The biggest challenge when introducing a new product is establishing a connection with your audience. Often, this is because you can’t do anything else until this is in place. This detail really hit home for me, when I went to an accelerator event in Mexico.
One of the speakers was an immunobiologist client of mine, who’d developed a unique salmonella vaccine that could be combined with other vaccines. And it looks as though his vaccine is the only salmonella one which can do that.
I’d worked with him briefly as an innovation expert, and had a discussion about commercialization options as well as some pitch training. At the time he was struggling to see entrepreneurship as a viable route to greater impact. He felt comfortable as an inventor, and wanted to do more of that, not become a businessman.
It turned out I had unleashed a force of nature. Also drilling him in giving pithy explanations helped him hone down his message to something much more concrete for anyone who wasn’t already a fellow immunobiologist, or even a scientist. This one insight allowed him to communicate the relevance of his work to the wider public.
But more importantly, he started to believe that entrepreneurship was a viable route to greater impact. As it would force him to confront institutions that held him and other scientists back domestically.
As a result of both, he’s pretty much gone from a booksy academic researcher to a serious contender in getting funding to help spread the use of his product vaccine. This is the power of relevance and empathy in an age of dwindling attention.
One of the best ways to get (and stay) relevant is to focus all of your marketing and product efforts around a client profile. In theory there are millions of ways to reach an audience; in practice, you only need to reach a specific group of people. So figure out who they are, and then just focus on them. The best way to do this is the Hero Canvas tool. Grab a copy and get a quick intro for free with my Hero Canvas course.
Going back to revisit my old post The Myth of the Startup Garage, I wanted to verify my statements quantitatively. In that post, I argue against garages as this magic place where entrepreneurship starts.
It’s true that the majority of new businesses do start in the founders’ home. Scott Shane cites that a residence, such as the home or garage is the most common place a new business is started (48% of new businesses start there). However, when measured over a 5 year period, less than 5 percent of home-based businesses move out of the founders’ home. So while the garage is a common starting place, it’s sadly a common resting place for new businesses.
Also, I argued against the idea that founders are these young whiz kids, as portrayed in the startup glossies. Depending on the actual study, the average age of successful tech startup founders is 35-42 according to the Startup Compass report, not the typical college dropout narrative in the media. If you look outside tech startups, the picture is even more stark. Founders in their 50s are 3x more likely to start a successful business.
As for coming up with the idea, reality is also a bit nuanced; startups start with what and how they know, but are open to searching for opportunities:
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) showed that 61% of new businesses serve the same or similar customers as their founders’ previous employers
66% were in a similar product line. (source: also NFIB)
70.9% indicated that the identification of their business opportunities wasn’t a “one-time thing” but instead unfolded over time. (source: Hills and Singh)
46.9 % of new firm founders indicated their business ideas changed between the time they first identified them and the time when they were surveyed about them. (source: Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics)
Looking at the actual data is the basis for getting a good grip on what is actually happening. So there is your weekly dose of reality.
One of my natural tendencies as a creator is to create broccoli products. Namely, products which I think people should consume, and which are good for them, but which they don’t want to consume. Imagine a loud voice in your head saying “Eat your broccoli”. Even though I initially felt queasy about foisting my sense of obligation on others, now I realize broccoli products are best placed placed further down the customer journey. Existing customers will be more open-at that point-to engaging with you. And you earn the satisfaction of truly serving your customers.
At first, I thought landing page testing served to filter out my broccoli product ideas. This is what landing page testing is designed to do: optimize a single step in a journey. If each step is optimized, then the whole system is optimized. Using real data about actual preferences, not declared or imagined ones. But I’m beginning to realize that isn’t necessarily true in this case.
A big factor in successful journey design is knowing where to put which piece. The order of operations. Remember grade school arithmetic, where 2+3*4 wasn’t the same as 3+2*4. All the same parts. And the same operations. But they give a different outcome.
Lead with something that addresses an immediate pain point. Then fully solve the (small) problem for them. Then upsell them on broccoli. Or something else. But at least you have their attention and you’ve earned your credibility, rather than trying flash in the pan trickery to extract their credit card details.
The initial offer can’t be a “should have” but a “must have”–in their opinion. And it needs to address a current issue the prospect is actually having. Without this, your front-end conversion will be a lot lower than it could be. But after that, you have a lot more leeway.
While fiddling around during the lockdown, I decided put together a Spotify playlist of songs I like, and that I found inspiring as a founder. Even though I have a reasonably eclectic taste in music, my roots will always be in rock. Rock and 80s hair metal were the audio backdrop to my mis-spent teenage years.
Just to call it out explicitly, I’m not really a fan of Gary Vaynerchuck “hustle” or Grant Cardone’s “massive action”. Being deliberate first matters (to me) a lot more, so you don’t fritter away lots of pointless energy. By nature, I’m more of a systematic strategist, which I think appeals to the deep tech founders I enjoy working with.
