April 4, 2024 SaaStr : The 21 Top Excuses for Not Closing A Deal

Sales is hard. And not only is it hard, but you shouldn’t be closing every deal you are in. Why? Well, if you’re closing every deal you are in, you’re not being invited to the deals where your product has competition. Where it has gaps. You aren’t being invited to where you’ll want to be to grow, if you magically close every deal you are in. And closing every deal you are in is also generally a sign you the company itself isn’t doing enough marketing. Still, the best sales reps close so much more than mediocre ones. And what you hear a lot from the mediocre ones are … excuses.  But hear these excuses too often from a rep, and you have the wrong rep. Even today, when sales for many of us is harder. Probably, especially today. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, product-market fit, resilience

May 26, 2021 Sammy Abdullah via Medium : Autopsy of a dead venture backed company

Build a product for one market. Build a real product, focus on one market and use case, and don’t move to a new market until you’ve successfully established your company in that original market. Watch your sales cycle and customer set up. Although we signed contracts with big names like Facebook and Yahoo, it was always a custom project which took up team resources and had a very long sales cycle. Cash is king. If the revenue to burn ratio is too high and growth rate too low, if you’re lucky you’ll end up with a down round. If you’re unlucky, you’ll die. Know your limitations. At the early stages of any business, the founder will do most of the selling, but professionalize this function as soon as you can afford it by bringing on real sales talent. Know when it’s time to exit. Knowing when it’s time to walk away is valuable. Don’t drink too much of the Kool-Aid. Believing in your product and potential is wonderful, but don’t let it blind you. Stay heads down. Basically spend more time building the business and less time on everything else.

CATEGORY: leadership, product-market fit

April 30, 2021 Jason Lemkin : Maybe Every SaaS Contract Should Have An Automatic Out Clause

In the long run in SaaS, any customer that churns was never really a customer at all — unless you get them back later. Maybe make onboarding, and buying, as simple as possible.  Maybe just let the customer buy, at a given price point, however they want to buy.  Drive up your NPS, close the deal even faster.  And maybe just let them cancel and leave whenever they want.  Just give them a pro-rated refund, and move on.  And say thank you for trying us.  And let them know they can have this refund whenever they want, no questions (or not too many at least) asked. (read more…)

CATEGORY: product-market fit, SaaS

November 23, 2020 Jerry Neumann : Productive Uncertainty

Uncertainty, generally, is something to be avoided. If you can’t predict the outcomes of your actions you will have a hard time planning and managing. And if others see that your business proposition is uncertain they will shy away from including your product in their plans. But uncertainty can also shield against competition, allowing you to create excess value. If it does, it is productive uncertainty. Innovations, because they are new, usually come with uncertainties of one sort or another. Founders have to choose the subset of innovations where the uncertainty is productive to have the best chance of succeeding. (read more…)

CATEGORY: growth, product-market fit

September 21, 2020 Andrew Lee via Medium : How To Tell If You’re Running A Zombie Startup And How to Revive It From The Dead

What’s the potential solution to the problems you’ve identified? Don’t dismiss the solution if it initially seems small, trivial, or hacked together. Most great startups start small and build toward a grander solution. The best ideas or solutions aim to be uniquely obvious as opposed to being obviously unique. In hindsight, people should be saying how stupidly obvious your solution was. The elegance of simplicity is hard to capture here so, you’ll need to do the work to find inspiration. (read more…)

CATEGORY: leadership, product-market fit

June 16, 2020 Allen Miller via Medium : The Return of Capital Efficiency

Capital efficiency has long been a desirable trait in early/growth stage businesses. But over the last few years, an abundance of capital combined with a “growth at all cost” mindset, allowed founders to deprioritize efficiency. Ignoring efficiency, however, can lead to making cardinal mistakes like misreading true product-market-fit, over-hiring for the stage you are in and burning through too much money too quickly. Furthermore, growth rate and top-line progress are a function of how much capital a business has consumed to get to that point (i.e. getting to $10M in revenue is less impressive if you spent $50M to get there vs spending $5M to get there.) (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit

March 9, 2020 Maya Kosoff via Medium : Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding

Perhaps the original mistake of the DTCs wasn’t in their vision, but in their decision to take the venture capital in the first place. Now under pressure to grow even faster and at greater scale than they otherwise would have had to naturally, they are being confronted with what happens when growth slows down, the cash starts running out, and investors are expecting their returns. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit, winner take all

December 3, 2019 Aaron Dinin via Medium : Venture Capitalists Don’t Invest in Magic. Neither Should You.

Instead, the kinds of growth companies should be studying, charting, and analyzing is intentional, controlled growth. That means growth driven from things like replicable marketing campaigns, sales funnel optimizations, and improving your company’s customer success process. Simply put, when you can attribute a sale to a specific and intentional action your team has taken, and when you can consistently repeat the action to achieve similar results, that’s when it’s reliable, predictable, investable growth. Everything else is just magic: fun to watch, but not something you can invest in. (read more…)

CATEGORY: growth, leadership, product-market fit, VC

October 1, 2019 Jimena Guijarro : Venture Capital and Design

The key to building strong teams and culture is giving everyone a common cause to fight for. With design at the center of culture, every decision is aligned with the user needs. When this is true individual egos disappear. There are no bad ideas, just ideas that either do or do not align with user needs. The latter can make or break the team, especially in the early stages and through periods of fast growth. Building a user-centric system creates accountability and provides clarity amid startup ambiguity. The result is a functional team, a system that captures value from talent, and top customer experience. According to the Design in Tech Report, 89% of companies in 2018 said the customer experience is their competitive advantage. (read more…)

CATEGORY: leadership, product-market fit

October 12, 2017 YCombinator : The Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King

Toutiao launched in 2012. The app uses machine and deep learning algorithms to source and surface content that users will find most interesting. Toutiao’s underlying technology learns about readers through their usage – taps, swipes, time spent on each article, time of the day the user reads, pauses, comments, interactions with the content and location – but doesn’t require any explicit input from the user and is not built on their social graph. Today, each user is measured across millions of dimensions and the result is a personalized, extensive, and high-quality content feed for every user, each time they open the app. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit