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Conversational short-form marketing strategies, frameworks, and tactical advice to help early-stage B2B software (SaaS) companies on their journeys from MVP to PMF and beyond. Hosted by Brian Graf, CEO at Kalungi, and Stijn Hendrikse, Co-Founder at Kalungi, serial CMO for B2B SaaS companies and ex-Microsoft Global Marketing Leader.
Brian Graf (00:08.045)
Hi there, and welcome to B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, the CEO of Colungy, and I'm back with Colungy's co-founder and chief centropy officer, Stein Hendricks, the serial SaaS marketing executive and ex-Microsoft product marketing leader. In this episode, we unpack a concept that lies at the core of high impact execution, the tension between entropy and speed. You'll hear Stein break down how delaying action invites noise, dilution, and complexity into your marketing strategy.
while speed acts as a powerful antidote. We explore why shipping quickly isn't just a tactic, it's a safeguard against diminishing returns and a catalyst for clarity. We also talk about how to maintain quality signal while moving fast and why momentum might be your most valuable resource in today's fast-changing marketing environment. If you've ever left a strategy meeting full of energy only to lose steam weeks later, this one's for you. Let's get into it.
So Brian, just pressed publish on the Syntropy.com Amazon. We'll take another day or so for it to be live, but we also send out some of the emails today. So we're really officially watching.
That is a fantastic place to start. Because I wanted to talk about today, I want to talk about Syntropy versus Entropy and the importance of shipping fast. So great. So good that you started us off with that. So yeah, I mean, I wanted to talk more about the books Syntropy that you just made and are just hit push live on.
One of the key concepts in there is the difference between centropy and entropy and really just the importance of we'll get into Signal, I think, in plenty other podcasts and pieces of content. But I really wanted to push on the speed part today and just think about, just hear from you what you saw in the market and in today's kind of status quo that pushed you in that direction.
Brian Graf (02:14.22)
and why you think it is so critical that we need to focus on shipping and speed versus just kind of stagnancy.
Yeah, Syntropy came together in the last couple of months really. It's been a combination of a of things that I was working on also for another book. But what really was accelerating me wanting to write it was that the combination of what AI is giving us, all the powerful tools and what it also allows humans to do is also creating more noise and more things that we should probably not do using these tools.
And one of them is around speed and about making sure that something that's really good doesn't actually get worse over time. And that's the, the, the Syntropy concept that things, when you start, for example, an LLM journey, you start with your, your prompting and you initially have an idea and the idea maybe gets a little bit better if you start using AI to do some research, to validate your thinking, to enrich it a little bit. But then it's very risky for it to actually start compounding.
noise and sort of mediocrity as well when you, especially when you add, and that actually has happened, happens in real life too. It's not an AI artifact. It's actually an artifact of information entropy, right? And AI just does it at an enormous speed and at a tremendous volume. But if you have, and this is where I sort of wanted to connect it to the topic that you have for today, I have always found in my whole career,
That when there's a great idea, it could be a startup that's ready to launch. It could be an initiative and a company. It could be an idea that someone has in a meeting. That if you sit on it too long and you ask too many people for feedback, the compounding effect of that feedback or the additional testing that you do or the additional research is at some point going to have diminishing returns. that's where you often hear the 80-20 rule, It's sort of the Pareto principle.
Stijn Hendrikse (04:12.654)
80 % you know 20 % of the effort gets you to 80 % sort of reach or completeness. But you also get the effect of additional feedback also means you're inviting things that might make your idea just dilute your idea right. Whether it's criticism or it's people who turn your idea into something a little bit different because that's how they interpret what you are thinking about and now you're losing signal right it becomes more noisy and speed is just a great antidote to that.
There's other things you do, The Synthreby book is full of things to allow you to create signal and sustain signal quality and actually get, make sure that even when you use AI and other tools that you stay on that signal road. But speed is just one thing that is an antidote to this, right? So if you have a great idea, force yourself, and I have now 72 hour rule that I've put in the book, that's try to make your next to do whatever you're going to do with that idea.
limited in the time that you allow yourself to do that, to finish that work. Right? And that doesn't mean you have to make something that really would take three or four weeks to do something and do a really bad job by forcing yourself to do it in three days. But just cut the task into a smaller scope so that you can actually do it in three days. Because then you will just not lose that momentum.