The theme song of my entrepreneurial style
In my own case…
If there was a theme song for my own style of new product development, it would probably be “Learning to Fly” by Pink Floyd.
Learning to Fly was released and massively popular right when I was still a pre-teen. You couldn’t not hear it on the radio for a period of a few months. It was the first time I was away from my parents for a few months, living abroad in Montreal with my family to pick up French. I had autonomy to explore and learn in a completely foreign environment. Safely.
Learning to fall in a safe environment, before going skydving
And I had no idea what I was in for. I had the hormonal excesses of teenager-dom ahead of me. But this song nonetheless just kept playing over and over in my head. That song is ultimately full of hope and possibilities and everything I feel when starting a new business.
This song nails the feeling of entrepreneurship for me, at least my style of it. Initially difficult, but slowly through consistent effort and system building, everything eventually works. And I take off.
Also, it articulates one of the Launch Tomorrow core messages: test and validate before you expand. Especially when working from first principles. And when you do expand, keep testing in your growth until it really takes off.
You need to learn how to fly, before you can try achieving escape velocity. In fact, going for escape velocity before you know how to fly is the fastest path to a crash. There’s lot’s of advice on the details, but premature scaling is a real thing, especially among venture funded startups.
The Montgolfiers’ balloon
Flight was one of those seemingly impossible tasks for humanity, until about 100 years ago. The best of us, including:
Da Vinci’s sketches during the Renaissance
the Montgolfiers launching a duck, a rooster, and a sheep to impress King Louis in 1783
Sir George Cayley building a manned glider in 1849 to fly his coachman down a hill
the Wright Brothers finally achieving manned flight in 1903 on the sandy dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
We needed all of this to happen first, before Robert Goddard could starting thinking about how to conquer escape velocity, and come up with the idea of a rocket.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
Why manned flight is a good analogy for the early stage
Source: Wikipedia
Arguably, it was the Wright Brothers figured out where it mattered most: getting humans in the air. Through systematic experimentation, they pulled it all together. There were a lot of instruments, a wind tunnel, and lots of prototypes until they figured out how to use the shape of a wing to lift a much heavier plane (that happened to be carrying a person too).
You don’t want to just jump off a cliff without knowing what you are doing, and the only way to truly know is through systematic experimentation.
At least until the coronavirus pandemic, we largely took flying for granted. But it’s one of the most amazing discoveries every achieved. And spawned an entire industry as a side effect.
What song do you find motivating?
Feel free to check out the full playlist on Spotify, and give it a whirl. And let me know in the comments or via email about any songs or playlists you find motivating, powerful and helpful, as I am curious. And I might want to nab and add it to my own playlist. 🙂
Recently I’ve been revisiting the launch and pivot process in my research, in an effort to help founders and innovators change strategic direction in their business. Here is an old piece I wrote that should give you concrete metrics to track your progress. These were specifically chosen to be relevant, independently of what budget is available (and thus hopefully make it more relevant nowadays.
VCs and startup investors often say they’re looking for hustle in early stage founders. But that feels vague. And honestly, on its own, it’s not particularly useful feedback. More of a sophisticated way to end a pitching session they don’t want to be hearing.
Until now.
There are a few leading indicators you can use to keep yourself accountable, and to make sure you actually are hustling (and you’re not falling for your own PR).
The following four operating metrics say a lot about an early stage startup’s chance for success.
1. Number of pitches
A critical leading indicator metric of early stage success is how many pitches are you making each day (even if you aren’t trying to sell)? By “pitch”, I mean any attempt at asking someone for something, even if it’s just information. For example, this could mean approaching prospects for customer discovery or customer development interviews.
If you are making them, then you are learning more about your audience and iterating towards something that is likelier to work. Also, you are converting some people, which means that you can then continue to build on that as time goes on. This includes:
both outbound pitches, whether for sales or for customer interviews,
inbound marketing, such as free content you create which you need to put in front of your target audience.
advertising (impressions)
With inbound, unless if you already have an audience, usually requires some form of gatekeeper pitching or payment. You to pitch media owners, journalists, editors to get coverage. Or you create content and just pay for advertising.
And then pay attention to any response you get.
At some point after you’ve done this for a while, you’ll know what people want and how to reach them and roughly how to sell them. At that point do it yourself a little bit and then it makes sense to delegate it to a professional salesperson to improve your closing ratios (if you need one).
That’s actually a pretty good metric, because it’s a leading indicator for all learning. And learning is the #1 goal of startup, in order to stop being a startup, and to discover a business model which works.
Notice how I’m not really including the “number of failures” or “failing fast”. That’s repeated so often in tech circles it’s become hollow and meaningless. I think being able to deal with rejection is possibly more important than being able to deal with “failure”, certainly in the tech startup world. Because even in technology the most important decisions that affect your startup or are made by people (customers, prospective co-founders, prospective employees).
