This is my friend Josh Lowman ??, and he just blew my mind during a 60min Zoom call.
He's solving a really hard problem at his firm Gold Front:
How do you take a product to market that has never existed before, and that people don't understand?
Turns out, the answer is: By mastering the art of category design and category strategy.
It just so happens that Parakeeto is creating a new category.
It's super exciting, nobody is doing what we're doing, the way we're doing it...
The only problem with that is, it's pretty confusing to people who are looking for a solution. They don't know what we are, what to compare us to, or where we fit in the giant puzzle of software, services, and internal roles.
I've been feeling stuck figuring out how to tell our story.
So who did I turn to for advice? Of course, my friend Josh (he's kind of THE guy when it comes to this)
I had a lot of revelations on that call, but LinkedIn's character limits mean I'll have to focus on just one.
It's a simple, but powerful question Josh asked me:
What's the ENEMY Parakeeto is fighting?
It's something every great category creator has to define:
- For Slack it was email
- For Salesforce it was traditional on-prem software
- For Uber it was taxis
But what's the enemy for Parakeeto?
After workshopping this for a while, we came to the realization that the enemy is something to the effect of:
The Siloed Agency (working title)
It's the outdated way of managing an agency, which treats New Business, Delivery and Finance as independent, siloed functions and data sets.
It assumes data flows linearly from sales to delivery, to finance, and that profit and insight about profit come out the other end.
All the technology, best practices, and existing solutions are clinging to this old way of thinking.
The thing is, anyone running an agency today knows this just isn't how it works... and how obvious that becomes when they try to use traditional tools and methods to manage their profitability.
They know the pain of implementing a PSA only to have the data and reports coming out of it be totally useless.
They know the pain of relying on the finance department to manage profitability, only to end up with 60-day-old reports that tell them nothing about why they're not profitable.
They know the pain of trying to build homegrown solutions out of spreadsheets and custom software only to end up with a perpetually half-baked, expensive piece of shit.
The inconvenient truth is: these three functions are part of an interconnected, constantly changing puzzle.
Information flows back and forth between them, and when something changes in one area it impacts the others.
The answer isn't to fight this reality. It's to embrace it using a more modern approach.
An integrated approach to profitability management...
Stay tuned for more on that idea ??
I only have a few characters left so I'll use them to thank Josh and encourage you to follow his incredible work ??
