: This is so the ideation. Yeah, Ideation is is and time. I think those are the two things that most people struggle with when it comes to content creation.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: And then you said consistency. Do you think that's the key to distribution, at least at this stage, which is you just have to show up day after day, a hundred percent?
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I mean this is something that. So I've been doing content for other people for a long time. Like I've been in coast writing for some investors and other executives for years. And the original conversation I had with them was like, look, I think if you really want to make this work, you gotta like commit to it forever. So the volume of content doesn't need to be extreme. What needs to be extreme is your commitment to push through no matter what. Right. And so with them, I've worked them a really long time and so I can see the results vary. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Sometimes.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Some things go viral, some things don't go viral. And it's not about like trying to manage to short term KPIs. I think this part is really, really important.
It's about thinking really long term about establishing yourself and having a voice in the industry. And KPIs do matter. Like, it is interesting. Like we do want to understand what's happening, but we don't want to be captives of the KPIs and then be chasing some algorithm. I think people make a really big mistake there. And so, okay, this part's really important too. So, so, okay, Gregory, so we're not chasing KPIs. So, so then what is the point? Like how do we manage this? How do we understand if we're doing a good job? You have to really have a clear vision of where you're headed and what your narrative is. And then that is the goal with the content.
So for you, you and I have talked a lot about this, right? At the highest level, your brand is all about Reddit and demonstrating to people that you are the expert when it comes to Reddit regardless of the KPIs. Right? Like at the highest level, that is the mission. Because we found like, which we could obviously do. If you created a bunch of like outrageous political content on X, you could game the algorithm, but that would have no benefit to your company at all. Right, so that's why I want to be really clear about this because I think it's very easy to get captured by your audience or captured by the algorithm or start to go in directions that maybe aren't valuable. I think in my opinion is what people mean by vanity metrics. They're chasing a lot of KPIs, they're getting a lot of impressions, they may be even getting a lot of engagement, but they're not necessarily doing what they need to do to grow their business. And the last piece I'll say on this is that sometimes this is very uncomfortable for people because the things you're talking about maybe aren't that popular. There's only so many people who want to read a lot about a specific form of AI analytics or if you're an LLM ad network, like how many people want to read about that on a daily basis? Right.
So I think a lot of people ultimately like they get bored, they're like, they run out of ideas and they keep posting this. And that's what's really difficult about the long term content generation game is that you need to be able to say a thousand.
You need to be able to say one thing a thousand different ways.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Great. So at the. We'll wrap it up at the early stage. How would you think about pricing and sales for these? Innovative.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Yeah, this is funny that when we went down the path because I think this point is really important. So let me just quickly cover this. And you and I have talked a lot about this. We have in a different video where we talked about pricing in particular and pricing as a whole entity unto itself, of course. And if you will really have questions about it, you can always ask us. That's why I was saying in the early stage, I think the foundries have that conversation when you get to the sales piece so they can adjust the pricing on the fly because it's hard to understand exactly what's going to work and what's going to resonate in the marketplace. And I think in the early, early stages, if you don't have any customers, you only have two customers, you only have five customers. It's really important to bring people on and so just giving them a price break or doing something low cost is something that you did really effectively in the beginning, right? Like 500 bucks, $1,000 like just to get some traction and then you can always like adjust later.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: So I think a lot of founders at this stage, one of the key thing that they're deciding is should they do something for free or sell something for free. Do you have any thoughts around?
[00:19:39] Speaker A: I'm generally against free, so I think you should always charge something. So the first customer I ever got with five year SaaS, I don't think I charged him a whole lot. I just made up a number on the spot. Like we met at a cafe. I wanted to get his feedback on something he was working on. And he's like, he got all excited. He goes, how much is this? And I was like, $500. He's like, that's it. I'm like, yeah, whatever. Right. Just went with it. Right. But it's made up a price and like, I knew I could close him because I thought it was really important to like close somebody. And what I asked him to do was like, I need this to go really well, is what I told him. Because I want you to provide me a testimonial and be a reference customer for people in the, in the future. So I think in the early stages that's, that would be my goal with like getting customers on board. And why, like giving them a price break is really important because you want reference customers. And maybe people don't know this, but in the enterprise world, no matter how big of a company you are, the big case studies that you see with big SaaS, companies that are, with like a really well known brand, those are usually heavily discounted, like 80%.