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To be fair, not every founder is a natural salesperson. But every serious founding team needs to be willing and able to face lots of rejection in order to go after their vision. In fact, the number of rejections a founder is willing to take is a good measure of how strongly they believe in their vision, product, or goal. If you have a goal you believe in, but you’re only willing to be rejected 10 times before you give up on it, you can easily end up being a genius in your own mind but giving up almost immediately once you start doing anything related to marketing.
2. Number of experiments
Another related metric is how many experiments are you running each week? If this is not at least 1, you are not going to get very far. Or other startups who are will run circles around you. Or you are trying to cram too much into one test, not really telling you anything useful.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
This is more of a product or operational metric. Basically, the more thorough and organized you are with this, the faster you will learn what you need to know. It never ceases to amaze me, how documenting my own hypothesis and metric before running an experiment is very useful, when interpreting the result. Because it’s so easy to twist the results into what you want them to mean.
Most of the major technical breakthroughs result from lots and lots of experiments. They explore an area or technology with a lot of unknowns, including “unknown unknowns”. That’s why they’re surprising for everyone outside the founding team. Here’s a breakdown of roughly the number of experiment trials required to create a certain type of invention, based on patent filings.
numbers of experiments needed to achieve a breakthrough product
While this looks only at technology, the same principle is true in the case of proving the business model and finding a growth engine. By focussing only on tactics, you end up using exactly the same tactics as everyone else. So if everyone is reading the same 3-4 sources for ideas and trying exactly the same tactics at the same time, the tactics tend to quickly become useless. This the law of shitty clickthroughs happening–one growth hack a time. It’s so difficult and yet so vital to differentiate, if you are using exactly the same tactics as everyone else in your industry. Growth or business level experiments, and lots of them, are the only way to really discover an effective way of growing a startup.
Also, if you aren’t running any experiments, you are only delaying “learning moments”. And if you do ultimately fail for one reason or another, it’s because you’ve delayed so many “learning moments” for so long, that reality comes crashing down on you. And usually this results in the Dunning Kruger effect. You are just clueless, and being confident in what you’re doing only makes it harder to discover you are actually clueless. It’s also a different way of looking at cycle time, which is an important indicator for people like Sam Altman of YCombinator.
3. Back to basics with customer empathy
Many of the pivots required by the crisis require a change of customer type. Or at minimum a focus on a particular niche that currently have a lot going on. Like hospitals. Or Supply chains. Or Agriculture and food.
In that context, do you really understand your audience as well as they do themselves? Do you know their needs? Wants? What they dream about at night? Who they’re influenced by? What questions they have? What media they consume? What they typically do? What obstacles they struggle with?
Do you as the founding team empathize with the customers? Do you gather and systematize data on what they say and how they behave (as an indicator of subconscious needs)? Do you have a system for doing so, like Adrian Howard’s iterative personas and/or a hero canvas?
If you really have this covered, it will help you build something people want. It will help you do channel testing to discover how to reach them cost effectively. It will resolve many types of conflict among your own team, if you agree to formulate a test, and then gather data to prove which approach, option, or decision is right.
Your entire business model depends on it.
Most frequently, either founders aren’t aware of how important this is, or if they are, they only use this if they think it will further their own agenda (for example improving the user experience, regardless of the wider business context).
4. Goal setting and delegation
Probably another really big one is lame goal setting as a founding team, which impacts your ability to ship anything, particularly at the early stages. Knowing what you want to accomplish and giving your team deadlines. This is kind of related to:
succumbing to distractions (bight and shiny object syndrome)
indefinitely being stuck in learning mode
inability to delegate work.
Drifting along indefinitely is not good. And this is often left implicit, avoiding difficult discussions, and ultimately festering and resulting in things like cofounders leaving, etc.
If you really want to build a startup, at some point, you need to finish stuff as well as just learn. Which means you always need target completion dates, or at least timeboxes. In the early stages, these will tend to be very tactical and short term, because you are learning and you don’t want to commit to a “five year plan” if you don’t have any reason to do so, like revenue or traction.
Even if it means have a clear goal of what you want to accomplish in the next 2 week sprint and what that matters, that will help a lot. And also having everyone on your team agree that this is your goal, and how you will track it (so that it is objectively observable).
Admittedly, at first your only goal is to learn. But shifting slowly into execution mode, is inevitable as you start proving parts of your business model.
Most of the internal problems that I see with early stage startup founders boils down to variations of one of these four factors.
Key Takeaways
The 4 key areas to achieve a successful pivot during the lockdown are:
Number of pitches or contact points with new customers
Number of experiments you are running
Revisiting your customer segments and re-establishing empathy
Setting clear goals you and your team can work towards
