Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about identifying & focusing on growth customers. In the startup world, it’s common to want to prioritize customers that pay higher for your products, however focusing on these customers might not be the best way to optimize your business, as this customers might not necessarily be growing. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what a growth customer is, the 2 types of money that come into any business, what is negative churn and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 01:00 Why this topic was chosen. 01:15 Who is a growth customer? 03:45 What is negative churn. 03:54 The 2 types of money that come into any business. 04:09 Why you need to identify your growth customers. 04:40 Why growth is a really crucial criterion to measure. 06:45 How identifying a growth customer can help you prioritize. 07:43 What companies are truly trying to do with their business. 3 Key Points: When most startups look at a customer, they just identify today’s needs Negative churn is the amount of revenue that’s being lost that is made up for by the amount that comes in. There are 2 kinds of customers that’s coming in – new money, and existing customers paying you more money. [0:00:00] Steli Efti.: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat, we wanna talk about identifying and focusing on growth customers. Here’s the deal, in episode 399 we talked about how to create an ideal customer profile. The ICP, Ideal Customer. Today what I wanna briefly talk to you about and share with our listeners is the concept of a growth customer. And here’s what prompted this. So I’ve heard and thought about this in the past multiple times and we went through a transition in our company of starting to think and focus and identify growth customers a lot more. But recently I was talking to a company, I can’t quite discuss who they are, but their VP of sales had a much stronger focus on this than I’ve ever seen before and I felt that that was fascinating and interesting to dissect. What they’re doing, they’re building the sales organization. They’re focusing on only selling to a specific type of customer. And one criteria that an Account Executive has to check off to even be allowed to sell to somebody is that they’re going to be a growth, what they call a growth account. What that means is that whatever the needs is of the customer today is going to significantly grow within next 12 to 18 months. A simple example of this is today they have … Whatever, let’s say three people that work in their marketing team, would need seats or access to this product, but their hiring plans are so that the marketing team is gonna grow from three people to 11 people in the next 12 months, so they’re gonna need 11 seats and they are a growing marketing organization. So, their criteria of selling, being able to close a contract and close a deal is that the customer, it doesn’t matter how big the customer is. It can’t stay still. It has to be a growth account. It has to be a customer that’s gonna grow significantly over the next 12 months. I thought that that was very interesting, but I thought also that it related interestingly or usefully to our ideal customer profile episode of the, I think, this mindset that a lot of times, when startups look at a prospect or at a customer, they just identify today’s needs, right? How big is the customer today? What is their use case today? What are the requirements today? One thing that a lot of startups don’t do a good enough job is to identify how are these needs, these use cases and the potential revenue we can make with this customer? How is this going to change over the next 12 to 18 months and is this going to stay the same? Or is it going to significantly grow or change over time? That’s a really important thing to figure out, and I think a lot of times, most startups don’t worry about this or don’t think about this. I wanted to talk about growth customers with you and see kind of what your thoughts are, what your experience are, and what kind of tips we have to give to the audience on this topic. [0:03:15] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So, especially for a SASS business, this is a really fascinating topic, because what you’re really looking for is negative term. So, one of the main reasons from a metric standpoint of business metric standpoint. A business KPI, is to have negative turn. So, negative turn is basically the idea that the amount of people, amount of revenue. Let’s talk about revenue. The amount of revenue that’s being lost in a given month, is made up for, and then some, by the amount that’s coming in. And there’s two kinds of money that comes in. New money and existing customers paying you more money. So, to me, by being able to identify your growth customer and include that in your ideal customer profile, you will get customers who will pay more over time, and your business will essentially be that much healthier for it, because you will have negative turn. Which means that, of the people that are, of all the revenue that’s being lost, you’re gaining more than what’s being lost. [0:04:24] Steli Efti: I love that. It’s as simple as that now. I think the first thing that I would wanna give to people as a tip is to identify that as a criteria when you talk to prospects or when you think about your ideal customer profile or the qualification process, because, growth is a really crucial criteria. If you think about it, if you have two customers. Let’s say, all you have is two customers. And all you’re gonna have to do is service and support and invest in those customers. If you had to prioritize the two and you have one customer that pays you $1,000 a month and the other customer pays you $500 a month. If that’s all the information you have, it’s very easy to say, “Well, we’re gonna prioritize our top customers, the thousand bucks a month customer. A second customer is the $500 customer and we’re gonna spend double the time with the 1K customer than we’re gonna spend with the 500 buck customer a month. Now, if I add the growth criteria to this, and I tell you that the $1,000 customer has been operating at this size of business for the past ten years, and they’re planning to stay this amount of people and revenue and whatever the setup is for the next five years. But, the $500 customer just raised, let’s say, a series A, just raised 50 million dollars and they have plans to tenex they’re team and they have plans to go from $500 a month to $5,000 a month over the next 12 months. How does that change now? Who’s your top customer? And who’s your second customer? Now, again, with two customers, it’s probably not that big of a deal to prioritize them, but having that knowledge can make a big difference not just for revenue purposes, but also when you hear what their feature requirements are, right? Just knowing that this is a company that today needs feature A B and C but because the drastic growth that they’re about to go under, these feature requirements might drastically change, but we might have to stay more ears to the ground, and much more in touch with the customer, because they’re gonna be hiring all these people and changing their processes and kind of growing hat they’re doing and changing what they’re doing at such a fast pace that we can’t just say, “Well, we talked to this customer four or five months ago and we still feel like we know what’s going on over there and what their needs are and what they’re looking for, right?” So, identifying who’s growing and who isn’t can help you both prioritize and also understand how much time you’re gonna have to spend in checking in with a customer and re-confirming they truly understand the value they’re getting from your product today and what their needs are and what their feature requirements are and who the people even are in the company that you need to build relationships with. [0:07:06] Hiten Shah: I think it’s such a powerful concept. I mean, like, you just described exactly how to get there, right? And do it. And I think, this idea of a growth customer’s probably gonna start becoming a to more popular. I haven’t really heard a lot about this. I don’t know if you have. So, I’m glad you brought it up and I’m glad that it came up because all we’re really trying to do in our businesses, especially when it’s a SASS business and it’s a subscription business where people pay you and ideally, they keep paying you, is build a healthy business, and even when you think about like, as much as people might have opinions about investors, and things like that, at the end of the day, the biggest thing here is that an investor looks at your business to determine how healthy it is, and whether they should put their money