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Telling the stories of startup founders and creators and their unique journey. Each episode features actionable tips, practical advice and inspirational insight.
Welcome to the Founders Journey Podcast. Inspiration Education for Founders by Founders hey, welcome back to the Founders Journey Podcast. Weekly curation in my normal circuit these days, I'm soon to be recording all of these things from airports. So I am sitting outside at LAX right now. So if it gets a little loud in the background, it's because a plane is landing about 30ft from you.
And if security comes, you know why.
I'm on the other side of security. Thank God. All right, so this week we're talking about listening to your customers as a startup. So important. And the first theme that we're going to talk about is really how the primary focus should be on solving your customers problems as opposed to anything else. Right. It's just got to be myopically focused on that, certainly at that early stage.
Yeah. So Max Walker is the founder of P Town Labs. He helps early founders accelerate product development for startups, but he really talks about putting customer problems first over investors and getting caught up in what investors are having.
You do a lot of people, when they get into the business of building a venture backed startup, lose the focus on solving a customer problem, building a product and shipping it, and start to focus on, especially at the early stages, growth and raising capital. And obviously those things are important. But if you don't build a useful product like no amount of VC backing, no amount of growth is going to actually help you because that growth will be temporary. People will stop using your product if it doesn't solve a real problem they have.
The other one that I think did a great job of talking about. This is Lily Valetta. She's the co founder of Culture Plus Group. We just had her on a couple of weeks ago. Culture Plus Group really focuses on helping Fortune 100 companies that activate around culture trends, right? Learning from them and actually taking action to drive growth through them. Talks about the same thing of really identifying what those customer problems are and then really targeting your solutions.
And what I tell founders or business leaders equally is just go do the homework. Where do you live? Where is the consumer and population growth coming from? What are their unmet needs and how do you fill those needs? And just don't be blinded to the fact that when you are inclusive in understanding everybody's needs and those segments that are driving growth, it's not just because you're excluding and segregating is you're just being smart.
Peter, I think you talked about this in a previous podcast, the actual first podcast I think we ever did, about the importance of really making sure that people are willing to pay you for what you're doing. I know you've talked a lot about this in the past.
Do what people are willing to pay you for. I've seen a lot of startups and mentored a bunch of them and they're.
Like, this is great.
I'm like, it's great, but I don't know if anyone is willing to pay for that. You kind of need. That's really important. I know the rest of it is fun.
Yeah. Having mentored a ton of startups and it's really just about knowing what is a customer willing to pay for.
Yeah. Second theme is really around understanding who your customer is on a deeper level and really what they want. Lisa, first Willis, good example. She was podcast about a year ago, CEO of Truevella. They provide performance management software for mostly hourly workers. So really cool business. And she talked about the importance of making customers a part of your product launch process, but particularly around making sure that customers are part of your testing process as you're releasing into beta before you go into full commercial release.
When building the product, not being so fast to put something out in the market until you have vetted it with end users. Right. That's such an important part of this process and one that we did from day one, which was putting this concept in front of a lot of different people and continuously getting feedback from the customer and the end user. EvEn today, the product's really been in the market for two years. Right. But in the last two years, any enhancements that we have made in the product have been based on end user feedback.
Another good soundbite is Jason Frar, who we actually interviewed this week. He's the CEO of Full Circle Insight. They provide marketing attribution software for clients, but he really talks about talking to the customer and they will give you everything you need in their own words.
Customer data is so important, and sometimes it's not programmatic data. You can go into Salesforce and look at it or whatever CRM system you're using. Sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and talk to the customer. Like, why did you choose us? Who did you look at? What do we do for you? Why do we do that for you? Where can we do better? Would you tell your friends? And what would you say if you told your friends about this? All that information is super rich in figuring out what keywords to use when you're buying ads or figuring out what your general strategy is. Maybe you thought your strategy again was over here, but you look and all your clients are buying it for a different reason. So that customer data, it's a gold. It's just absolute gold.
Yeah, absolutely. So easy to try to come up with all of this fancy messaging when we just ask customers exactly how they would describe it and just use that. Right. Third theme is making learning from your losses a part of the process. We always think about learning from the wins, customer wins, but really learning from those losses, I think. MARTIN Babnek, there's really kind of two types of losses that you see, right. One is sort of on the micro level, the individual losses, but the other is on the macro level when a market shifts out from under you. And Mark Babinek, founder of Tribet, who's one of the world's largest CEOs, now publicly traded New York Stock Exchange, talked about this, who talked about using customer trends and really understanding when those market shifts are occurring.
I'm one that looks at the longer term. I make a lot of my decisions based on macroeconomics and trends and feel that the best way to be a successful entrepreneur is to find trends that you can put wind to your back, so that as trends unfold, you're building something that could be more valuable a few years from now than maybe what's recognized by other people today. So I looked at the trends and the whole thing made sense to me.
Yeah. And Greg, you at Harvard actually did a really good job of looking at loss reviews of a customer that you didn't get. Why don't you talk about how you use that at Harvard?
Yeah, this is early days and continuing on. We really made part of that, doing loss reviews every time we had a loss that occurred in our sales pipeline. And unfortunately, if you got a great closer, you're still losing about 75 80% of them, being able to incorporate that into your process. So that after every loss, we're doing a full loss review with the prospect. One of the funny things that happens in enterprise sales is if you start to develop that relationship between the seller and the prospective buyer, they really are usually willing to give you incredible information about where the product efficiencies were, maybe where their pains are, that you didn't recognize, where a competitor may have beat you out. There's so many different things that you're really going to get.
And again, it just comes down to just simply asking to take some time. And it's really amazing when you incorporate those learnings into your process, what comes out of it?
You get a lot of good information from that. Like what are some of the things you learned?
What went wrong in the sales process. What are the pains that somebody had that we didn't understand? Where's our product just not meeting the market demand? Where's a competitor out flanking us? From a product standpoint, there's just so many different things that would come out of. It's like gold. So that's it for the Founders Journey podcast with the creation. Again, if you have a name that we can give this weekly thing, stick it in the comments. Take a second like this. Subscribe to the channel so more can see it. We will see you next week. Bye.
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