Yeah, I mean, you're bringing up a lot of a lot of points. feel like every person, well, definitely every person in this room, but every every person probably listening to this has come out of a meeting and, you know, felt really energized and said, hey, we're going to change the world after what we just we just got the strategy. We're going to we're going to blow the doors off this thing. And then two weeks later, nothing's happened. And then three weeks later, only a little bit's happened. And then the fourth week, we don't even know why we're doing this anymore. Right. And you just kind of go back to your old ways. So
That resonates a lot with me. I do feel like just forcing yourself to ship, ship, ship is a huge piece to just, it's almost like the, a bad decision is better than no decision, right? Or moving in one direction is better than not moving at all, right? I feel like all of those things are kind of the core principles behind it. I do feel like a lot of people, half of it, half of the reason why people get stuck into this entropy, or my mind is that
Brian Graf (06:31.894)
Well, A, people are busy, but B, you know, people don't really like putting themselves out there if unnecessarily, right? They don't like inviting criticism. But what I hear you saying is that, you know, the only real way to get to centropy almost, to get to true centropy is to invite the criticism, right? Like you need to put something out there for people to react to and based on their reaction, then that gives you, gets you one step closer to
you know, true centipede are really understanding what they want and how they can be motivated to change, right?
Let's talk about the word shipping for a second so everybody can understand what we're talking about. This is something that I grew up with at Microsoft. When we published a new piece of software, we shipped the software. And it's partly because a lot of the software that Microsoft of course started with were CDs, or before even floppy disks that were these small square plastic pieces of a more enormous amount of value that you could put in a computer and then let the computer do something with it.
icon on your Word document, but even that reference is outdated now.
floppy disk CDs. And those of course could only make it to the end customer if you shipped them, right? If you send them in the actual mail or some form of distribution that actually produced a physical shipping challenge, right? That's where the word shipping comes from. So usually when a product was done, when the software developers were done coding and the testers were done testing, there would be something like a master version of that software that would not be changed anymore, right? That would be the...
Stijn Hendrikse (08:09.196)
the final product and sort of that CD would be burned as the official copy. And then that thing would be deplicated, of course, and shipped out to the world. So that's where the term comes from. So shipping, of course, doesn't relate to shipping as in the shipping industry or anything with water or boats, but it is kind of shipping your product. And in our sort of now completely digital online internet economy,
Especially in SaaS, there's no real thing as like a one version of a product anymore. A product evolves, a product gets better. And usually companies don't talk about when they make small incremental updates to a solution, to a service that they... So that's kind of not completely valid anymore terminology. But so shipping the way I'm using it is when you have a project, when you have a product, when you have a very meaningful thing that you're contributing to the world, that you actually get it done, that you get it over the finish line. So that's shipping. Let's talk about what you were just talking about around...
So why is it so valuable to do this fast? The best ideas that come from collaboration between people. And now that collaboration has extended to AI, right? We love to just jam with others, right? To get feedback quickly, to sort test our ideas and see what people think about it. And now we have this enormous amount of new tools to do that work, right? We do the same thing with AI. We put something in and we see what it thinks about. We ask feedback, we ask to enrich it.
And all that is phenomenally important and very powerful. And what you now just have to do is when you have a great idea to get it ready to ship as fast as possible, so you can start inviting that feedback. And then you also have to be very conscious that when you do that with AI, the amount of feedback you're going to get, that is going to be very unfiltered and maybe a little bit random because AI has a tendency to pull from all the information that's available in the world and do the...
less filtering maybe than we humans do for that to become very messy, very quick. So the sooner you ship something and the sooner you can also invite feedback from humans, the better, the quicker you learn and the more, the stronger you can actually make the ultimate signal of your idea. And then maybe one other thing you said, right, the longer you sit on it, there's a little bit of time when it gets better and better and better, but then at some point you get diminishing returns on your own thinking, right? So then inviting others to contribute is really powerful or AI for that matter.
