Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 9

Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read last week.

Before you go there, consider joining my mailing list on Substack to allow me to reach you directly without jumping through LinkedIn's hoops. Substack readers get the newsletter in their inboxes every Saturday.

1. Varun Anand , co-founder of Clay , a modern enrichment platform, was on the 1 to 100 podcast by the Turpentine Network by Erik Torenberg . The part I liked was how they solved the cold-start problem by selling to B2B agency owners first, who felt the pain of data enrichment the most, and then piggybacking on their social proof to build a flywheel. This is the absolute classic example of the nail-before-you-scale GTM motion. What’s also insightful is that Clay helped these agency owners create marketing material that positioned both of them strongly.

…this guy, Pete Kazanjy, is a famous sales leader guy. He has this serving community called Modern Sales Pros. It has a bunch of sales leaders and salespeople on it.

At one point, I just looked through the last three or four years and messages in that group looking for people who had said anything smart about data enrichment and app found. And I found like 30 people who I thought said something smart about this topic in the last three years. And I reached out to all of them and I'm like, hey, you said this thing. I thought it was smart. I'm building a product about this. Will you talk to me? And basically almost all of them agreed to chat. And they kind of ran the gamut from sales leaders and marketing leaders to sdrs to marketing agencies to just junior marketing people.

And the only people that had any idea what I was talking about were these agency owners. And it kind of made sense in retrospect, because they're entrepreneurial, they are technical, they're building a business, and they feel the pain most acutely because they are doing data enrichment outbound across dozens of clients. Maybe it makes sense that they felt the pain most acutely.

And so that's why we started with that.

And when we started with them, we started to create this flywheel. And again, it was at a small scale, but we would help them get onboarded, we would help them be successful, we would help them see value. Then a lot of these agency owners were already posting content on LinkedIn to try and drum up interest about their own business. Then we helped them realize that content about Clay could be pretty lucrative for them, both because it positioned themselves as this expert pioneering this new way about this product that no one ever heard of, but also positioning themselves as an expert in being able to do this thing that everyone needs.

We would help them create this content, which then created this flywheel for people getting adopted into the product. We started with these agency owners, and a lot of them started to change their business models to be around clay, which then enabled us to find more people like them, which then became a distribution channel both through the content they created and also through their customers.        

2. Tyler Denk ?? , co-founder and CEO of beehiiv spoke to Banana Capital ’s Turner Novak on coming from behind in the newsletter space by (a) shipping at speed, (b) building in public and (c) shipping at 85% readiness.

We ship a lot of new features, and that comes from the insecurities of, yes, we launched, but we are missing 20 of the largest features that every other competitor has in this market. So the only way to be able to communicate that we are working on it is we ship as quickly as we possibly can.

We send an email to all of our users that says, hey, we just launched this feature, but it's custom fields or automation, so it sends a signal to users who probably were aware that you were missing that, like, hey, you don't need to churn. We now offer this. That's no longer a reason you need to churn. So it reassures the existing users.

But then we promote it on social, have a bunch of people share it, and it becomes like, now people who are looking at our product, but they're like, oh, they don't have automation yet. So I can't possibly move my email program over. That's very dependent on automation. Now that we projected into the broader ecosystem that we do offer that now it's lead jet people like, oh, they're like, they just launched something that was the blocker for me. So now I can move over.

Unless it's touching money or something that's like, very fragile. We knowingly ship things probably 80, 85% done. Not like, blatantly missing something, but not entirely polished because the last 10% takes so much time with guessing of how would a user use this? Or, like, what do you think they want to do where you can actually just short circuit all that by getting it in their hands and they'll tell you right away.

We launched our product today. We did four days of QA. I think it's pretty polished. And immediately ten people say, the thing that we weren't even thinking about is actually what we're missing. And so now we're addressing it today and tomorrow, and it'll be there. But we could have spent another three weeks trying to guess that and not got to the same conclusion. So I think there's an acceptance with good enough and getting in the user's hands where a lot of founders are scared of negative criticism. I send these product updates, I get 40 people telling me what's wrong with the feature. And rather than that hurting my ego, I just synthesize it, put it into a doc and send it to the engineers and they fix it. And like a week later I respond to them being like, hey, we addressed all those things.        

3. Shishir Mehrotra (founder and CEO of Coda /former Googler) was on the Behind the Craft podcast with Peter Yang . He introduced the framework he uses - PSHE - to identify leaders in the org who are better equipped to deal with chaos/ambiguity, something that’s always present in an early-stage startup.

The acronym is P S H E: Problem, Solution, How, Execution

So I can explain the concept. And this came out of a set of discussions when I was still at Google in 2011 or so, Larry took over. Larry Page took over as CEO and he got rid of the functional organization structure. And we had all these business units then, and YouTube became a business unit and so on. But one of the things that caused was some conflict around what do we, how do we decide who is a good product manager, engineer, so on, and keep it consistent across teams.

So let's imagine you're a junior product manager, and then the way we like to describe it is we hand you a problem, we hand you a solution, we hand you the how, and your job is just to execute. So it might be, we say, talk to this person, write this document, hold this meeting, do this research, whatever it might be, and you just have to execute on that plan.

At some point, you advance in your career, we hand you the problem, we hand you the solution, you figure out the how, and so you figure out, this is how the team should run and how the milestones should be set and how the cadence should work and so on.

At some point, we hand you the problem, and you have to come up with the solution and figure out how to solve that problem.

And at the top of this pyramid, we hand you the space and you have to come up with the problems.

I'd say, okay, so great. So who's the best person? And then they, the way they would describe it is, well, you know, so and so. She's definitely the best salesperson, you know, and I'd say, why? And they said, well. Cause she can handle anything. She can take a product that works and a product that doesn't work, a category that's growing, a category that's shrinking, you know, a region that's working, a region that's not working, a great team, a not so great team. And she'll just figure out the right problems, identify the right solutions, figure out how to implement those solutions, and then execute and deliver all those results.

And so since then, I've come to this framework, pshe, as not only a great way to judge product talent, but also as a way to judge people, employees generally. So I kind of use the same rubric everywhere.        

That’s all for this edition. Please join my mailing list on Substack for me to be able to talk to you without algo-driven platforms like LinkedIn stepping in-between.

thanks

Rohit