Like people probably aren't aware how high the discount is sometimes to bring on an incredible brand. I've actually had conversations, I wonder what, say, who the brand is where they, they literally told me, like, we want to do it. They want to know what our margins are and then they only want us to pay below cost. They wanted us to even eat some of the cost. Like, so brands that like have a really big brand in the marketplace, they're well aware of like the leverage they have with people. And the point I'm making is that it's that important to bring on people and get testimonials. Right. So don't worry about chasing the dollars in the beginning.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Right. And I think like a lot of your pricing strategy also tells you a lot about the amount of service or the product that you're offering. Right, right. Like at the very state early stage, you haven't figured out either. So your pricing has to be artificially lower than where you want to be. So it's okay to start low?
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Should that your entire sales process be kind of price discovery? What's your, what's your thought? That's a great question loop here.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the part's really important. So, so let's assume that like you've got your narrative, you got some form of your product, you're posting on social media, you got a landing page, some people signed up, you're able to get them to have a call and have a conversation with you. And in the course of that conversation, right, they've already gone through your funnel, They've somehow became aware of what you're doing. They have some understanding of the value prop, there's some reason that they think it might be valuable for them. And so I think you're absolutely correct. I think at a very early stage, first 10 customers, the call should be pricing discovery. Like you're trying to gauge where do I fit into the marketplace. And you and I have talked about this too. Like, we think there's actually a pretty clear range of pricing for these types of like early stage SaaS. Companies. Like it goes up to 8 to 10 grand a month because once you get over that number, they can hire someone internally or they can like buy a very sophisticated piece of software. When you're in these numbers of like 500, 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 bucks a month, it's still cheaper than like hiring a full time employee, particularly in like Silicon Valley or West coast. Right. And it's, and it's cheaper than getting like very expensive software package. So at that point it's like they could afford it. As long as the value is in line with like the pricing, people are generally happy to at least give it a shot. And I think ultimately where you're going to is and let's, we're talking about early stage, right? So you want to be in the like $501,000 range to just like get some people in and see if it, if it even works for them.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Okay, so let's say everything worked out, right? You found your first, you made it, you made it, you found your first five to 10 customers, you're charging them $500 thousand per month. So you're making decent, not, you know, not an incredible amount of money. But your Target is like 10k a month, right? A lot of people's, a lot of bootstrappers. Target is 10k a month.
And then you're transitioning to the early adopters. Walk us through. How would you think about content? How would you think about distribution? Does anything change?
[00:23:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, Great question. Which is so interesting because you and I have gone through this exact journey, right? So once you've got customers established and you have a sense of like what works for them, that's when I think you can start thinking about pricing and how you want to move that. Right? So if you're going to move your pricing up, you need to offer people more or the value prop or the pitch needs to match needs to match that. And I think that part is, is really important.
Right? So just be sure that like, okay, I'm going to try to like increase my pricing. Your narrative and your whole approach is going to change a little bit because you have to be able to position in a way that it seems like it's, it's more, it's more valuable. Right. The other thing that you can do is, like, if you have some customers and now you're making some money, is you can actually spend some money on marketing to help improve what you're doing. Right? And there's a multitude of ways to do this. I generally encourage people to still focus on organic and not paid. And what I mean by paid is like LinkedIn ads or X ads or even Google Google search ads. I think that, like, you need to continue to do a lot of really great content in order to see what resonates. And I think you can only use paid to amplify the successful content.
And so if you, if you ever dive into like the advertising world and start looking into like Google search and all of that, or even Google, LinkedIn ads are a really good example of this. If you put a lot of money behind an ad, that's a low performer, it doesn't matter. People need to click on it, people need to engage in it, people need to think it's valuable. And just throwing a lot of money won't solve that problem at all. So there is this like, interesting dynamic where you need to figure out how to establish a reputation and develop content that people want to engage with and then you can amplify it. I do recommend sometimes people like throw some money behind something, you get something that takes off or you do some kind of feature launch and you want to try to reach some people, it can be effective, but you can't rely on it. I've told some angel investors and other people this. Like the question was like, what do I look for in a startup that I'm evaluating when it comes to GTM strategy? And I said this strategy cannot be. We're gonna buy ads.
Yeah, I'm serious. Like, they have to have a really well thought out way that they're gonna like, create content, create narratives that are interesting and that are gonna get traction, and then they can amplify it and hopefully improve the awareness and reach that they're getting. But if they can't do it organically, it just won't, it just won't work.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: At this stage. Do you think you should measure marketing and sales together? Because, like, you Said right at this stage you have some cash, maybe you have more options of hiring people to
[00:26:32] Speaker A: help you out, run marketing for you,
[00:26:34] Speaker B: even hire your first salesperson. How would you measure your content, your distribution, your sales? How would you kind of measure the whole end to end?