in it. You can look in your business in the same way, whether you have investors or not. And say, “How do I build a healthy business that I wanna continue that is worth continuing?” And one of the key areas there, is to have it so that you build a business, a product, a sales process or marketing process. The whole company. Around the fact that people who start paying you, pay your more money over time because they’re getting more value, or they have a really good reason to pay you more over time. So, I would say that like, this is super super powerful. And, it should definitely be like, double clicked, underlined, all the good stuff. So that people start really thinking about, “who’s my growth customer and how do I get more of them?” [0:08:58] Steli Efti: So this is a topic I don’t hear a lot of people talking about. I know that we have both started thinking about this and putting some process in place around this over the last couple of weeks and then I’ve been bringing this up to more and more people to see if I can learn from somebody about this concept and I talked to this VP of sales that has this kind of surprisingly strong point of view around only selling to growth customers. So I think this is going to be bubbling up more and more and I’m happy we’re early in sharing this with our audience. I think that most companies, we all worry so much and over index on who the customer is today and what their needs are right now and that’s fine, but it’s just a starting point. Especially in [Sass] where you sell a subscription service. I think it becomes more and more important, not just to understand your customer right now, but kind of try to understand where they’re going in their future and trying to focus on the ones where the future is gonna rapidly change. And I think that as more and more businesses are moving faster and growing faster around the world, servicing growth customers its not just a good, selfish thing in terms of your revenue. It might just also be a competitive advantage of understanding companies that are going through a lot of change of a fast-paced change environment. Since I think that’s what we’re gonna see. More and more broadly businesses and companies around the world and customers around the world more frequently. So I think the big tip here that we have to people is to start thinking about growth customers and not just ideal customers and my number one tip in getting started with this is just to identify those. So if you have a sales team, start asking customers what they’re growth plans are. If you do this all self-serve, maybe you want to have one drop-down menu that asks people not just about how big is the team right now, what’s your industry, but also maybe future hiring plans or some other criteria. You could probably do a bunch of stuff if you ever wanted to do intelligent stuff, you could probably go and look back on some public data that you could capture about a prospect or a customer. Their traffic, has it been growing? Or the same? Do they have job posts up there? Are they hiring? Is there anything in the news about series A or series B or financing? There’s a bunch of criteria that you could probably identify and automate that could give you a good glimpse of if this is a prospect or potential customer that’s gonna go through growth over the next 12 to 24 months, or not. [0:10:41] Hiten Shah: I really like that. So everyone’s got a task after this, if you’ve got a business and are working in it. If it’s your own or not, which is go figure out what type of customer is your growth customer and start really thinking about that so that you can create a healthier business. [0:10:56] Steli Efti: Beautiful. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:10:59] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:10:59] The post 400: Identifying & Focusing on Growth Customers appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to create an ideal customer profile. Creating an ideal customer profile for your business is super important. It can help you build a better product, market it better and ultimately help you serve your customers better. But how detailed should you be when creating one of these? In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what an ideal client profile is, why you should create one for your business, tips on how to create a good one and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:24 Why this topic was chosen. 01:18 what is an ideal customer profile? 01:58 The goal of identifying your ideal client. 02:58 If you should pick an ideal client. 04:36 How understanding your ideal client can help you serve them better. 05:10 How companies sometimes misuse this concept. 06:10 How companies can use a customer profile. 07:15 If you should ignore a customer that doesn’t fit your profile. 07:37 Tips to help you create an ideal client profile for your business. 3 Key Points: Identify what segment of the market can get the most value out of your software. The goal of identifying your ideal client is to help you do better marketing. If you don’t know who your customer is, you won’t know what to build, sell or market. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we may or may not tell you to create an ideal customer profile or not to create an ideal customer profile, but- [0:00:12] Hiten Shah: Yeah, we don’t know yet. [0:00:14] Steli Efti: But either way we are going to talk about the concept of an ICP, ideal customer profile. It’s a very popular idea and it’s one of those surprising topics that sometimes I can’t believe that we haven’t talked about something in almost 400 episodes. But we have not talked about this very specific topic, so I thought it would be fun to tackle this. Well, Hiten, maybe first we explain first to people what the concept is, like what is an ideal customer profile, why do companies do it? And then we might want to talk about why it’s overused or misused and how we really feel about this topic in 2019. [0:00:55] Hiten Shah: Yeah, why don’t you start. Why don’t you define it, at least in the classic sense, because I think that will help. [0:00:59] Steli Efti: Yeah, so I think the broad idea is not that complicated. The broad idea is to ask yourself as a company … There might be many, many different types of people or organizations that decided to purchase your software, but not all of them are created equal and I think the the idea with an ideal customer profile is to identify what type of customer, what segment of the market can get the most value out of our software? Who is the most ideal customer that exists out there, and what do they have in common? And the goal of defining and writing down an ideal customer profile is to help you do better marketing, do better segmentation, do better product development, because you’re not taking on a broad group of people in terms of the feedback they give you, or a broad group of potential customers in terms of what channels would be most effective in terms of acquiring them. But you segment it down and you focus yourself and the entire company and team on the best ‘customer,’ the ideal ‘customer.’ You define it, you write it down so everybody in the company and the team understands it, and then you go after those customers above all others. Does that make sense? Is that a definition that you would agree with? [0:02:23] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean if you don’t know who your customer is, you won’t know what to build. You won’t really know what to do, even. You won’t know how to sell, you won’t know how to market, you won’t know how to do any of that. So this idea of an ideal customer profile is super valuable, super useful. I think where people get confused is at do I have to pick one? Right? And so my thought is no, you don’t have to pick one. Some products, like many of the ones I work on, are either focused on many different types of customers or they’re focused on basically like … They’re a free product and so anyone literally can use it as long as they fall under a certain criteria. That being said, when you’re early on in a product, you’re looking for what everyone calls an early adopter. And so I look at this concept as a more malleable concept than other people do. There’s also a lot of people out there that think through from a design and product standpoint, they think about personas, right? [0:03:19] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:03:20] Hiten Shah: And then there’s rallying against personas and then other are excited about personas and there’s a debate. But to me the ICP, ideal customer profile concept actually comes from a classic sales methodology in general. And that’s fine, that’s cool. To me, it’s like what you’re really trying to do is when you see a