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We follow the journey of Faith Forster as she creates an AI native tech startup & product.
Welcome back to Building Out Loud with me, Randy Silver and
Faith Forster:James Foster.
Randy Silver:And this week, we have a special guest as well. Chad, you and Faith used to work together before this project. So can you just give us a little bit of an introduction, please?
Chad Butz:Faith and I worked together at a business called Dex, where I was the VP of Product Marketing and Faith was my partner in crime as the VP of the Product organization. We joined up two weeks apart and our mission at the time was to make product marketing and product work together well. And I'd say we became friends throughout that process and and managed to stay friends, which is as much a result as anything else.
Randy Silver:And Faith, you got to a certain point in this project where you decide you need Chad's help. What was the impetus?
Faith Forster:Having done a startup before, one of the big issues I had with my previous startup was the branding was really not great. Didn't tell a good story at all. And so I knew if I was gonna do something like this again, I wanted to make sure that there was a really strong brand from the start. And having worked with such good product marketing people before, I knew how important this understanding of the ICP, the value prop, and the messaging around that is. And if we can get that right the beginning, that puts us in a much stronger position.
Faith Forster:I was having a conversation with Chad and then said, look, I've got this idea. Any chance you'd be interested in helping shape it from the beginning? And he very generously said he would.
Randy Silver:So you said getting it right from the beginning, but you were telling me earlier that one of the first things you did together was work on the name. Tell us about that.
Chad Butz:Product marketing one zero one is we tend to look at a number of things working together as a system. You wanna look at your positioning, which is what's this product for? What problems are trying to solve? What space is it sitting in? What's it up against?
Chad Butz:You want to convert that into to a value proposition that sits at the top, which is ultimately, if we had to say this in a short space of time, how would we talk about the value that we're actually trying to deliver? You'd break that out into messaging that you would tell to different audiences, And then you need a name that sits on the top of that and brings it all together. So one of the things you have to do when you're creating a product is get to a name. We also have to do the work of just making sure it's gonna fit within a system. And you ask a number of questions.
Chad Butz:That's fundamentally about how are we going to take this idea that's going to come from a problem that faith has lived and experienced herself very personally, and they're going to flip that to a story and a name that's going to appeal to others who are going to say, that person and that product and that business, they get us. They're talking about something that I've felt myself.
Randy Silver:Did the first name idea work?
Chad Butz:Absolutely not. No, naming, it's only becoming more difficult. So you come up with a name that's available, that fits the brief, that's gonna be short, that's gonna be concise, in which you can protect from an IP point of view, which you can buy a domain name. So we went down, I would say, least half a dozen very excited directions thinking we had nailed it only to find out that it wasn't something we could protect or there was an unfortunate competitor that we hadn't spotted right away that's already got it or the domain wasn't available. That's just the way you have to approach naming is you never go with one.
Chad Butz:You've got to have half a dozen that you think are plausible because something's usually gonna kill four or five of those in the process.
Randy Silver:Faith, you told me about one of the names.
Faith Forster:We're running with Discoveree. This took quite a number of conversations to get to this point and understanding. It really came through from the conversations I was having with different product leaders as validation conversations about the problem space in general. From a value proposition, there's two areas we could really focus on. One was the gathering of the data and using AI agents to help make that a lot easier and quicker to do.
Faith Forster:Or the second one was then really aligning the product teams and what they're delivering and where you're focusing back to value. It all sits in that sort of discovery part of the process.
Chad Butz:There's lots of different naming types. We looked branded names. We looked at descriptive names. We looked at longer names. We looked at shorter names.
Chad Butz:We looked at ones that had a little bit of a foreign sounding slant on it because you can get a bit more name availability. But when Faith was talking about Discoveree, it had enough of a term to sound like a branded memorable term. It had a bit of memorability behind it with a subtle shift on the spelling. So and that's what you look for. It's not rocket science.
Chad Butz:It's a very simple shift, which makes it memorable. But the other point for me was it planted Faith's product idea very much in the space that we thought there was most valuable. You know, product teams do a lot, but one of the fundamental problem points is when you're a product manager or you're a chief product officer, you're time poor. You've got a lot of noise. You've got a lot of stuff coming out.
Chad Butz:It's very difficult to make sense of the signal within the noise of of that information gathering stage. That first upfront piece of work around Discoveree, that part of the process, getting that right is what sets you up for all the successes going forward. If you haven't chosen the right thing at the start, you're working on the wrong problem. And there was a statement that Faith made really early, I wrote down everyone with, and it was, you can't prioritize what you can't see. And if you can't see what's most valuable in all the noise in that discovery process, every step you take after that's going to be wrong.