Brian Graf (10:31.448)
Can you maybe play that out over time a little bit like across? We can use marketing as an example. You can use something else, but how this shipping mentality kind of compounds on itself. feel like it's easy to think about like it on a per initiative basis and say like, okay, it'd be nice if it was two weeks faster, yeah, play that out a little bit more to see the end gains.
Yeah, and lot of these things that I'm talking about are not new to anybody here. They're very common to the software industry. Things like, hey, I'm going to ship an MVP, or a Minimum Viable Product. That's of course nothing new. And that's what I'm talking about, right? So that you can actually start getting feedback, right? And help and ask other people to help you or companies to help you finish your product. The only thing that I'm kind of adding to it with SensorPy, partly because AI is giving you so many tools that allow you to procrastinate as well.
is that it's now even more important than ever to have certain rules and milestones that say, if I have an idea, I want to get something out in the world in 72 hours, because that's the amount of time that it takes for something to actually otherwise get either too diluted or it starts to become almost forgotten why we actually wanted to do this. So that's why I'm kind of putting a couple more new rules in that sort of force you to take action. But other than that, it is not very different from whether it's iterative design.
or it's getting an MVP into the market, or a beta test, we used to call this, right? I think those things are already, of course, the reason behind those are the same. But now, especially with AI, the amount of entropy that will creep in if you don't ship is so fast, is compounding so fast that you have to be super disciplined about this.
the discipline side of things. I can see a world where a marketing leader or somebody like that embraces this philosophy, right? And decides to go really fast with their team and says, you know, ship, ship, ship and push, push, push. And things get, I guess, complicated, whether or not it's complicated or it becomes more difficult to make sure that your team is all pushing in the right direction, right? Like the...
Brian Graf (12:39.778)
There's always this constant pull and push, feel like between focus, focus, focus to make sure that you maximize your efficacy in a certain direction versus push hard and fast and break things and you'll get there. How do you balance those two ideas with this concept and as you apply them?
That's where I think the concept of Syntropy is kind of finding the balance between that speed and not waiting for things to be perfect, but also making sure that you're constantly adding signal strength, right? Are the new things you're adding, the feedback that you're getting, the idea evolution, the research you're doing, are they actually really giving you new insights? Are they adding new clarity? Are they adding new context?
There's all these things that are very human, The creative part is one of those, the context, the collaboration with others, communicating your ideas out in a clear way so you can get also really useful feedback. So as long you're able to do that, I think you're adding signal quality. then it's still good to keep doing that. And then once you feel that the returns of that work are diminishing, and I think that's usually within 72 hours.
It's time to get it out there and sort see what we'll do in the hands of whoever. you always answer the question, who's it for, what's it for? So the what's it for is kind of what you work through in the 72 hours, or building the thing that I came up with. And then the who's it for needs to be validated. So that's what you do after that 72 hour period. You kind of say, let me see if it's actually going to create the value that I envisioned it would.
I mean, you're almost saying like, like signal is, is both the thing that will make you break through the noise, but it's also in a certain respect, like the strategic North star of, especially for marketing, right? Of how you do things. Like it should be the, the point that the whole team is trying to drive towards, right? And then if you do have that singular point, then it, it makes a lot of sense to push hard and move fast, right?
Brian Graf (14:47.498)
yeah, we-
We are marketing and everybody has their own definition of marketing, but for me it's always like, as marketers, we try to change what people believe and we try to change their behavior. And those two things are of course interconnected, right? We try to make people believe certain things so that they maybe act on those beliefs, right? They buy something, they click on something, they open a piece of content, they make a decision in whatever funnel we have defined. And when you think of the quality of your signal that we're creating, the Synth should be kind of side of marketing.
It's all about are you able to change those two things faster? Are you able to more effectively have people believe things or change their behavior? And signal versus noise is all about the effectiveness of what you're creating, establishing or leading to that outcome.