customer or see a prospect you’re trying to identify how do you serve them, and how do you speak to them, and how do you show them the value of your product. Whether it’s in the product because it’s self service or something like that, or a free trial they can sign up for, or it’s a more like give them a demo and there’s a whole sales process to the product. Either way, you’re trying to deliver whatever value they need to them. And without understanding them deeply, I don’t think you can do that. And so to me, the concept is just that simple, which is if you don’t understand them, then you won’t be able to deliver value to them at a high enough rate that enough of them are coming to you and converting. So yeah, I mean in some ways it’s like to me 101, like these are the basics. You need to know your customer. You need to have a deep understanding. You need to define who they are, it it’s relevant to the demographics, if it’s relevant to you, their behavior. If it’s relevant to you, the other tools they use or whatever it is that helps you understand them so well that when they come in you are able to either fill it out or already know about them because they’re signing up with a company email or something like that. And then you can start really servicing them in a way that they feel like this product or this service that you’re providing is for them. [0:04:54] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. I think that I’ve seen a few interesting trends when companies and teams misuse the whole concept. And sometimes they go overboard, where the exercise becomes more important than the goal of the exercise, and so they pour so much creativity in the persona that they make sketches and they put together a board of like this is Mary Johnson and she lives at exactly this street in this city and this is what she eats for breakfast. They go really, really crazy which can be fun, but at times I wonder what is the utility of this? And how accurate is this, is really everybody that’s your customer eating the same breakfast and living in this one specific neighborhood in this city? Or is this just somebody going wild with an idea and not really staying practical with it? And then the other thing is that sometimes when companies create an ideal customer profile it’s not its purpose for you to ignore everybody that doesn’t 100% fit that. But sometimes the practical implication of it is that, and that’s surprising. So a company will define an ideal customer profile for the very first time, and then instead of using this as a way to clarify who we want to double down on, individuals and team members in that company will use the ideal customer profile as an excuse to ignore customers that don’t perfectly fit into that profile, or dismiss them. [0:06:27] Hiten Shah: Oh, yeah. [0:06:28] Steli Efti: Or not pay attention to them. Well, you know, we said a customer with 17 seats, a 17-seat license, is an ideal customer. And this is a customer with 18 licenses so they requested this feature but I don’t think they’re an ideal customer. And it’s an easy way to not pay attention and not listen. Instead of asking yourself, is it really that different, somebody that has 16 users on our platform versus 17 or 18? Are we just going nuts here? Is this just dumb? Or is there really a difference between those two customers? And should we really ignore a customer just because they’re a little big bigger or a little bit smaller than whatever we, in one session, sat down and wrote on a piece of paper as ideal. There is an application of this and this is advice that I have given to companies, especially in the super early days, is that sometimes I’ll give founders the advice to create a non-ideal customer profile. And this specifically goes to in the very early days there might be some customers that are harmful for you to go after. The classic example here is self-funded/bootstrapped startup, small tiny team, three people, having some traction let’s say in the professional or the SMB space, and then a big, large enterprise clients comes around and waves a bit of money and says, ‘Hey, we found you, your solution is really interesting. We’d like to buy 1000 licenses of this, but don’t worry we’re going to be a really uncomplicated customer for you.’ And now the startup that has no experience in enterprise sales, doesn’t know how to deal with a customer this size, has not built a product that fits, kind of goes, ‘Well, we didn’t go after them, they came to us.’ So of course the lure of all this money and this big, shiny logo as a new customer made us go down this rabbit hole that oftentimes can derail a startup, and sometimes even kill them. So I have advised startups in the early days to potentially ask themselves what is the type of customer that we really want to turn down, because we think we’re going to do a terrible job servicing them? Or they’re going to do a terrible job being customers of ours. So that can be useful, but it’s always funny to me when I see a company that writes down an ideal customer profile and then uses that in a very inflexible way to dismiss customer feedback, to not pay attention, to not listen, to not care for customers that don’t fit that profile. Versus use it for its original purpose, which is to clarify who do we want to double down on, who do we want to focus on more in maybe our customer acquisition, our marketing, our positioning or whatever else, our product development cycle. So this might just be one of so many other ideas that it needs to be used so thoughtfully and it’s easy to just read a blog post online, call in an emergency meeting in your startup and write down a one-pager and then you think now that we have this thing, everything surely is going to just magically become better in our company. And as always, it’s never as easy as that. [0:09:45] Hiten Shah: Love it. Yeah, I think that’s so true. [0:09:49] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right, I think that’s it for us for this episode. If you have struggles with identifying your ideal customer, if you have done this exercise and it worked out particularly well or poorly for you, we always love to hear from you. Just send us an email with your thoughts, questions, feedback, to steli@[inaudible], hnshah@gmail.com. We always love to hear from you and hear more feedback and get more questions from you guys. And until next time, we’ll hear you very soon. [0:10:19] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:19] The post 399: How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to use documentation to get the right things done in a remote business. For your startup to run smoothly with no hiccups, it is crucial to document all your processes and have them followed by your team members. The importance of documentation is even more crucial in fully remote companies, as a lot can go wrong when everyone is not physically present. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on why documentation of your process is super important, best practices and things to avoid when running a remote business and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:26 What inspired Steli to come up with this topic. 02:24 Best practices and things to avoid when running a remote business. 03:22 How FYI is solving a huge problem for remote companies 03:36 Why becoming disciplined in your writing efforts is a good idea. 05:50 How companies sometimes make the mistakes of coming up with different versions of the same document. 07:54 The importance of having rules in your organization. 08:36 Why you should make your rules simple to follow. 10:14 The importance of having a philosophy in your business. 