Chad Butz:So I thought it just planted the product in the part of the process that makes everything else work.
Randy Silver:That goes really nicely into the next part. So you've got the name. How do you approach the messaging around it? Was that one line? Is that the basis of messaging for you, or is there something else that you do?
Chad Butz:I often do look for that one critical insight, and it often comes out the person's mouth and their own words in the way they felt the problem. And that was faith in us revisiting both our experience at Dex, but also face other experience and just saying, you have product managers who are trying to juggle so much workload, usually with small teams. They've got input coming from everywhere, from sales teams. It could be coming from executives. It could be coming from research.
Chad Butz:And Faith is just talking about how difficult it is to separate out what's valuable and answering this question of what should we build next. So that insight of you can't prioritize what you can't see if you can't separate signal from noise. That's what I look for. And then you're running. My job is to usually then take this into something that's a product story to a human story and really start to unpack what are we trying to do when we talk about this product to someone else.
Chad Butz:You wanna clearly describe what it is and what it does. But if you want people to take notice, you've got to reflect their problems and their pains. You've got to put it in a way that says, that's the thing that I'm struggling with. So what we looked at with the messaging is product managers being overwhelmed with volume, being overwhelmed with input, having too many tools, giving too many pieces of information, but none of them giving you prioritization. That's the difference.
Chad Butz:And then if you bubble that up to somebody who's the chief product officer, who's probably gonna be the one who makes the buying decision, although the product managers may be using it, that person is the fundamentally, what their job is making sure that the company strategy and the company's commercial objectives are translated through product value. So they're on the hook to make sure that their team is building the right thing. There are human beings wrestling with these problems and trying to put the messaging in a place where they see themselves in the way that we talk about the product.
Randy Silver:How long do you stick with that initial hypothesis of a message? Because this is something that obviously the two of you worked on together, but I know April Dunford talks about how your customers or potential customers will tell you what your positioning is. And I know a messaging expert, Diane Weirdo, who once told me, it's awfully hard to read the label when you're inside the bottle. And the two of you on this, you're very much inside the bottle. Does this messaging usually survive contact with other people?
Randy Silver:Does it evolve? Do you stick with it? What's what's the approach?
Faith Forster:We'll probably change the messaging again shortly to take it more from what would typically be a SaaS offering. This is what it does. Take it or leave it, to here's a toolkit and a set of data, set of information, set of agents that can help you that you then use to make them work the way you want to work. Still covers the same problem areas and jobs to be done, but it's a slightly different positioning in terms of how we support them to do that.
Randy Silver:Once you've got all that, it's then the execution of it. You're putting together your initial website and everything else. How do you approach that?
Faith Forster:Chad and I would have some conversations, bounce ideas. He was quite heavily using Claw to help sort of frame that and turn those into some options that have been properly considered. And he gave me a document that says, Here's your outline for your website. And honestly, I just wanted to upload it to a tool and have it done because that's now what I'm quite used to having. I went to Squarespace because I already had a website on Squarespace.
Faith Forster:They in theory have an AI agent, but it just does not work that way at all. I just found it so frustrating having to sit there and put these blocks and do these bits. It felt like I'd gone back to the dark ages. There's a website there. It works, but it's pretty clunky.
Faith Forster:And so I think I'll actually do it again, shift the messaging slightly, and I'll probably do it through Lovable. I think in that case, I could just upload the messaging and the website appears.
Chad Butz:There's two parts. We consciously tried to use AI. We're two people trying to do the heavy lifting without getting bogged down and having to write lots of copies. We actively said, let's lean on the tools. And you do find out that the tools get you pretty far.
Chad Butz:They might get you 75%, but that last 25% can still be a bit of a slog. But it did get us pretty far pretty quickly. I think part of your question was about how do we sort of translate the messaging, and you have to make some choices about what job you're actually trying to do. If you're gonna build a website or a landing page, describe the product very clearly upfront. If people don't get what this is very quickly, they're gonna move on.
Chad Butz:If they can't put it in a box that says, I either have that and I'd be thinking about replacing what I have or I don't have that and I should continue looking because it's a gap I need to fill. If leaving you're them going, I don't really know what that is, so I don't know what box to put it in, you've lost them. Nothing else really works. There's a statement on the top banner that says Discoveree is. Right?
Chad Butz:And getting that set of words will remain to be tested, but you want people to go, I get that. I can I can mentally put that in a box? So that's job number one. You also need to get enough intrigue value in there as well. So there's also a statement that says, know which features drive value before you invest.
Chad Butz:It's just enough of a question to go, yeah, that's a pain I felt before. I felt like I've been guessing, and I felt like I've run away spending time and money on things before I was sure.
Randy Silver:You just mentioned testing a moment ago. You're at an early stage with this. You don't have something sellable at this point. What's your metric of success? How are you defining whether this works or not at this stage?
Faith Forster:So the reason I wanted to get it up was because I was talking at an event. I wanted to have some way that people would go if they wanted to find out more. But this wasn't the focus of the talk. There is a way on there that you can sign up to join the waitlist, but I haven't in any way actively promoted this. So I haven't had any signups and I'm not surprised because I've not made it discoverable yet, really.
Faith Forster:I am not far off having the first version of the product ready to test. So I will start talking about it a lot more. The first round of testing is really just making, because it is all built in an AI native tool. I'm expecting a whole lot of bugs. So just getting people to help me with that first before we even sort of get onto is the product doing the right thing in the right way.
Randy Silver:That's talking about testing the product itself. I'm curious at this point, and when you're doing that testing, you're probably doing it with people you know and people you already have contact with. But the marketing has to speak to people that you know as well as people you don't. So how do you test that at this stage?
Chad Butz:So I would say Faith is probably one of the most in the customer's face product people that I've worked with. Faith was taking the concept out when she had a couple of sentences to describe it. She was then knocking up prototypes and getting it in front of people super quickly and getting feedback. Lots of people hold on to it. Faith gets it in front of people really quickly, and she was feeding me back the raw notes from those calls.
Chad Butz:So that's not quite the same as going out doing message testing, but I'm taking quotes from what people said and how they reacted and the problems they felt. And sometimes you can overcomplicate this job of product marketing. Sometimes you should just write what they say. And when you take it back to the landing pages, if you sort of start to go down, it's going, you're guessing which features will drive revenue. Are you finding it difficult to identify and compare and prioritize opportunities?
Chad Butz:Are you lacking confidence in where the commercial value is on your roadmap? Those are lifted from the exact things that some of the CPOs and product people that Faith was talking to. So for me, you get some of the testing before you've even written the word if you've gone out and had those human conversations.
Faith Forster:Once I've got a working version, I'll go back and talk to these people again and ask them again, how would you describe this? What problem do you think this is solved? We'd refine it on that basis.
Randy Silver:Did a startup before and had some experiences at at large organizations. I'm curious, how has this process been different than last time you tried the startup route?
Faith Forster:Gosh, completely different. I know what I'm doing now. When I did my startup, I had not done a tech business ever. I feel like I was learning everything the hard way. I have a lot more experience.
Faith Forster:I have a lot more very knowledgeable people like Chad that I can draw on as I need to. It's a little bit of a different approach. Some of the questions Chad was asking earlier on were really great questions around the ICP and what the sales process would likely be and what sort of price range are we talking? And some of those cool questions around the business model, which I'm still not sure about actually, Whether I wanna turn this into an actual startup or keep it as a side project or get investment and go big, I really don't know what I wanna do with it just yet.
Randy Silver:Yeah. But we're not gonna about that this week. That's in the next episode.
Faith Forster:Yeah. That's a that's a whole topic in itself, But that really changes things. Whereas before, I was very committed. This is a sign up. I've investment.
Faith Forster:You have to make it work. Right? Whereas at the moment, I'm still very open to the fact that this is not interesting enough or different enough to what already exists that it's of particular value. It's a very different approach. And I think just having the AI tooling now, I couldn't create a working product without getting proper investment.
Faith Forster:It was too expensive. I've been able to create something in a number of weeks that I can get people actually using and seeing what they think. So the level of commitment doesn't have to be as high now.
Randy Silver:Chad, any last thoughts?
Chad Butz:I've taken a business from start up to exit and signed my house against the bank guarantee in the process of doing so. So I know how much of a leap it is to put your heart and soul in something and your finances and your time and decide to not take a job and build a product. So one of the best parts about this is let's get to a name, let's get to landing page, let's get to some messaging. But the big piece for me when I'm thinking about a founder is actually helping a founder get to confidence and just playing back to go, is it a bit like this or is it a bit like this? And have you thought about this?
Chad Butz:And can I just push you in this way? And they go away and you see the confidence build and you see the clarity start to come out. And then you see them go, I've got it. And we're not quite there, but at certain steps, Faith going, I know what this is and just that confidence to then go out. Because it's a big commitment to do this, and I think that's one of the best parts of working at this early stage is seeing a founder get to, I have something here that I can run with.
Chad Butz:So, yeah, that's been fun, and I really enjoy that process. Fantastic.
Randy Silver:Well, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. That's all for this week, but we teed up the subject for next week if you're watching carefully, so come back soon.