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, great question. There's one point I want to make which is like at this stage too, it all still needs to be centered around the founder. Okay, so like you have options now at this point where like hey, I could start promoting my, my LinkedIn account brand, right? Like every, every company has a company page on LinkedIn, but they generally don't perform. That's one of the reasons why I'm such a big advocate for founder led gtm. People want to follow people and I think this is a dynamic that's emerged because of social media, that that's what's popular. The obvious example of this is like Elon has, I don't know, 300 million followers now and Tesla only has like 40. It's really clear what people.
Yeah, it's a great example. Right. That's what people want.
So at this stage it still needs to be all about the founders.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Do you think the founders role shifts from the last stage to here or are they still doing relatively the same things?
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So great question. So I'll get into the KPIs too, but I think it depends maybe on the price point and the type of business you're going for. So we're assuming like you're B2B, you're charging thousands, hundreds, whatever it is, Right. So you brought on 10 customers, that's your baseline. Now you have a sense of like what works and now you're trying to get to the next like ten, fifteen or a hundred. Right. I think if you're trying to do a hundred customers and maybe have a slightly lower price point, you're definitely going to need sales and marketing help. And, and it gets the same as if you're even like further along, you have a higher price point but you want to scale more. Customers need help. What's really important is the founder always needs to be leading and anyone that you bring on, they're going to have sales conversations, they're going to participate, they need to basically shadow the founder and kind of just work around the edges to assume more responsibility. So just make it more effective for the founder to have more conversations.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're. And I work like this. Exactly. Right. So what. When we started working together, I had a bunch of ideas in the back of my mind whether it's market positioning, whether it's pricing, whether it's like customer discovery, who, who, who, who's even like my customer at this point right now that I have options, I don't have to close every single customer. That transition was super confusing, but also super important. And you need somebody who's gone through the process, who's in the marketing, who also understands sales to help you guide through that. So I think one of the biggest, one of the biggest pointers that you gave me was just to establish myself, sell to B2B instead of focusing on, let's say, E commerce or that segment of customers. And I think by far that's the best advice that I've.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. With you Is very clear. Yeah. Thank you. Well, so let me go back to like the methodology. So I think this part's really important. Like, if we're talking about like founder led gtm. And that's why I think this is the right term. Anyone that you bring on to work through, if you're the founder, you still need to be the leader. You need to be the one who's responsible. You need one having that conversation. What you need to do is get consultants, help employees, people that make it easier for you to be more effective. The goal is for you to have more conversations. Right. And have people that can like, do the, the follow up. Right. Or help you generate content. Like start figuring out ways to like, minimize the effort that you're putting into the sales process. But customers want to talk to you. And like, no matter, like, even if you think you're like not a great salesperson, this is the other thing that like all the founders I talk to get, they struggle with. They don't, they don't generally think of themselves as great salespeople. And that is why they are great salespeople. Because they're genuine and they're authentic.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: They're not trying to sell something. Yeah, correct. Yeah.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: And they know everything about the product.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: And they'll be honest, you know, everything
[00:30:24] Speaker B: about the product or the problem and also the solution.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: And they won't, they typically won't oversell a customer, which is what a lot of salespeople can do, right or wrong. Like sometimes a lot of salespeople do it because like they, they actually don't know all the details. Right. So the founder knows that like that particular feature that you need is not available, but it'll become available. Maybe if you come on, we can accelerate development. Right. There's ways to handle that. But they won't oversell customers. I Mean, they need to sell customers, too. And sometimes founders can be too honest. You need to sell customers and be enthusiastic about what you're doing. But you'll learn through the process of, like, what works and what doesn't. And I think what Paul was saying, too, is, like, when you hit on a segment that works really well for you, it'll usually be fairly obvious, and you can. You can keep going. You did. You did mention about KPIs early, and we. We didn't really discuss it. And the one thing I'll say is, like, the marketing needs to bring on leads and help you close. If you're bringing on lots of leads that, like, don't work for you, something's wrong, right? And that's okay. That might happen. And you need to, like, to figure out the. The way that those things work together and make sure that you're reaching the people that you want to. Yeah, that's brilliant to reach. But the goal is not. Like, that's why I would say, like, don't set some crazy lead goal. If you do that in your team, they will just stuff that pipeline with a bunch of, like, useless leads.
A much better metric is like, find me one or two leads that we think are ace and are gonna close, right? Or even just, like, help task them with, like, pipeline and closing, right? Like, the goal of all of us is to make sales. I say it's actually all the time to my team. Our goal is sales, right? Our goal is not leads. Our goal is not, like, some awareness metric. All these things matter, and we measured all of them. But the goal was sales. The goal was revenue. The goal was to grow. Grow the business.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Right?
