You easily create a product or service which actually appeals to your chosen prospects.
You describe it in language which resonates with your audience.
You prevent wasting time on counterproductive work (which you can't know about without actually doing this first), both in your business processes and in any software you might build.
You make it much easier for people to buy what they already want (cha ching!)
Your customers immediately understand your product, which means they're more likely to buy it, get excited, and promote it afterwards
Your product's good reputation explodes naturally
You keep your whole team aligned around the customers' needs
Talk to your prospects. Intentionally don't sell them. Just learn about how they buy. How they live. What they need. That's it.
People like to buy, they hate being sold to. If you can engineer your whole sales and marketing process so that it's pleasant, engaging, and persuasive, you will have all of the above. You just need to ask. At the right time. In the right way.
Oh yeah, you'll also have a sales process that scales rapidly.
Seems like a big gain for so little work. High impact. Low effort.
Which reminds me…
There's a whole chapter going deep into exactly how to do this in Launch Tomorrow. What questions to ask…what order to ask them in…what to listen for…and most importantly how to find people to interview.
Grab your copy, and get crackin'.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
Named after a 13th century explorer, who bumbled his way in the dark from Europe to China (the center of all civilization at the time), the children's game hooks into something primal. It keeps kids engaged for hours at a time.
Marketer and designer Nathan Barry has previously pointed out that this game also serves as an analogy for call-response.
Direct response, even. You only want to be chasing after the Polos, and avoiding everyone else in the pool.
That's my kind of marketing.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
The Marco-Polo analogy holds really well for what it's like to enter a new market. You know there are people interested. You want to catch them, yet avoid everyone else.
You just need to figure out how to reach the "Polos". Speak to them. Hook into what interests them.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
There's three more twists, though, compared to shouting "Marco" in a pool:
You can use any medium you want to reach them, not just yelling at the top of your voice: advertising, free content, phone calls, events, or anything else.
You can optimize what you say, not just "Marco", to attract & identify the "Polos".
You can be really smart about choosing the first "Polos" you want to pursue.
This is exactly the situation you're in, when launching a product. I call it medium-market-message match. The 4Ms. 😀
Choosing a channel and message and market can feel like choosing an elevator
Choosing media is an interesting game. Essentially, you're tapping into other people's existing audiences, and putting a message in front of them. Depending on how relevant that message is for that particular audience, more people will "convert". And then you can be smart about who you actually go after.
Pol-ah, you got me.
And the best way of testing these combinations?
Why, never thought you'd ask.
Landing Page MVPs.
There's a good book on this topic called Launch Tomorrow. Arguably, I'm not the best person to judge that, since I wrote it. But I'm right anyway–this time.
It goes into constructing constructing tests around the 4Ms. Put all of your ducks in a row.
Catch the "polos" who are keen to hear what you have to say.
Even better, build products which are popular with lots of "polos".
There are a number of ways to think about designing a business. There is the traditional business plan, which is defined up front and then used as an accountability mechanism. There is the business model canvas, where things are mapped out and tested one by one, until you get to a decent and self-sustaining business.
The Business Model Canvas as way to articulate a business model
And then most recently, Megan Macedo pointed out that business forms are useful as business prototyping tools. In other words, in what form does your business show up? What structure does it have? And what is the resulting customer experience? This is largely defined by setting certain boundaries and then converging on something specific.
Creative Forms
The original source of this “WhatIf” was her own creative process. The benefits of creative form are easiest to understand by starting there.
For example, the sonnet. 14 lines. Iambic pentameter. Like it, love it, or despise it, it is a very particular structure. And it has been used to get across different types of messages: love, coming of age, nature. The form was the same, but with very different messages, reader experiences, and external outcomes.
Or the Haiku. Also a clear structure of 5-7-5. Used for a large variety of messages.
Novels and non-fiction books have a form, too. And some are better than others. Frameworks like Story Grid help authors create a structure or form that feels intuitive. Or authors like John McPhee literally map out a novel’s structure visually before writing it–as part of the creative process.
Or song lyrics. Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus etc.
From a business perspective, your key business slogan could live in any of the above forms. A podcast intro. A business novel like the Goal. Probably even a sonnet if you gave it a proper shot.
You can choose to broadcast a message across in any of the above forms. And they could work, or not. In other words, the form doesn’t tie down the message to anything in particular, but as the delivery mechanism–it’s part of the message. And part of the audience experience.