Well, because especially in today's day and age, right? Not only are customer preferences changing faster than ever and they're becoming more educated than ever, but also the competitive landscape is also changing faster than ever. And you honestly can't afford to, know, God forbid you wait a week on something much less a quarter, right? Like you cannot afford to take your foot off the gas.
or you in many, many, many instances, you will end up losing or losing ground or ending up being replaced entirely. I overheard you say in the call the other day that I agree with it, but that you need to slow things down to the point to where the client is getting annoyed because you're asking such deep and probing questions on the why how ladder. That's the level that you need to get to to get to the heart of the
Brian Graf (16:30.466)
the signal that you need to get to, right? So in that sense, it's almost like when you're searching for signal and gathering it, you need to slow down. You need to, you can't rely on things like surveys, right? You need to go straight to the source and talk face to face and do it over video and all those things, right? But once you have that signal, then things, then you want to push, push, push, right? Even, you know, working with you in the past few months, we've been creating a
landing page in a day, And creating full value proposition frameworks in another day. We're moving super fast, is both putting this theory to the test, but also just what's needed, right? Given the state of the market.
How do you see this? don't, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. You know, we've talked about how this relates to marketing tactics and like executing a marketing strategy. But do you see, would you apply the same principles to like hiring a marketing team? Like there are plenty of, of companies and VCs out there that are facing this decision. Like how do we, how do we move fast? Right? Do we, do we hire internally? Do we.
hire an agency, like how do these principles apply to that decision for you?
I believe the world of marketing is changing really fast. the type of skills you hire for the type of contribution is changing. I still believe that recruiting is all about letting people show, let them show you the work, right? It's very hard to replace people actually proving themselves by their work and by with interviewing or tests or all kinds of things. So I love to have in my recruiting now some of these
Stijn Hendrikse (18:25.098)
Syntropy principles embedded, right? How do people actually, when they look at your website, when they look at your content, when they look at the job, what could they add that you didn't think about, right? That is really unique. That's really special. What could they contribute that is going to make them stand out? I mean, you find people like that. think, yeah, the next thing is just higher based on almost intuition.
but be just a really good manager on what are your expectations. When people don't meet those expectations, you make sure they get feedback, right? All these things that make people a good manager and also provide clarity for team members. Recruiting doesn't end when someone signs their contract, right? It's constantly, then the onboarding starts, right? And then making someone really successful and having someone fulfill their potential in your organization. Because work,
Employer-employee relationships, of course, are not anymore what they were 10, 15 years ago. They're far lesser committed to each other. So you constantly have to level up together. I think all these principles will stay kind of at the center of that. Is someone really adding value? Are you as an employer providing value? Are you allowing people to grow? Are you allowing people to make impact? Are you allowing people to leave meaningful things behind in their roles?
I feel like with, I think it all depends for me on where you are from a team standpoint or from a product standpoint, right? Like it's, I would almost look at it as like you first would hire to, to find centric, right? To understand your core audience, understand how you need to communicate with them. And then you would hire for entropy or not entry to get away from entropy.
and to move fast and start to execute that. I don't know that you would be on a per-role basis, right? You can only hire a product marketer and not a main-gen person first. But I do feel like it's... When you're thinking about that from a CEO or a CMO perspective, right? Like it does make sense to me to really want to push in place like true understanding of the customers, be able to show that with the right level of content, the right level of...
Brian Graf (20:40.107)
credibility, right? And then you can push hard on, hey, what experiments are we going to run? How are we going to go to market? How are we going to start generating demand? It seemed like that works for me.
And to be clear, think a lot of the traditional roles have changed. don't think you hire a copywriter anymore. You hire the investigative journalist that you can find, right? Or whatever the thing is that you really expect people to do that will add enormous value that cannot be done by AI tools.
