The Founder's Journey Podcast

What is The Founder's Journey Podcast?

Telling the stories of startup founders and creators and their unique journey. Each episode features actionable tips, practical advice and inspirational insight.

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:31:10
One of the, I think most impactful things that I ever did in my previous business, which all three of us were working together on back in the really early days of Outmatch before it was even outmatch it was checked. Dot com is that that mapping process, right? We we I know and Peter's the one who brought me to this like the three you two of us kind of sat down one day and you said, okay, like let's just look at, you know, we probably had five customers, ten customers at the time, right?

00:00:31:12 - 00:00:58:07
And let's just look at what they did every single step. And this was totally manual that they went through. And what we came down to was this kind of discovery, right. Today, you know, you look at it and say, well, that was the big discovery that you guys came up with. And I mean, the answer was yes. It was really big, which was we never closed a deal when there weren't more than three people involved in the buying process.

00:00:58:13 - 00:01:22:02
Yep. In our day, lost in our data and we lost every single deal where there wasn't a minimum of three. That was it. That was the insight. And then the first thing I mean, it was so important to show me all our open deals right now. So we went and tried to get that data right. Right. And there was a rep sitting next to us who was convinced that he was going to close this deal.

00:01:22:02 - 00:01:44:15
And Greg said, I'll bet you a steak dinner you don't close it because the data tells us you won't. Yeah. And you can imagine what happened, right? Yeah, yeah. He still owes me steak. That exact. I'm worth somewhere. He's listening to this, and I'm going to come collecting at one point, actually. But marketers don't talk about current customer information enough.

00:01:44:16 - 00:02:07:22
They don't talk about customer marketing enough. That's where all your information really is. And I try to make people look at my business and say, this is prospect. I don't call a prospect a customer. Right. Because customers, clients that that's their their own category. And you have to go in and look at that data. You can also look at prospect data and you can go look at search data, things like that.

00:02:08:00 - 00:02:25:23
But that 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?

00:02:26:00 - 00:02:47:17
What can 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 at all your clients are buying it for a different reason.

00:02:47:18 - 00:03:12:20
So that customer data is like it's a goal. It's just absolute gold. If you're just beginning right, you're in those early stages. You're really trying to figure out, do I have product market fit or do I have a marketing problem? Yeah. What is decipher between those two things? Yeah it is it is tricky because it's it's sometimes hard to believe the data that you see because you, you want it to be something that it may not be.

00:03:12:20 - 00:03:40:22
And so you're like, okay, I got to I got to believe data, right? Rather than believe myself. I look at it again, talking to your existing customer. So I'm making an assumption in this conversation that the company we're talking about has some customers. Yeah. To go to and talk to. Right. Yeah. And if it's, product led growth type situation, there's so much experimentation you can do to figure out where the product fits into the market.

00:03:41:00 - 00:04:02:18
Right. And and so it's if you've got customers start talking to them. If it's a more enterprise sort of hands on sale, if it's, freemium model, you know, product like gross ton of thing. They're just it's like lots of experimentation in short bursts to try to understand. You can test your marketing and you can test your product.

00:04:02:22 - 00:04:20:01
I mean, I think those are two, two key ways to do it. You've got to get your team on board with those short bursts of activity. So the team has to be able to be willing to say, yep, I sign up for a week of doing this, then we'll test it for a week. Then we'll change it. Right.

00:04:20:03 - 00:04:51:20
That really has to be a part. I know that's not part of marketing. That's more of a company leadership thing, but that's got to happen. Like people need to be on board with this idea of product market fit or marketing problem. You hit a thing that I see a lot, which, such as stuff that we've talked about, but it's when people are like this paralysis of what this perfect thing needs to be like before they execute it, and and then it's executed and then everyone's emotional upset about it.

00:04:51:20 - 00:05:21:22
Unknown
To your point. Like just just start doing something right. Yeah. You got to start. I, I was, I was at a startup, and we, we basically built a new product for a vertical that didn't really need the product. And we spent tons of time marketing this thing and having, like, no success. It was this conversation. Is that the is it the market?

00:05:21:22 - 00:05:41:10
Is it the product? I mean, the product worked. You know, you we could test it. We know like it's like the product wasn't broken. Just nobody in that particular vertical cared to to spend the money and cared to solve the problem that it was solving. It was really hard to see through that because the push was grow, grow, grow.

00:05:41:11 - 00:06:05:01
This one, this one product. And finally we got down to like, okay, after it was probably a year that we just all of us were just driving so hard, just stopped because we had been kind of beaten by that, by that market rather than here is a really simple, product that we could test very quickly and just give it to as many people as we could and see how it was used.

00:06:05:01 - 00:06:33:01
Would have been even just with no marketing at all, would have told us more about that market than all the keywords you could have. You could have got. Right? Just the conversation, them all tremendous lesson to learn, hard lesson to learn. But but super important. I think your advice of just get your product in the hands of as many people as you can, within what you believe to be your target market and just start collecting information, right?

00:06:33:01 - 00:06:55:04
Yeah. It's because, you know. Absolutely. Because there are if you get the right customer, you give it to the right customer and they use it and have great things to say. There are lots more like that customer out there who will pay you. So I think that's the other concern is like, well, wait, I can't give away my product without making money because I got to make some money because I got a business, I'm running and all that.

00:06:55:10 - 00:07:13:09
Unknown
But, you know, there are more people out there who are willing to pay it to give it to some people for free or, you know, whatever your version of free is. Yeah. We'll just you'll get so much good data with so much good data. It is one of those things that makes me just want to smash my head against the wall repeatedly.

00:07:13:09 - 00:07:35:17
Right? When you when when I talk to a founder who gets so wrapped up around pricing. Right. Well, I can't sell this to cheap. Nobody's going to value my product. No, actually, no one's going to know your product exists unless you get it out there and start collecting real data. Stop worrying about optimizing on those early customers around price, right?

00:07:35:17 - 00:08:02:13
Or even having the perfect message or anything like that. Get it into the market. Yeah, pricing is an excuse for a lot of inactivity and great, you know, because like, I don't have the ideal price. Well, I don't know that any product has the ideal price just based on how many prices change. And how much there is to I mean, an enterprise level, the discounting is insane.

00:08:02:15 - 00:08:15:11
Right. And and so I don't think anybody's got it right, which is okay. Just the faster you can learn, the better off we are.