[00:32:19] Speaker A: And we had to have a clear vision about, like, what that meant when it came to marketing. It's like, you could make a compelling argument for, like, this is why we need to do this, because in three months, I believe this is going to happen, and this is where the market's going, and these are the people want to chase. That's why we do this. Founders will, like, listen to that. But if you're like, oh, I just. I stuffed a bunch of stuff in the pipeline and I got a bunch of junk. Leads aren't going to close. Like, nobody wants that. No one wants that.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: I have a. I have a little bit of a contrarian, unique insight into this. I think a lot of people think that sales and marketing is always either the same thing or separate. And I actually think that's. That's the wrong take. Depending on where your stage is at. At the early innovator stage, the last stage. I think your sales and marketing has to be separate because, like, you don't have your sales pitch down. So, like, if you combine sales and marketing together, you start assuming that your marketing is wrong and you focus too much on your market instead of focusing on your sales. Because, like, if you're the founder who's doing all of the sales calls, it's hard to evaluate yourself and say, maybe my sales pitch sucks. It's not actually my marketing.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: That's really interesting.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I'm sorry.
[00:33:31] Speaker B: Good. And then at this stage with the early adopters, what you're actually trying to do is you're trying to tackle the next segment of people who might want to buy your product. Right. You've already validated the first segment, your first five to 10 customers, and then now you're trying to validate a second one. So at some point, at some level, your sales is working. Now you need to, like, combine the marketing sales back together so that you can validate new segments really quickly. I think a lot of founders don't.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: It's a really interesting point. Right? Like, how do you tease out, like, what's working and what's not?
[00:34:04] Speaker B: That's.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And like. Well, I think that's why, like, the, the, like, the founder needs to have a clear vision and be really.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: And really, this is, I think, like, when people say this word like lead, what does that mean? I think this is a good example. The founder needs to lead and be able to do their best to tease out, like, the improvements need to be made. Right. Is our marketing wrong? Are we positioning product wrong? Are we overselling it? Are we underselling it? Oh, is it just like our sales pitch isn't great? Are we not, like, able to close customers? Cause they didn't see the value and what we did is our pricing too high.
Right. It's really hard. And it's really hard. I think there's like a perfect way to figure it out. But it's a great point.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: It's basically like running a business. You're trying to figure out a playbook that works at scale. So like, founder led just means you're validated one segment. Either it's marketing is working, sales is working. Can we move on to the next segment? Segment being different customers. Right. So like different targeting. But your ultimate goal is to make one sales playbook that works for everybody. Then now you have like a large business.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Correct?
Yeah. So, okay, so I think we've talked Enough about like the.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Let's. So like let's say you've everything's working with, with the early adopters, with the innovators and now you're tackling the one of the larger segments which is the early majority.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is super interesting and like it's interesting. It's like in the context how I've been talking about it, you, you, it's, it would be simple to say something like, oh, now you've arrived and you just have to scale. Right?
[00:35:39] Speaker B: But what does that actually mean?
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it's actually really hard. This point can be really, really difficult because it's when the founder and the early, early founders, early employees need to start like letting go of things. Actually this can be really, really tough because you need to find a way to really scale and you can't do everything the way that you were doing it in the past. So you need to find ways to like work with other people, work other teams, outsource things, work with contractors, work with consultants, work with agencies and put a more scalable approach in place. And a lot of time like that's not what people want to do. It's not fun anymore for them. They were like really liked, like playing around and like experimenting with different GTM motions and now they've got to like really find one that they've got to like scale. It can be hard. But I think the important part is to like, like you said, think about it in a scalable way and like what's going to, it's going to be the one or two channels that are really gonna be able to grow the business. Because I think the mistake people make here is they just kind of like dole out a little bit of resources across everything and they ultimately have no impact.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: It's like the cloud. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Would you say this is where you start deprecating some of the channels that may have worked previously and now you need to explore new channels. Like how would you help a founder go through this process? What would you, what would your offer for them to be?
