Iâm a âSEOâ guy so make sure you are planting some seeds there (may take weeks or months to âbear fruitâ but lay some things down).
Iâd say go to where your customers are and where the conversations are happening. Make sure you are in the conversation.
Tons of communities these days Twitter, Reddit, Slack groups. You just have to be careful to learn the native language so you donât do something off-putting. Just be helpful to people in those conversations but donât be promotional.
Look to follow up in DMs or other ways that make it more personal and ask for feedback.
Make sure your product is listed like product hunt, beta list, capterra, g2, trustpilot (also helps for SEO)
Then make sure youâre super easy to contact.
Simple lead form (not many fields to vet/validate)
Phone number listed
You should be in a mode of âIâll take to anyone that has interestâ so make it as easy and frictionless as possible for them at this stage of your business.
Stay in full learning/listening mode on all of these things, so you can refine your product/pitch to solve their pain.
First, âFunctional Operating System," is the name I call it. Not sure anyone on the team calls it that.
Itâs developed over-time with a âletâs have less tools and make sure everything has a placeâ mentality. I was involved with every aspect of the business, so personally I wanted to be able to lean in and operate the same way with all of my team who were doing different jobs.
At the same time standardization, efficiency, and valuing everyoneâs time is important to me.
All that mixed together has had our team members be able to work the same across multiple teams. Everyone knows how to reach other members and what to expect in responses vs trying slack, email, text messages⌠to communicate.
So, to best answer your question it just happened organically.
Itâs changed over time, but lots of time blocking and making sure systems were in place to have them keep running when I moved to something else. In the early days my time was focused by splitting days, then sets of days, then weeks, sometimes even months.
When I leave one, I am making a decision that this pillar stops when I leave or itâs continued by otherâs. SEO for example, once I had it down I was teaching my team to run it and putting in check points for them. (weekly meeting with a standardized report/format) this way I could keep up to date and steer as necessary, but was out of the âday to dayâ unless something big came up.
Once I built up reliable people as ICs or managers in place, weekly check-ins with them keep the pillars going. These check-ins may change over-time from daily, weekly, to monthly, to quarterly⌠but thatâs how they donât suffer.
Rituals for communication, feedback, and check-ins at various levels. 1 on 1s, weekly standups (per team), monthly team-retros, monthly all-hands, quarterly OKR goal-setting⌠(We just started to introduce professional development check-ins with managers and ICs)
Being remote I feel like you have to mature as an organization faster. Many of these rituals we were doing with our company size at less than 10. With an office environment you may not need all the rituals and process to keep your team/culture aligned.
This one is interesting as we have both. Really, we just keep leaning into what is working and try to have the product do as much heavy lifting as possible. At the same time making sure our sales team gets the right incentives/credit for the hard work that they do. Weâre working on better incentives/credit for our CS team on the retention + adoption side.
Both our sales team and CS teams take up most of the oxygen, but we still keep investing in the product to do more for itself.
IMHO you have to figure out how much human-led vs product-led efforts you need for your product and market. We track it and make sure we know how customers want it but also balanced with what is most effective for us as a business. It also changes over-time and the scale slides more to product-led over time.
Iâd say Iâve gone through life trying to be well-rounded and not have flaws. Liked by all from a personal and product perspective. Itâs the typical âtrying to be something for everyoneâ. (UberNote was that).
Itâs when Iâve leaned into strengths is when Iâve found the most success. Iâll never get 100% away from trying to be well-rounded as that is in my core being, itâs what makes me the founder I am today⌠but reminding myself to keep doubling down on strengths will get me further.
Seeing those strengths play out despite weaknesses has been the most rewarding. SEO, building systems (internal + in product). our product positioning, and our great service keeps paying dividends today.
So, for the incumbents, Iâve tried to keep things understandable from a âbottoms upâ mentality vs âtop downâ. So a company of 9 people with 3 teams are really ICs (6), and managers (3).
I try to make sure all incumbents have the opportunity to BE that person, but they may not want it.
For recruiting, you have to know what youâre offering and finding the right people to join you at the right part of this journey. Every day, I feel like I have a better understanding of what the needs are for the business. I can articulate it better in conversation, so I know what Iâm looking for. The right people will feel right.