3 Key Points: It’s very rarely the tool, but the humans and how they use those tools. The more complex the rules are, the less likely people are going to follow them In a remote company, you need to get really good at documentation. [0:00:00] Steli: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to manage process and documentation at a remote team inspired by the FYI twitter account ’cause that’s what Steli said this is about. [0:00:18] Steli: Yeah. [0:00:19] Hiten: Which is one of my businesses. And the twitter account is @usefyi in case you want to follow along. And what we’ve been doing is we’ve been talking a lot about documents, document tools as well as productivity. And then I think one of people’s favorite topics today which is remote work and how to do it well. So I think Steli and I have a lot of thoughts on this considering our businesses are remote as well as we have faced a lot of these kind of challenges in the past with doing this right, doing this wrong etc. So what’s on your mind? What inspired you? I know what inspired you which was our Twitter account and all the sharing we’ve been doing. We’re committed to sharing more and more now. But what really is on your mind about this that you think people need to hear? [0:01:08] Steli: Yeah, I get asked often, “What tools do I use? What tools does my team use to be productive and aligned as a fully remote company, fully distributed company?” And I often find myself going back to some of the basic principles that we share so often Hiten which are that yes, I have some tools I use, and I have tools that I can recommend, but it’s very rarely the tools, right? It’s always the humans and how they use those tools that really make a difference. And so I oftentimes find myself just sharing with people certain principles on how we communicate as a remote company and how we think about certain things. Now, one of the biggest problems that … So I thought it will be fun for us to go back and forth, ping pong a little bit on this episode and just share some best practices or mistakes to avoid for people that are thinking about organizing and managing their remote company especially from a point of view in terms of how do we organize our different projects? How do we organize our work? How do we share information online? And since I’ve been following the FYI twitter account, you guys post all this kind of super neat insights in document sharing software and what companies and people struggle with. One of the biggest struggle which is what you guys are solving right now with a product that you’re building is that people cannot find all the documents that they have. And that’s one of the problems that we went through is we grew as a company. Engineering team likes to use Dropbox paper when the market team likes to Google docs, when the other team likes to use something else. And you never want to constrain people. But then eventually, you’re drowning in a sea of different document preferences, different document tools that different teams use. And it’s very hard to navigate and find what you’re looking for at any given time. And FYI is making I think a big dent in helping people with finding their stuff. But the big principle that I always share … There’s two. One, when it comes to documentation sharing of ideas within a remote company, is to become very disciplined in your writing efforts. Make sure that you eliminate having impromptu conversations between two or multiple team members that are not captured or written down anywhere, right? That’s something that people are very accustomed to in an office environment. A bunch of people ad hoc meet around the water cooler, brainstorm some wild ideas and come up with that exciting solution to a problem, or make a decision on something that was unclear. And then because it happens physically in a room in a way that’s very strong signal for everybody else, the most relevant people might eardrop or join the conversation and have the information that they need. In a remote company, if three jump in on a Skype call or a Zoom call and come up with some brilliant idea, nobody else in the company knows of this fact. Nobody has heard of this. So it can be quite dangerous because then you have the scenario where people had made decisions and nobody else understands these decisions or knows about them. And so you get this strong misalignments. So in a remote company, you need to get really really good at documenting any ideas, decisions that are being made, usually writing that down somewhere, keeping track of meeting notes, doing write-ups afterwards on what was decided and why, and then sharing that with the company. But the other thing that I’m curious to hear your thoughts on is this concept that I find oftentimes surprising or challenging especially on remote teams, but this is probably a generic issue, is companies and teams they pour way too much time in creating a version 1 of any kind of document. And then that document will be forgotten, never to be used, never to be practically put to use. And a year later, there’s another group of people that will have a meeting about a similar subject creating a new document writing down the new version of this thing. And so after three or four years of the company history, there’s literally nine different documents that try to describe the same thing in different ways and that have never been used by anybody in any practical sense to make a decision or to do anything else. So this is one of my biggest [inaudible], and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this of it’s a good idea to write things down, and document things, and create processes and documentation for things in the company especially a remote company. But then the challenge seems often to be from a human perspective, how useful are these documents? How are they being put to use? Or are they just busywork where people spend a lot of time writing all this down? Everybody looks at it and agrees, and then it’s instantly forgotten, never to be used again. I’m curious to tap into your mind and your learnings over the last year or two that you’ve been really diving deep when it comes to document sharing and see what you’ve learned and how you see that in that space. [0:06:19] Hiten: Yeah. I was on a call yesterday. It was an hour long call. And there’s a document produced right after it within another half hour. It had two sections. It was recap of discussion, and there was literally bullets of the recap. And the next section was takeaways and actions. And it had people’s names on it and what they were going to do. Thankfully, none of those were assigned to me. There were two other people in the call. [0:06:49] Steli: Thankfully. [0:06:49] Hiten: I’m just joking. I’m just joking. That was the context. I was just sharing that these two people needed to hear, and we had to coordinate. So I had already done my task which was think through something. Anyway, so there’s two sections: recap and takeaway/actions. And it was sent out within a hour or so of the discussion. And the question was like, “Is this good? Did I cover everything? Did I capture everything?” The answer is yes. And it got shared with the rest of the team so everybody knows what’s going on. And then there was a reply from a key person on the team saying, “Oh it’s all good. This sounds good to me. Let’s just keep moving forward,” and all that. And so what was really cool is that you just have to have these simple rules. They’re rules. I’m sorry. They’re rules. And they make the organization work well because if that call didn’t have somebody taking the notes and coming over to takeaways, the whole call wouldn’t be worth everyone’s time, you know? [0:07:54] Steli: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- [0:07:55] Hiten: And it wasn’t a serious discussion. It was a tactical discussion and getting people aligned sort of discussion of how we move forward with something. And it was relatively casual, but we were just getting aligned. But the notes were super powerful. I’m even looking at them now because I wanted to find them and make sure I describe the sections. And its like, why can’t we as humans just come up with simple things like that? Why do we have to make such a big deal about all this stuff? So my big learning is that the more complex the rules, the less likely people are to continuously follow them. This is simple rule. Recap the discussion. While we’re talking, someone’s writing notes or whatever. And then basically have a takeaway section. And honestly, the coolest thing about the discussion is nobody was sitting there even at the end, even though I usually do this. But at the end, nobody was like, “What are our takeaways?” Or “What are our next steps?” It was just organically determined and a document was created of what people are going to do because somebody was paying attention and knew that this needed to happen, right, and knows the importance of documentation. It’s kind of rooted in the culture at that company. And so I don’t know. This kind of blows my mind because the simple stuff works. The complex stuff is like, “Oh you got to have these five sections. You got to do this all the time.” That doesn’t work most of the time unless it is for things that you’re repeating that are heavy. So I would say for product development and things like that, and some certain types of engineering, there are very deliberate templates or sections you needed to document. But the simplest thing you can do is if people are having a conversation whether it’s two people or more … Ideally when it’s two people or more, it becomes even more important. You write notes, and you make a document of the recap and takeaway/action items. And that just gets everything done. Sometimes, what I see remote teams do that takes it to a different place or is a different way to do