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Or yeah, it's super interesting. So I would assume that in the beginning it's probably all digital. Right. And so a good non scalable channel that probably works in the beginning is Reddit. Right. So you're like the way I was doing it, like I was on Reddit, I was posting these things and doing my own content and they were pretty involved. And like that's not scalable.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: You can't have.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: You can't have the Founder spending three hours writing posts and replying to people, people on Reddit. Right. So a good example like this is like where you come in is that, hey, can we find a tool, an agency, can we find an AI product that can help scale this piece? Right.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Now that we're talking through this, this is really interesting because like think channels coming in and out. So for example, when I first started X and Reddit was really good, this is like the first five to 10. Then they stopped being really good channels during the early adopter stage and then they're coming back as a really good channel for later stages because now you need to build trust. People search you up, maybe you have brand presence across the Internet.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is also very specific to your audience.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: So like I got success on Reddit and then there, and then you find ways to scale it. Right. But like X has been really difficult to get customers. Right. And so I'm trying to limit how much effort and energy I put there. So, so it, it's really customer dependent. There's, you know, there' these people that are really big on discord. I've never been very big on discord, but for some people it works really well. I think for me the point is like you've gotta just pick a few that you think work and double down on that. And also be like, like I was saying, be aware that like your approach has to change. So like having the founder like reply to every comment on Reddit is no longer scalable. But if that channel continues to work for you, you can find other ways to do it. Right. LinkedIn's another one where like I do a lot of stuff on, on LinkedIn cause it works.
So basically everybody is there in B2B, right? There's a billion users on LinkedIn and like it might get a lot of like hate on, on X, but the reality is like people are on there and they're interested in talking and doing things that are business related.
So it could be a great channel to double down on. I think a lot of people, maybe we'll even do another episode on this. I think a lot of people approach LinkedIn wrong. So there's multiple like, ways to take advantage of LinkedIn and most people just like get obsessed with like posting content and trying to just get as many impressions as possible, which isn't necessarily the right way to go about doing it. And I don't think impressions is the best way to measure results. Like I was saying earlier, like, if you're talking about a rather niche topic, that's only appropriate for certain segment of people. You're just not going to do thousands and thousands, hundreds and thousands of impressions. And so I think people like, don't invest the amount of effort, energy, time that they should is on direct messaging and like doing what is traditionally thought of as sales building prospect lists, finding people on LinkedIn that you want to reach out to, and then doing a really good job at the prospecting and the outreach. Right. I think that's the other area where most people fail. They're taking the approach I think they used to use in email and then they try to apply it to social media in general. So not just doesn't work LinkedIn but Twitter, DMs, Reddit even has DMs. Right. There's all these platforms have DMs, and if you get really good at it, they can be incredibly valuable. I've built huge businesses and have built a ton of success on these types of platforms with direct messaging. And the simple answer is like, do not take your email strategy and just transfer it to any of these platforms. And there's a couple of key reasons why email, like the, the sender is generally anonymous or it's not very obvious who they are where any platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter even I read it the way I set up my, my, my profile, when I see the message, I have a sense of who that person is and I can go and do some investigation. I just, all the time when I get a connection request on LinkedIn, I go and check out who they are before I respond, before maybe, I mean accept it. Right. Email doesn't work like that at all. So emails, a lot of effort has to go into establishing credibility or credibility. I am so. And you work with these companies and we're credible because of this. Right. You don't really need to do that on all these platforms. Right. Because they can get that from your profile. So you need to take a really different approach with breaking through and getting people's attention. There's also very technical things that I think people don't think as much about. This is this probably my best tactical tip for LinkedIn on this entire video? When you send someone a connection request, don't say dear so and so you're just wasting, you're wasting characters, right? Because on a connection request it's this tiny little window that supports like a couple hundred characters. And if you say dear so and so and then you put a space and then you put another space and then you put the thing, they won't be able to read the introduction at all. And I've heard this from other people who are big on LinkedIn. He's like, look, if you send me a connection request and he had screen capture, he's like, if you use this email format, like, I can't read it. Like, I don't know what you're trying to say. And if you're just like in your first sentence in the connection request was like, I'm interested in this and you come up with something obviously compelling, you're going to get a much higher rate, right? So when it comes to direct messaging and all these things, don't take your email strategist and just transfer it. Like, think really deeply about what's going to work, what's going to resonate on that platform. And the final thing I'll say is, like, just think about any of these platforms, about taking advantage of the entire system, the entire ecosystem. And that's why I think people need to focus, right? Like, if Reddit's working for you, you need to be able to, like, create great content, need to be able to manage a community, need to be able to do. You need to be able to do direct messaging. Same thing would apply to LinkedIn, right? You need to create content. You need to be able to manage like a messaging sequence and campaigns across different prospects. You need to also have something going on with your community, your brand, your corporate account, right? Because people will go and check that out, right? So you start to see that, like, while managing, this is actually quite the whole thing. It's quite a lot. And that's why I think people fail, because the traditional maybe approach to social media, I've seen a lot of B2B teams do, is they just, they create content and then they go to, they just shoot it across every. They go into HubSpot and they're just like, here's my Tweet, here's my LinkedIn post, here's my, like, Reddit thing. And then they're kind of done with it, right? Rather than like really thinking deeply about that channel and how it's going to work for them.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Okay, so like, you're basically at this stage, your strategy for marketing is this, it's a little bit more broad. How do you. Is this, is this where you start measuring roi or how do you even measure ROI at this stage?