Yeah. Well, yeah. And I do think like, you know, if you have the the the bank account to be able to support a full stack, you know, team of individual marketers and you have the the spend or the revenue to be able to justify it. Sure. But particularly for companies that don't want that right or don't have that full stack need, it is especially if you're going to look at a small team, you have to have people that are that are we like, you know,
can call them jacks all trades, but really like T-shaped marketers, right? They have a specialty and they can go deep on a couple topics, but you don't want it to be just be a designer anymore, right? You don't want it to just be a copywriter. You're limiting yourself, right? And honestly, the person in how they can benefit themselves in their careers, but also your company, I think.
Yeah, copyright is the best example. That's literally what an LLM is probably. It's one of the LLM superpower, right? They're very good at writing very good copy. It doesn't mean what it actually writes makes any sense, right? Or it's about the right topic, or it talks about things in the right sequence, in the right order, with the right context. But you can't beat an LLM on kind of writing sentences with decent English, right? And with good grammar. And let's know the...
Stijn Hendrikse (22:28.394)
Serve anybody if you try.
you as a Chief Centropy Officer, like how you build out the right team and make sure that you create a culture of shipping.
So yeah, so today we launched Entropy the book and we also launching a new part of Colungy, a company that you're leading. So Colungy.com is our traditional marketing agency focused on B2B SaaS. Companies who need marketing in their early stage, they're not necessarily ready to hire an in-house team or they don't know exactly how fast they can go or want to go. So they outsourced that problem to Colungy.com today, right? You got a team of about...
10 people typically they're all fractionals. A lot of those works full time for you, but that team service four or five clients at a time. Maybe some of us two or three, depending on how large those clients are. And you get basically a full outsourced marketing department, including things like commitment to results and pay for performance, all those things that make Lungi very, very special. But we also know that some of those things are now better done by AI and there's other tools that have evolved over the
And we also always have had clients at Colungy that we could not service because they're just a little too early stage. They could not yet afford what Colungy has to offer. And we're now, we're launching also Colungy.ai, which is basically a new way to try to deliver the same things, maybe at a slower speed and a little more automated, a little more backed by AI, partly because a lot of early stage companies, they just need a really good website, but it doesn't have to be exactly
Stijn Hendrikse (24:07.502)
completely unique and different than any other website in the world just yet, right? So with that, we can now build really high quality copy, high quality visuals, high quality demand gen, high quality automation with a relatively lean people investment because we have so many powerful tools behind it now. So with colongi.ai, we're actually going to serve as a different segment of the market.
that is not necessarily ready for the full Colony Playbook yet. They don't need it yet. They're still trying to reach MVP. And so, yeah, that's how we're putting it to the test as well, Brian, by kind of launching that today.
Yeah, I mean, it's super exciting. think it's, it has been, it's pained me to have, you know, companies that have great products and really promising, traction come in the door and get really excited about the Kulungi vision and what we can provide only to be kind of turned away by like, just cannot afford, can't afford that price tag, right? And, and, nor should they with where they are.
The Columbia pricing is typically, I think that you get that huge team with all these capabilities. People have done it before for the price of one or two marketers, sometimes three depends a little bit on scope. But so what these companies really cannot even afford one or two. They're before them. That's where we're trying to fill that gap with Columbia.
to be clear, those are the companies that are early stage just getting off the ground, right? But for those types of companies in particular, right, they still need marketing, right? They still need...
Stijn Hendrikse (25:40.736)
They want to make it not ready to invest in, they don't have funding yet and are profitable, right? But they also want their product to be seen in the best light on their website. They want to start getting a couple of MVP clients, right? They can use to get to MVP. So they need something. But today they refer to using LLMs to build up a couple of landing pages. And it's not going to be very good, right? It's going to be entropy all over the place. And so we're trying to kind of bridge that gap.
Yeah.
Brian Graf (26:06.754)
Well, yeah, it's going to waste their time and their dollars. And we've worked with, you know, over a hundred companies. know, we know our stuff, right? And we have these best practices. So why not use them in a way that can help these types of companies? But I mean, it can also help companies who are just trying to, just trying to test the market with a new idea, right? Or start a new product, but don't want to heavily invest in it yet. There's tons of applications, but anyway, it's super exciting. And it's a really, it will be the application of
the centropy model, right? So it's gonna be really fun.