it is they’re literally creating the tasks in the tool they’re using. So I’ve seen so many teams use Trello. And they’re discussing what’s going on in Trello in their meetings. And they’re moving things around, and then they’re adding tasks in realtime as they’re discussing it. That can be really valuable too because very little gets lost, and you might not need to take notes at that point because everything ends up getting put into the tool you’re going to manage the process. [0:10:29] Steli: I love that. And I think there is one thing that’s really important to highlight here in terms of philosophy, right? You could have a meeting that is a 30-minute, 45-minute, 60-minute meeting; and somebody writes meeting notes, basically transcribing sort of the entire conversation, right? And it could be seven pages full of text that attempts to write down everything that was said. Or you could do a recap that says, “What were the key takeaways? What were the key decisions we made? And what are the action items? And who has to do them by when?” Right? And this would take maybe just half a page, right? But think about the usefulness of one versus the other. It does sound cool to say we’ve written down word for word, everything that was discussed. But if you have to as yourself, well, what is the likelihood that people will have the time to read through eight pages to remember what was said two months ago of the meeting. Who has the time and desire to relive the entire meeting by spending another 20 minutes reading everything word for word? That’s not really that useful. But it is the most kind of mindless way to say, “As a remote team, we’re documenting every meeting. We have a really meticulous meeting notes.” That it in of itself is not useful, right? It’s not practical. [0:11:52] Hiten: No. [0:11:52] Steli: But writing up half a page of the key takeaways of this discussion, the key decisions that were made, the key to dos, that’s something that within two minutes I can look at and relive everything that was said and understand kind of its essence of what do I need to do now? Or what have we all agreed needs to happen next? And who’s responsible for that? So I love that simple but practical format by coming up with processes that are simple and practical and valuable versus that seem extensive or impressive or we do … Doing things for the purpose of doing them is mostly a wasted exercise versus asking yourself, after we’ve talked for 20 minutes, we had documented something with the most important thing. What will we really have to go back and look at? What needs to be documented here in a way that is going to be useful. Those are the few questions that if you ask yourself those questions, if you use that level of thoughtfulness and mindfulness. And everything else that you do becomes much, much better, right? Bit it just requires that little bit of thoughtfulness in the beginning versus just mindlessly going, “We’re a remote company. Whenever we have a meeting or discussion, we should document everything. So let’s down everything we’ve ever said. Let’s use a transcription software to have 450-page transcription of every word that was said in the 60-minute meeting, and then never to look at this again or use it in any practical way. [0:13:25] Hiten: Yeah, that happens a lot that people going document crazy, right? Yeah, that’s what I call it. It’s like document crazy. It’s like there’s so many that are created that you don’t go back to. So just a rule, I think the example you gave is really, the one from the fact that you made a document, had a meeting, and a year later you’re working on the same thing for some reason. Other people are working on it. I mean what really needs to happen is you almost need an elephant’s memory as they say. And you need to be able to remember that somebody did something. And then you have to go find that document in order to waste less time. Oftentimes, the document doesn’t even matter. That’s actually what’s really interesting to me. The document doesn’t matter. And the fundamental thing here is that humans tend to just be bad at getting stuff done. I’m just going to put that out there. We’re just bad at getting stuff done. And you could argue with me and say, “No, we do lots of stuff,” but like, “Yeah, yeah, Steli, we do lots of stuff.” See I’m talking to myself through you. [0:14:30] Steli: You’re having an argument with me- [0:14:31] Hiten: So yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, it’s great. [0:14:34] Steli: Without my participation. I love it. [0:14:34] Hiten: Yeah, there you go. I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, we get lots of stuff done but are we doing the right things?” [0:14:40] Steli: Yeah, humans are bad at getting the right things done. [0:14:43] Hiten: Fair enough. [0:14:44] Steli: There you go. I think that it’s impossible to argue with that statement, and this is a tweetable moment for sure on this episode. [0:14:51] Hiten: There you go. [0:14:52] Steli: Because it needs to be said into the wider world. I love it, yeah. So the more thoughtfulness we can use to constrain the way that we document things and the way that we decide what the right things to get done are, the more we can accomplish at the end of day. Yeah, I think it’s never really a problem of not enough time, not enough resources. It’s mostly a problem of now working on the right things or not getting the right things done. So anything you can do as a company or as an individual to get better at picking the right things and getting them done, I think that’s really the big difference between how far you can go and how much you can accomplish, and what the average is capable out there in terms of productivity. All right. I think this was a fun episode. I’m glad we did this. For people out there that are drowning in documents, using too many document tools, if you’ve not done this yet, Hiten is not going to pitch you this, but I will. Go to usefyi.com and check out Hiten’s newest product. It’s really really killer. It’s a [inaudible] product. So check it out. [0:16:06] Hiten: Yeah, check it out. Let me know how much you like it or don’t. I’d love your feedback. There’s a lot of work to do, but we’re really looking to solve this problem where your documents become easier to find and more. [0:16:18] Steli: Beautiful. [0:16:18] Hiten: So thanks for the plug, Steli. [0:16:20] Steli: Well, it’s my honor and pleasure. Usefyi.com everybody. We’ll hear you very very soon. [0:16:25] Hiten: See ya. [0:16:25] The post 398: How to Use Documentation to Get the Right Things Done in a Remote Business appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of the Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about creating a new category as a startup. Sometimes in order to stand out in a highly competitive niche, it may be necessary to create a new category for your product. This strategy is sometimes known as resegmenting and can be quite rewarding when done right, as you can then become a leader in the category you created. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what resegmenting is, if you should implement it for your startup, how Hubspot resegmented blogging, how Drift resegmented content marketing and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:47 Why this topic was chosen. 02:01 If you should create a new category for your product. 02:19 How it’s much easier to be number one in the category you created. 02:51 How Hubspot resegmented blogging. 03:50 How Drift resegmented content marketing. 05:07 If resegmenting is something you should do for your startup. 06:20 The important thing to consider if you’re thinking about resegmenting. 07:42 How resegmenting isn’t necessary if you’re competing with everybody. 08:29 How you need to describe what you do when you’re creating a new market. 09:42 How companies that are successful at resegmenting do it. 3 Key Points: It’s much easier to be number one in the category you created. Hubspot resegmented blogging. If customers are drawn to your resegmented product then it’s worth it. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah and in a rare turn of events today we’re going to talk about something that was inspired by a book. This book is called Play Bigger and the book is about what people are calling category design. This is the idea in business, in a company, in a startup, you can have the ablility to create a category. [0:00:27] Steli Efti: There’s a lot of value in creating a category, in thinking about what you’re building as like a new category that you can then own, right? [0:00:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that too. Exactly. [0:00:38] Steli Efti: I’m building a product, I have a startup, I have a few customers. I have a little bit of revenue. Usually I play in some space that broadly we can define in one way or another. The question now becomes, is it worth the exercise of trying to come up with a new positioning and branding and give this thing that our software does a category name? Maybe two recent examples I can think of HubSpot created the category … Or named the category of inbound marketing and in content marketing. I think Drift is very recent example of the [inaudible] space where they … Instead of just saying, “We’re doing chat, live chat,” which is something that other companies have done before drift. They started framing this as conversational marketing and calling this a big new emerging category and a big new trend. There are many, many other categories. [Gainsight] with Success software, and all that kind of stuff. How do you think about doing category design, does every company need to? And is it just a marketing and branding exercise or does your product really need to do something uniquely different that is its own category in order to be able to do that? [0:01:57] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean the line in there is, and I have this saved … I have this saved because I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the line I would use for that is basically like, “It’s much easier to be number one in a category you created.” I think that that’s really this idea in the book, and this idea, category design, which is age old. I guess my response on this whole thing is most products are already in an existing category. Very few products create a new category, literally like they are already sitting in a new category when they start. For example, HubSpot resegmented blogging, that’s my opinion. Blogging was a very personal thing, HubSpot comes around, see this pattern based on Dharmesh Shah, one of the co-founders, blogging about startups about his blog onstartups.com. He convinces Brian, the CEO, now CEO/co-founder of HubSpot to start the company around this idea that blogging can be done for business. That’s really to me how I would describe the original category that HubSpot was in, which was blogging. They were building blogging software, believe it or not, that’s my take on it. And they resegmented that as they started talking to customers into what they called inbound marketing which is this idea that you don’t need to do paid marketing in order to get traffic, and leads, and customers. Then they built a whole suite of software and it’s a public company growing super fast and all kind of things are going on. But originally, to me, it was resegmentation. They were not in their own category, and then they re-segmented the category and gave it a name. So that’s one example. And the one you used for Drift, to me, was a resegmentation of what I’m calling content marketing. The reason for that is after we went into inbound marketing and blogging, content marketing became a thing. It’s like basically any kind of content that you’re putting out there for marketing purposes, even thought that’s been done, that’s what people started calling it, because it went beyond blogging. It was all about doing this marketing and getting emails, or getting leads. And so Drift is basically saying, “Okay, well you’re doing content marketing, that’s great. Traffic is coming to your site. We got this thing called conversational marketing to help you convert those people without just using email.” They basically replaced this idea of what I call content marketing in my definition of it, with conversational marketing. That’s like two good examples where they resegemented an existing category. They took something that was a pattern that was working and they gave it a name and they built a software around that in a business. [0:04:44] Steli Efti: So how do you decide when this is valuable or not? Or would you say this is something that is universally valuable and that every startup should strive to do category design and resegment? Is this just an exercise that every startup should try to be number one in the category that they named or designed? Or is this something that becomes relevant at a certain phase? What’s your thinking on that? [0:05:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I wonder. I really wonder. I think this is not clean cut and clear. In the past one of the things that category design really was called was branding. That’s my take, like- [0:05:25] Steli Efti: Positioning. [0:05:25] Hiten Shah: Positioning, there you go. Yeah. It’s almost like, “Okay.” You want a differentiated position in the market, now that the markets are crowded, creating a category of your own and naming it and marketing it as such. In Drift’s case they wrote the book on it, right? And things like that, like recently. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you find yourself in resegmenting a category, and you see customers drawn to it, and it’s different, then yeah, it’s worth it. But if you’re in a category, and it exists and people understand it, and there’s a lot of software in it, it’s not necessary to do to stand out from the crowd, but honestly, there is still a differentiator you might have. It might be worth entertaining it. So to me it’s really about how do you think about what you’re doing? If you’re in a market and you’re hitting on being directly competitive with others … And I think your business is very close to that, if not right there, then maybe you don’t need to resegment. I’m sorry, you don’t need to resegment, you don’t need to do any category design, you don’t need to invent anything. You’re just like, “We’re another CRM, we do things a little differently, choose us because we’re right for you.” And if your pitch is any different than that, please speak up, Steli, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s like you have some differentiation, and you’re in the market, and you’re selling against larger and smaller competitors, right? [0:06:50] Steli Efti: Right. [0:06:51] Hiten Shah: It’s pretty straightforward. You’re in a highly competitive market, and you’re going after, and the market is big enough to hold I don’t even know how many CRMs now, right? Especially if you widen it and talk about CRMs targeting specific industries. So that’s one way, which is you just compete against everybody, and you’re one of many, and that’s okay. Because you can find your niche or carve out your audience. Another is you resegment, which is essentially Drift and HubSpot are classic examples of that I would say. And then, a third is more of like when you just invent something new. You invent something new because whatever your product is or your service is just doesn’t look like anything that existed before and is solving problems in a way that is differentiated amongst your market in the first place. This is my take, if you’re competing with everybody you don’t need to do category design early. You might not even need to do it mid-stage, you might think about it much later, actually, because it takes a while to find differentiation in a highly, highly crowded markets. If you have a resegmentation strategy where you discover underserved set of people or a trend that you can hit on and go after, then … And the trend that you believe is a new one and customers are sort of just gravitating towards you because of like that little bit of differentiation that you have, usually it’s product differentiation, that’s resegmenting. And I think that is more something you think of it more medium term. Early stage you’re still discovering what that difference is, but you might have some inclination that you can do something different there. And then, I’d say that if you’re creating a new market, you have no choice but to figure out how to describe what you do in a way that people resonate with it. And whether you’re creating a category in that case or really going after hammering the value proposition and the problem that you solved, then I think it’s more imperative to do that much earlier in sort of that third market or type of market. [0:08:59] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that framework. And I think it’s a very common pattern that for companies that successfully kind of reposition, resegmented, and defined a category, the ones I think of that did this successfully, they didn’t do it on day one, right? [0:09:17] Hiten Shah: No. [0:09:17] Steli Efti: They did much later in the life cycle where they had a few iterations, a chance to iterate a few times, both of the product, the marketing, finding product market fit, kind of fixing some of the early bugs of, “What is our brand, what is our identity, who’s the ideal customer, what do we need to do to switch around the product?” And once they get a good momentum going, then it