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. I think it depends how far along you are, but there's a couple things you can think about, right, which is like, continue to figure out Your pricing strategy. So can you go up in your pricing? Can you go down in your pricing? I met a guy last night who, he wanted it to be as like low cost as possible because he's going for scale, right. And so if you're doing that, that's a very different approach than like, if you're like, have a product like yours where like, hey, I'm trying to get my pricing up, is there a ceiling to my pricing where if I go too high I start to like lose customers. If I go too low, I'm not making as much money as I want to make or I'm leaving money on the table. So they get depends on your strategy. But yeah, at this stage I was starting to think about, I would start thinking about total like if the marketing team. So let's assume that like you maybe have an agency or a go to market person you're working with, right? When you're like feel like things are working well and you're scaling, I think ROI does matter because like they'll start to ask for more resources and you just need to have a sense of like why do they want those resources and what's going to be the result. Right. I wouldn't be so like extreme in trying to like calculate ROI on like a weekly or monthly basis. I think people jump way too quickly into like, I agree, having really high expectations around this like flywheel being established. Which I think is because most people come from a large company, an established company that has great business and that is definitely how like management look at it, right. They want to have your quarterly KPIs, so they try to apply that to early stage companies. It doesn't work. Right, because you're, you're still new to the market, you're still trying to experiment and there just isn't as much momentum. It just takes investment in order to create the momentum. Right. That's why like you do so, so it's easy, I think for founders to like not perhaps scrutinize it enough. And like the marketing team like wants this or the salespeople want that. You gotta think really deeply like is that gonna work? I would just do something like ask them why, like why do you want this? Like why do you think that'd be, that'd be a great thing for us to do. And then try to evaluate and make, make sense of like does that work or not? Right. You don't want to overcorrect in the other direction too where like you want to test things. So the one thing I would Add on this mix. And it was funny, I thought about this early, before we started talking about LinkedIn was like, we've talked all about digital. Right. I think when you get to this, this stage is when you want to add in real life type of marketing. That could be an event, that could be going to a conference, that could be out of home. I've been doing a lot of thinking about that recently. Right. Like billboards, they're unskippable. If you advertise in an airport, you can reach all kinds of executives that are really difficult to get different. Start to think about your mix of like, is there a non digital channel that we want to like look at and start experimenting with? I think that's probably the most important decision.
And you want to try something a
[00:46:39] Speaker B: lot less scalable right. At this stage if it's in person. So now you got to get a sales team, Marketing team.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's fair.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Can't do everything anymore. You can't be at two places at once.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: I think that's always a big surprise for a lot of founders is that when you move out of like digital that this stuff is basically like teenth century Gutenberg. Right? Like, yeah. It's like doing an event is, is like a hundred percent just. You're working in the world of atoms and so you're like it's, it scales, things go wrong.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: That's right. It's all people's game. So do you think at this stage, what do you, what's one thing that the founders still get wrong? Are they just focusing on too many different things? They're jumping all over the place. What do you think?
What do you think a founder must do at this stage? To scale?
[00:47:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that like so if they, I, I think we kind of touched on it, but maybe I could summarize it really easily. I think there's like, there's probably three or four traps they fall into. There's people who overcorrect and they get really like hard on people about roi. And so you don't want to overcorrect in that direction and start demanding like weekly and monthly reports and like scrutinizing like thousand dollar budgets on Google.
You're spending $30,000 a month on Google? Yes. You want to have a really clear sense of ROI and like what's happening on a fairly consistent basis. Right. But if you're just spending a few thousand bucks here and there, like it's not worth the pressure. They need to have some data they're using to Evaluate it. They need to be able to give you a credible reason about, like, why they think this is a good idea and need to have some kind of result to prove that it works. But it wouldn't be too extreme on roi, Right. I think there's the flip side where it's like they just start doing all kinds of fun stuff. They maybe even, like, raise some money. There was a lot of cash coming in. And so then they start doing all kinds of things that like, maybe aren't going to have a great return.
