Ep. 256 - Amos Schwartzfarb, Techstars Austin MD & Co Author of Levers on Building Repeatability into Your Business

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Amos Schwartzfarb, Managing Director of Techstars and Co Author of the new book Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business.  Amos and I talk about the framework for going from idea to scalable repeatable company and the challenges startups face in the process. Let's get started.

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Brian Ardinger: [00:00:00]  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Amos Swartzfarb.  He is the Managing Director of Techstars Austin, Author of the book Sell More, Faster and Coauthor of a new book and the reason we have him on today's a new book called Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business. Welcome Amos. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:01] Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:01:04] I'm excited to have you here too. You've been in this space of spinning up new ideas and helping companies get off the ground. You've got a new book coming out called Levers. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about that and give some insight into what it takes to build a business. So maybe let's start off with what's this new book about, and we can go from there. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:25] What the book is and I should clarify it is, it's a book, but it is more a book that you do versus read. And that gives you a little sense of what it's about and the goal that my coauthors and I had when putting this together was, we're all investors and operators for many, many years.

And as we sort of looked around, and this is the stuff that we teach and profess to the companies we work with, and we realized that there wasn't really a great place, resource to go, accelerators included where the focus is on, what are the fundamental things you need to do to operationalize a business. How do you get it to repeatability? And how do you scale it? 

I like to say this is sort of like a recipe book. Like you open it up and follow the instructions and it doesn't guarantee you're going to get there, but it certainly will help you figure out the right ingredients so that you can have the recipe for the cake you're trying to bake. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:18] What I like about the book is the fact that it really does start at the very beginning. And I think a lot of startup founders take the startup journey. They see the big vision of where they want to go and that and they start 25 paces ahead of where they really are. And the book really starts off with who are you really trying to serve. What are you trying to build? And that, so maybe talk through that initial W Three methodology and your belief around that. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:02:42] So I think maybe just for the listeners to give context here, the book is a five-chapter book. Each chapter is dedicated to a piece of the overall framework. It's very intentional in the order that we have everything and the way that we see it makes most sense to think about building the business.

And I should also clarify that the framework absolutely works when you're sitting in the coffee shop and the writing an idea in the back of a napkin. And really where we focus our energy is working with founders that are a little further along than that. Usually there's some customers or some revenue. There's no repeatability in the business. 

And so our thought process is regardless of the business you're building, it all starts with really having a deep understanding of who you're serving. And who you're serving is who your customers ultimately are. And so, the, the W3 framework is a way to answer three fundamental questions, which are, you know, when I say them, everyone's like, yeah, of course these are the questions you need to answer. But getting to the right answer is the hard part. 

So, the three questions are who is your customer and what is the very specific and narrow definition of the customer that, you know will say yes, 100% of the time. That doesn't mean that your prospects will, that's not your entire tam. It's just like, what are the attributes of someone who, you know, will say yes, a hundred percent of the time.

That's the first W. The second W is what are they buying from you. Not what are you selling to them? And that's a really important, often subtle nuance. And you know, I think as you know, the reality is your potential customers. They don't care what you do. They only care what you do   for them.

And so, we just try to really get at that so that when you're talking to them, you can talk in the language that they understand. And then the final W, the third W is why are they buying it? What's the impact on the business? Have a clear understanding of what that is. And more importantly, or equally as important is how are they going to measure that impact? Because if they don't know, they won't know if there's an impact and they won't be a customer for very long. 

In the book, we also get at that there's two different parties that you need to understand the why from. There's the obvious one, which is the business why. But then there's also the individual buyer. What's their motivation and making sure that their motivations are aligned to.

So even if the business looks like the perfect customer for you, they might not be because of the kind of person they have in the role or the exact person they have in the roles. Understanding that deeply as important to getting at, figuring out who your customer is on a deep level. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:00] Yeah. Specifically, based on the business model too. Oftentimes you have multiple different stakeholders where you have to figure out what that why is for not only the user of the product, for example, but the buyer or the influencer, whatever the case may be. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:12] Yeah, you have to understand why they're going to care. If you're going to get them to understand why, what you're doing matters. Or conversely, to understand why maybe they're not actually the right customer for you right now, even if they look like it from the outside. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:23] Right. And then we could grow into it. But those early adopters are sometimes a little bit different than the ones that buy longer term. So you mentioned at Techstars, you tend to have companies that have thought through that a little bit more, and maybe they're in the early stages of developing that customer network and stuff. What's the next step? Where do startup founders typically get tripped up? Once they've started that business and have gotten a little bit of traction. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:44] There's sort of two things that I see most often are the    operational trip ups. The first is the notion that they have product market fit literally years before they actually have it. And so, this goes around, figuring out who your W3 is, but saying like, okay, we've got a couple of customers, we've got a bunch of people that have said they would buy, ...