I try to look for that right person who has hit a ceiling somewhere else. (i.e. a team leader who hasnât gotten their shot at management or the manager who aspires to be a director) Those people can take you far and hopefully onto the next stage (if needed).
Hereâs a twitter thread I wrote about how we approach recruiting:
Have not considered a reboot and wouldnât want to get into that market today. So many great players Notion + Asana + Others that are serving that market well.
If I was looking for something else, Iâd still look for B2B niche.
When you have a money machine where you know inserting $1 can get you $3 out the back + youâre not worried the machine breaking down.
Know the answer to the question âwhat would I do with $X so I can get to Y fasterâ
So, if you know $ is the resource you definitively need to grow then get $. Also keep an eye out for non-dilutive capital like revenue-based financing or some of the micro funds that arenât betting on you being a 100M company.
Lots of podcast listening and a few communities! I listen and consume the bootstrap/indie side of the tech startup world as well as the SaaStr VC side. I also have been watching D2C, influencers, and other B2C style things as well.
Then I try to break it down in my own lens.
By nature I try to always see all sides and am open to all roads to build better product, distribution, and an overall business that is authentic to me.
I think my diversified learning approach has helped me find the right things for us to focus on and also recognize when something isnât in our wheelhouse. Def more to come on this front, but the learnings help me strategize where we should dig next.
I try to make friends in these areas and talk business lessons with lots of people as well.
Overall I think you have to know your buyer. What is ânormalâ for them and how they buy? The buying process should be as frictionless as possible which usually aligns well with how they are used to buying. Whatâs normal for that industry, how are competitors priced and packaged, payments by ACH/check/CC? What are expected terms? Who has to approve it? Sometimes pricing can be an advantage if youâre making it even easier for an older industry.
I do believe if you have market pull⌠best in class⌠clear winner, you can start to have a change the game on pricing for your industry.
In my experience ârev shareâ is harder to pull off and also harder to track. Seems good in theory, but how do you keep it honest and keep incentives aligned for either party not to think they are being tricked by the other party. Also the economics start to get wonky as things scale. But if your in âpaymentsâ thatâs the norm, so works fine.
Flat is normal and an easy bet in most markets, but I believe âusage-basedâ pricing is more of the future in SaaS. I feel like that aligns best with value delivered in many cases.
Thanks @astha for dropping my question.
Thanks @jlogic for your response. Super valueable!!!
The debate starts because we first launched our product on Shopify, and when talking to their team suggested to go ârev shareâ as this begins to be a trend in this ecosystem.
After a couple of months and more then 70 downloads, we did outbound sales to mid market accounts (eComm +25M annual GMV) and what we see is that ârev shareâ is easy to sell, but we are more confortable with your recomendation âusage-basedâ.
THANKS!!!
Basically I found what worked for us by hopping on calls with people who signed up for a trial. I found the audience we were attracting, wanted to talk to us. Thatâs what led to higher sales conversions.
It was effective and still had good unit economics paired with SEO - inbound leads, so we just kept doing it and scaling out âwhat workedâ in the early days.
It wasnât so much of a decision, but more of just following what the customer needed.
Building the team modeled after how I did it in the early days. It has since matured to a team of 3 sales consultants and a manager. I canât say I built that part out myself but had great people to help build and scale a team off of the initial model.
@jlogic, thanks for taking the time! Whether itâs your note on âfollowing what the customer needs,â or knowing and working with oneâs own strengths and limitations, or intentionally diversifying peer circles, what animates these responses is an admirably frank admission of the consistently complex work of learning and growing as a founder.
This is such a powerful, not often acknowledged side of the bootstrap-vs-fundraise decision:
A lot more was learned about our customers, market, and behaviors because of the slower pace we moved that had less pressure.
Wish more founders examined what a heightened/slower pace can do for their particular product and market, instead of going by whatever the prevailing assumption is.
And Iâm definitely borrowing those all-hands questions. Especially the one on visualizing (doing exactly that as I write this) seasons. A beautiful conversation starter!
Totally relate to the pain of not being able to do enough pricing iterations. In the early days, with all that goes on as you begin to scale teams, it does get hard to prioritize pricing.
And, I think, we can all take a page from your âsee all sides and open to all roadsâ approach to building a business. Thanks, again, for doing this, @jlogic!