Physical Forms
Or physical forms, to get a bit more concrete. For example, at the moment, the main form my business exists in is that of my book, Launch Tomorrow. In fact, it is only sold at the moment in electronic form. So the “physical form” is that of a kindle. That is the main way customers experience Launch Tomorrow.
Consulting is another form Launch Tomorrow exists in. At the moment, consulting is remote only for reasons outside of my control. So the physical form there is a computer screen and headphones.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
These are physical objects that structure the business, without really tying down the “content” of the business.
Each of these delivery vessels also imply a way of finding customers, and who those customers are, and pricing structure, and all the rest of it. There are lot of assumptions that everyone has around any given physical object. So choosing a physical form piggy backs on those assumptions, and makes the experience more tactile.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
Megan Macedo tells a good story about Doug Sohn, who ran a gourmet hot dog stand in Chicago. He wanted to make sure that everyone had the experience of eating amazing food, even if it was a hot dog. He’d work long hours, charge low prices given the quality of what he was doing, and pretty quickly had a long line of customers at his stand.
He didn’t go for the big location scale-up, or turn his business into a franchise, or follow any other received wisdom around the restaurant business. He just did his thing.
He did write a book, as a passion project. He later opened up a second stand near the local Cubs baseball stadium. Probably due more to his wanting to be with the fans than purely a foot traffic (read:business logic) thing.
And then, one day after many years, he closed shop. He’d had enough. Just wanted to do something else.
We choose our own containment
The key message I found in Doug’s story is that we choose our own containment. And it can be liberating–a way to create something unique. It might not be the “go big or go broke” approach which VCs will expect you to take, as laid out Peter Thiel’s Zero To One. But it can be a lot more rewarding and fulfilling.
In Doug’s case, the business form was a hot dog stand. And he really played it out. until the end. Trying things which hot dog stand owners wouldn’t, like offering gourmet food. Thus becoming unique. And globally famous, since a lot of his customers were tourists who’d just come to have one of his hot dogs, sometimes even as repeat customers.
This story also shows how all of the traditional advice around business can be a type of containment. A form, in and of itself. One which some people will love, others will feel imprisoned by. And Doug knew himself enough to make sure that his successful business existed as an extension of his life, and not the other way around.
Isn’t is all artsy-fartsy clap trap?
You’re probably thinking that I’ve been in lockdown for too long by now.
From a traditional business lingo perspective, the form is the product. How something is productized. You need to accept design constraints to create it. And then turn it into a both a delivery mechanism. And ultimately, a customer experience.
Source: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
In terms of software or technology, Geoffrey Moore’s Whole Product model shows how much more there is to “product” than just getting the technology bits and bytes to work. Of course, having a working technology is a necessary condition to reach early adopters. But as you start scaling the product up and out to the larger market, you will need all of the above to make the product usable and relevant. So that it “sticks” in the customer’s world.
Essentially, we are talking here about the form that a customer engages with it.
Is it a SaaS app?
Is there a community of power users in forums to help answer questions?
Is it available via the App Store?
Do you need a particular type of cable to get it work?
How do you configure it and apply it in your particular case?
These are all “form” decisions, in the context of a technology product. And notice that most of them don’t require deep engineering knowledge, even though they are super relevant to customers. If anything, they require a deep knowledge of customer needs.
Taking advantage of the momentum
Like Doug, we need to choose our own box, before starting to think “out of the box”. This is just as much a note to self, as anything. That simple act of choosing is paradoxically empowering.
Aligh Remotely, a book on remote team leadership
Taking my own advice, the form that I am exploring is that of audio, for my upcoming book Align Remotely. This is a book to share my experience in managing remote teams, which will hopefully come in handy during the lockdown (and whatever remote friendly regime we’ll have afterwards). I’ve spent close to a decade either participating in partially or fully remote teams as a software guy and author. And most recently, I ran a remote program for a client, with 3 sub-teams of around 30 people.
At the moment, I am starting to release it for free, chapter by chapter, on LeanPub. Or pay what you want, if you insist. Eventually, there will be a lower bound of the price; but it’s free for now.
From a “forms” perspective, if you grab a copy, you will get details of how to get the audio form of the same content.
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.
About to start a greenfield project?
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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.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
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