Right. So type of like, let's. Obviously it was a mistake. I've seen people where that business starts to take off. They've got some things that are working for them. Everyone's working really well together. They've got, like, social media down, the LinkedIn's taking off. Then they just put all this money into, like, events, and they send everybody, like, a conference. They just kind of, like, overspend on it because they're young and they have money. And now it's exciting to, like, travel
[00:48:51] Speaker B: at a booth for $10,000, you know?
[00:48:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's so it's almost the others. It's the, the overcorrect either, like, demanding everyone, like, bring them all kinds of ROI reports, or they just go so far in the other direction where it's like, free for all. Let's just all go start traveling and flying around the world and going to every cool conference we ever wanted to go to. And who cares if there's any ROI at all? Event ROI is a whole other topic I can go into. I have some very clear ideas about what you need to do there. At the highest level. What I would say is, like, if you're really early, like, don't buy a booth. They're not very great. The people that stop by the booth are like competitors, investors. They're just tire kickers. They're generally not salespeople. The thing you need to know about events is actually pretty straightforward in the early stage. You need to go to events where buyers are. You need to contact them in advance. And you need to basically measure it on the number of conversations that you're able to have, let's say because of the event. Ideally they happen at the event, but maybe they don't happen at the event. They happen because of the event. And so if you get good at that, like, we know our buyers are going to be here. We reached out to them in advance. We had this many conversations, and, like, eventually some of those will close. If you are great at your Business. Right. And so that is the way to, like, look at events in the early stage in the most simplest way.
[00:50:06] Speaker B: Do you think, what would you say about pricing at this stage? Do you think it's. We've already probably raised the price a bunch. Do you think this is when pricing stabilizes?
Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Great, Great question. Pricing is really complicated and like, I think it depends on your strategy and I think even you, like, keep experimenting with pricing, right? Like, we think we have it figured out.
Yeah. So you've, I think, like, remain flexible. That's, I think is really important. And be very clear on, like, how the market is evolving and like, adjust your pricing in order to take advantage of, like, what's happening in the marketplace. Do you think you need to accelerate? Do you need to, like, lower prices? You can do that through a variety of mechanics too, right. You can have a list price, rate car, what they call it in the advertising world. Like, here's what's on my website. But for you special person, I'll give you a credit. I'll give you a discount, right. So you can use techniques to increase the sales volume and velocity. If you think that's important, you could also.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: That one definitely work on me. Yeah.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: You can also raise prices, right. So you can go in the other direction and you can even like, do a mix of both. You can have a higher list price to make it look like you're more established and your product is more in demand and like, wow, they can like, get that kind of money. And at the same token, you can be offering more discounts to people. Like, I even gave the example of the 80% discount that a lot of people offer big brands. Right. So you can have a lot of flexibility on a one conversation with your pricing. And you can even have like a high list price if you think that's gonna, like, work in terms of like, the image that you want to have in the marketplace.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: Awesome. Okay, so to just wrap everything up, if, if the founder is currently stuck between selling to early adopters and then trying to get to selling to the earlier majority. What. What's one advice that you should. You give them. They should do this week?
[00:51:54] Speaker A: Yeah. If you're, if you, if you're like,
[00:51:56] Speaker B: if you're stuck between the two stages, Right. So you're selling to early adopters and then now you're trying to expanding to the earlier.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you need to.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: That's a hard question.
[00:52:06] Speaker A: It's a hard question, right? Because it could be a number of things. The first thing that came to Mind was like, pricing, experiment with your. With your pricing. I even did this with my business, right? I was like, I start out like, like I say, I had this kid, come on, I charge you 500 bucks, right? I don't charge 500 bucks anymore. And I'm continuing to, like, experiment with pricing because I think it's a really important lever with helping you go from that, that specific, I think, transition. So pricing is. Is one thing. Like, it's possible that you went too quickly and you raised the prices and now you're struggling to, like, close people. It's okay to go back.
There's no cool that says you can't. You can't do that, right? So you can always do that. The other thing you can do is, like, you could still pivot in your product, right? So maybe your product, you have one iteration of it, you maybe try a different iteration of it, you maybe offer like a new version of it in beta, so you can also experiment with the product. Something else that I have done and I've seen lots of people do. The early adopters maybe buy something that, like, the early majority are. Aren't really ready to buy. And the early majority need something a little bit different, a little more polished. They need more reporting, they need better tools, they need a dashboard, right? There's a lot of things that they might, that they might need that early adopters are like, don't need. So I actually have an excellent example of this. So when I had these app acquisition platform, we sold app downloads for, like, iOS apps. The early version of that had no dashboard. Like, our customers, like, we literally would send them a URL string and they would, they would, they'd go boop. And it would download a CSV file. And then I create their own pivot table to get reporting. And we had like 50 customers on this platform. And obviously that was not what was going to bring on early adopters. Very obvious, Very obvious. In fact, like, I forgot about. This is a great example of, like, product development. We had that and then I was making these pivot tables, and we got really good at making these pivot tables. We could, like, we could roll them out really quickly. In fact, we had this interim stage where we would send a customer the pivot table. So we actually hired someone and we said, you know what? We're not even going to make the dashboard yet. We don't even know what the dashboard should look like. Here's the pivot table. And we kept adjusting the pivot table. And we literally got to a point where, like, we had this Excel file that was, like, set up exactly as we want the dashboard. And we hired someone, we said, make this the dashboard. And that became the dashboard. And it was a huge success because they basically. We had it all, like, tested in an Excel file. And then we built the, like, reporting dashboard. People logged in and it was exactly what they expected and they. And they loved it. So that's like a really nice example of, like, going from early adopters to.
Going from early adopters to early. Yeah, early adopters on your. On the product side. And the marketing changed too, right? In the early days, we were just kind of chasing people we knew around San Francisco. And then we got more professional with our marketing and we did a lot more events in that company. And that worked, worked really well, went to events. I really focused on exactly what I said before. We never did a booth. We focused on, like, having valuable conversations with people who we thought would be great buyers and networked.
[00:55:17] Speaker B: Is there anything that we haven't talked about today? I love this conversation. We could go on and on forever.
[00:55:22] Speaker A: I know, it's fun, right? Yeah. I think there's so many things we didn't talk about. Well, how about this? I think in summary, let me see if I can break down the important principles here by stage and by area. Right? So when you're in the very early stages and you're still selling just to the most innovative people, the founder needs to basically do everything right? You need to create content, you need to send DMS on Reddit, you need to do anything you can to get traction. And, like, don't worry about, like, will this scale? Is this the right channel for us? Like, just randomly try things and see what will work for you. Right. And once you get, like, even the smallest toehold, you'll understand, like, where you can invest more. And when you've got a certain number of, like, sales I think completed, you've been able to actually sell the product. I always called the msp. Right. I'm a big believer, like, not in, not in the mvp. I don't think validation from a techo perspective matters at all. Thing matters is like, validation sales. And once you've sold a few of them, maybe even sold three or four of them, I would try to get some help, find someone who's like, great, I can sell this.
[00:56:28] Speaker B: Agreed.
[00:56:29] Speaker A: Now I'm ready to try to scale. And I would suggest you get someone to help you with content because it's probably the lowest ROI for the founder to spend time creating content. There are lots of great People out there. I'm one of them, of course. And this is the reason I focus on content and helping founders to do it, because I think there are a lot of people out there who can create it better than the founder. And I think the founder's time is better spent having sales conversations and working on the product. Right? So making the product better, getting it where it needs to be. Find a partner who can help you with some of this, like, outreach, right? You've got Reddit, you've got x, you've got LinkedIn, you got email. There's some obvious things that you should work on. Get someone to help you scale that stuff and get this flywheel in place where you're getting more awareness, you're finding more leads, you're getting referrals. That's really where it should happen in the beginning. And then you.
Then you. Right? And if you find like a great partner, a great team, great people that can help you go from the innovators to, like, your first 10, 15 customers, that's. That's like, really challenging. Once you get to there, it should be pretty obvious, like, what needs to happen and how you can scale it. Right? You'll do more content, you'll do a better job at it. You'll find a few channels that you want to focus on. You'll go really deep on a few that work for you. Like, they could be Reddit, they could be Discord, they could be LinkedIn, they could be GitHub. Right. I know people that are, like, big on that, do a lot on GitHub, if they're really appealing to a hardcore developer audience. So that's the content and distribution side. And then lastly, I was gonna say is like, pricing, which we've kind of like, weaved in this whole thing. And I would continue to say, like, be flexible and be smart. And the founder really needs to own pricing. Do not outsource that to your GTM person or a consultant or anything like that.
[00:58:22] Speaker B: Sales.
[00:58:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Stay really, really clear on, like, pricing and be flexible. And that's why the founder needs. I was funny. That's how we started this whole thing. I was like, that's why the founder needs to have the conversations and lead on the sales piece, because they're really the only one who can, like, just kind of adjust the price.
[00:58:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Make the decision on the fly. Correct.
[00:58:43] Speaker A: If it's required.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: They're the only reason.
[00:58:45] Speaker A: So create great content. Be flexible with, like, creating content and getting someone to help you to do that. Focus on a few channels and get really good at them. Keep making your product excellent and be really flexible with pricing. That's the. That's the summary.