might make sense to really throw the entire weight of your business around the idea of designing a category and positioning yourself in a really strong way. Because that also points to the second thing I’ll say before we wrap up this episode, which is that the companies that have done this successfully didn’t just do this a little bit later, once they had already figured out some fundamental questions about that business, but they also … You need to be really committed to that idea, because once you design that category, typically I find that, or what I’ve observed, is that it takes a company a few years of consistent effort and repetition. Just keep, like this evangelical promotion around this new idea, new category, and it takes a long time before it starts catching on. Before other people and your customers and other competitors in the market are starting to latch and jump on this idea and use the same verbiage and describe the same category. So it’s not one of those things that you can just like write a blog post about, or run an ad campaign, and within two months, boom, you now have a category you’ve created a certain positioning that everyone in the market adopted. It takes kind of very long term commitment, it probably is the reason that it doesn’t make very much sense to do it in the early days when you’re still a few pivots away from having even rudimentary product market fit, right? [0:11:00] Hiten Shah: Yeah, couldn’t agree more. I think it’s timing that you have to do it. And the things people forget is they just do it, but they don’t realize it is all about timing, and also when you are able to do it, because you’ve learned exactly what the sort of customer perspective on the market is. So if someone wants to buy a CRM, let them buy a CRM. If someone wants to buy yet another marketing tool, nobody does, then go help them buy inbound marketing or a conversational marketing tool. And if someone doesn’t even know what the heck you do, but you solve a real problem for them, then figure out how to pitch it to them because that’s sort of a whole different level of problem. And I think you’ve got to start with the customer and figure out what the customer’s perception is, and their perspective is, and then map that to when you decide to go after creating a category or you might never need to, because you’re able to grow without having to have that level of explainable differentiation. [0:12:00] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right, I think that’s it for us for this episode. We will hear you very soon. [0:12:05] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:12:06] The post 397: Creating a New Category as a Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how secretive you should really be with your ideas as a founder. The startup industry, it’s common for new founders to be super protective of their ideas. However, more experience founders understand that ideas are a dime a dozen, and execution is all that really matters.   In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten dive into how secretive you should be with your ideas, wow the execution of an idea is what really matters, when to be protective of an idea and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:27 Why this topic was chosen. 01:33 How secretive you should be with your ideas. 01:46 How the execution of an idea is key. 02:33 The last time the guys worried about sharing an idea with anyone. 03:28 How being new to coming up with ideas tends to make you overprotect them. 03:51 How the value of execution has taken center stage in the startup world. 04:06 How valuable is an idea in today’s world. 04:17 When to be protective of an idea. 05:20 How executing an idea can change how you feel about it. 3 Key Points: Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is all that really matters. Ideas are more of a starting point and are almost never the end all. The more experienced you become the less protective you are of your ideas. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how secretive should you really be about your ideas as a founder. And the reason we wanted to record an episode is that one of you, one of the listeners sent us an email and this is a founder that was wondering and worrying about how openly he should share his ideas with potential investors and potential co founders. And I think the heart of the issue was the fear that people could steal his ideas. I thought that, a, it’s funny we’ve never talked about this, at least not in a full episode, but it felt like a prime time kind of a inexperienced founder worry or fear that you and I could quickly dissect and misspell. Let me ask you Hiten, how much should I protect my ideas? How secretive should I be? Should I worry about telling people my brilliant ideas and will they take them, run with them and crush me then.   [0:01:16] Hiten Shah: I’m laughing ’cause people are really protective of their ideas, especially if they’re new to having ideas and wanting to execute on those ideas. I think there’s a lot of sayings about this, but ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is all that really matters. And that’s where I will start. And if you’re not worried about your execution, which you shouldn’t be really, if it’s an idea and you want to pursue it, then why would you worry about telling anyone your idea? It’s this thing where it’s almost like if you are new to what I’m going to call turning ideas into execution, then you will totally be very, you’re very likely to be hesitant to share your idea. If you’re not new to it, you just don’t care. You’re just like, “Yeah, it’s an idea and I’m executing towards it and I want the whole world to know.   [0:02:16] Steli Efti: Yeah, I was wondering if the episode just started with a question like, when was the last time, because I don’t remember the last time I worried about sharing an idea with anyone with the thought in the back of my mind of, “Oh, if I tell this person this brilliant idea, maybe they take it and run with it and I’ll be lost.” I don’t think, can you remember the last time you worried about sharing an idea from that kind of protective point of view?   [0:02:40] Hiten Shah: I can’t.   [0:02:41] Steli Efti: I can’t. Yeah, I do believe that, when I think back to kind of the first start ups that I did, like the early days, the way that you phrased it and framed it was great where you said, when you’re new to having ideas and to trying to turn ideas into reality, you probably, because you’ve not had that many, and you don’t quite yet know the value of ideas, you probably overvalue them until you are over protective where you have this fear that this brilliant thing that you thought of is something nobody else thought of. And if you share it, you’re taking a risk that somebody could steal it from you. And it seems to me that we’ve gone through a trend where there was a time, I think 15 years ago or so where ideas and the power of ideas was kind of, a lot more glorified in the entrepreneurial community. And I feel like in the last 10 years or so that has been beaten quite a lot and like the value of execution has been a lot of more the forefront founders and investors promoting the value of execution and putting down the value of just a pure idea. Do you think that we’re maybe, kind of tipped the balance, the power of balance here and now we’re not valuing the beauty of ideas enough. Do you think that we are too dismissive of that in any way? How valuable can be a creative ideas in today’s world. And is there any, at any point, at any time and context, does it ever make sense to be a little bit careful and protective What idea you share with whom? Can you think of any scenario like that?   [0:04:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean there’s things where like maybe you’re executing towards something and you have a great idea and you just want to ship it and you’re waiting to let it out in the world. That’s a little bit different. I have a couple of those right now where I’m working and executing and testing and learning and I don’t have any desire to go share it with anybody beyond the team that’s working with it or the few people that are using it. I would say that’s a scenario. I mean both of my primary businesses, I think I’m doing that right now where there are things that are going on that I don’t have a desire to tell anybody, but it’s not out of people not needing … It’s more out of people not needing to know and less out of fear of sharing it, I guess.   [0:05:12] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think also there’s a, the more ideas you’ve had, the more ideas other people have shared with you, and the more you see how often times during the execution and the exploration phase, you’re gonna learn that the kernel of your idea might have been good, but it still needs a lot of changing, right? Or adopting.   [0:05:33] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:05:33] Steli Efti: Or you quickly realize that the idea seemed exciting in your head and maybe even exciting as you were verbalizing it to other people. But once you actually executed it, build it and manifested it in reality, you saw that nobody, didn’t resonate. There was a big flaw in that idea that was hard to spot in your mind, during a conversation. And so you just realized that ideas are a starting point, but they’re almost never the end all. Right? It’s not like if somebody could just copy and paste the idea from your mind, that’s all it takes to succeed. Execution and iteration and improvement and change is really what makes the difference. And so the more experienced you become, the less protective of your ideas you are, and you just share the ideas appropriately with people that can actually morph or form those ideas or help you execute them. Versus sharing ideas to get positive reinforcement to get other people to tell you that they also think your idea is brilliant. That becomes less and less valuable. Which I think in the early days is still a very fun game to play, and exercise to play. You have an idea, you’re all excited about it. Now you want to tell people about it. So they also could tell you how brilliant you are and this will work and be big. And then you overvalue that idea and then start becoming paranoid, I’m like, “Oh maybe, if somebody would only know what I know they could make this huge thing happen.” But you don’t realize that millions of people have ideas, but only very few know how to execute those ideas and change them and morph them into different product market for them, they’ve truly made something valuable in the world. All right. I think that’s it for us and for this topic. Somebody out there has an idea that, if you have an idea, you’re wondering if your idea is in your situation so unique and you’re worried about sharing it with people. You want some trusted sounding boards to give you some feedback on that. Always happy to hear from you. You can send us an email at Steli@close.io or H&shah@gmail.com. Besides that, please give us a review and rating on ITunes if you have not yet. And we will hear you very soon.   [0:07:44] Hiten Shah: Good luck sharing your ideas. See ya.   [0:07:46] Steli Efti: See ya. [0:07:47] The post 396: Should You Be Secretive About Your Startup Ideas? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to create and how to set clear expectations. In any relationship, whether professional or personal,  setting clear expectations is key to making sure that that relationship is successful or not. But knowing what is expected of us something a lot of people struggle with, and this can lead to a lot of headache at work or home. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about how expectations are the birth of either success or failure of any endeavor, why it’s a good idea to set clear expectations and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 01:00 Why this topic was chosen. 04:00 How expectations are the birth of either sucess or failure of any endeavor. 04:05 Why it’s a good idea to set clear expectations. 05:10 How you can trace the root cause of a failure to a problem of expectation. 06:25 Why expectations are important. 07:27 Why people suck at knowing other people’s expectations. 09:30 Times when we don’t have expectations. 09:50 The importance of figuring out if your expectations make sense and are realistic. 3 Key Points: Setting clear expectations is something that a lot of people struggle with. Expectations rule our lives. Our expectation of ourselves is to be efficient and break things down for our audience.   [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli: And today on the Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about how to create and how to set clear expectations. I mentioned this subject to Hiten a second ago before I hit the record button, and sometimes I wish I would record before I record because your first response was just beautiful, you know. Your first natural and organic reaction to how to set clear expectations was what Hiten?   [0:00:30] Hiten: It was just a chuckle. Yeah. One of those right there. See, you did it. I don’t know, I think like, this is a topic that I talk to people about. This is a topic that I might have tweeted about, but I’ll probably tweet about more. This is a topic that people struggle with and sometimes realize it sometimes don’t, especially people who are starting companies or managers. Sometimes they just don’t understand that they have expectations of themselves and other people and these are the things that cause suffering for them. So my chuckle was just out of the fact that like, I think expectations rule our life and our lives and oftentimes we don’t know what expectations we have until we’re hit with certain situations and we’re like, wow, whoa. You know? In some of my most intimate as well as challenging relationships in life, I think expectations sometimes come up and they can cause trouble or they can be really beautiful. So yeah, I think the chuckle was just out of wow, what a fascinating topic and what a key topic and there’s just so much you could go into around this. We like to obviously be efficient with these episodes and we also want to provide as much value as possible in a short amount of time, which is essentially the definition of efficiency. So our expectation of ourselves is to be efficient and break things down. The expectation the audience should have from us is that we do that in every episode with every topic. And if we don’t do that, tell us. So, okay. How do you like that?   [0:02:31] Steli: How do you like that? Very much, so because what I love is you instantly went into meta mode, like expectation, what are the expectation for this episode? What is the expectation for the podcast in general? Right? I love it. I love it. So yeah, there’s a lot of venues we could go down to. So the thing that I would like to, maybe the thing that we can touch on on this episode to set an expectation for their listener is just talk about, I just want to touch high level on the concept of like why are expectations important, why they’re invisible but all encompassing, becoming more self aware of the expectations you have, and why when you’re frustrated with people or when you were impressed by them, how both things are so related to your own expectation. They’re not things in a vacuum, people are not impressive or underwhelming or frustrating or disappointing in a bubble. They are because you had an expectation for this person or this task or this thing, that the delivery was either above or below your own judgment. So let’s talk a little bit about the meta topic of expectations. I want to stay philosophical and then let’s make a commitment to the audience that we’re going to create a few more episodes on this on like how to set expectations or how to work with expectations, when they’re met, when they’re not met, for projects. We can like go a bit more tactical later, but I want to stay philosophical for this one, right? High level. One thing that I realized and that I realize more and more is how expectations, like how my expectations and the expectations of others are the birth of either success or failure before any endeavor. Right? And I didn’t use to be as aware of that as the, if I don’t know what my own expectations are for this thing that we’re discussing or thinking about, and if I don’t know what exactly the expectation of this other person or these other group of people are, if we don’t make sure that we have clarity of expectations and set clear expectations for each other and that those map, then the chances of one of us or all of us being disappointed and unhappy or the thing we’re discussing being unsuccessful are incredibly high. Can almost read, like I can almost go back to the root cause of a failure, whatever the failure is to a problem of expectations. And so now more so than ever, almost in any relationship and almost in any conversation, very early, the question pops up in my mind, do I know what my expectations are and does this person know what my expectations are? And conversely, do I know what this person’s expectations are? And how do I know that I know? Like how do we know that we’re really are clear on this because 99% of the time people think that the expectation is obvious, that it was already discussed. Well, we said, we want this thing to succeed and we said, we should do in a really cool way. It’s obvious, right? Like what else is there to discuss in terms of expectations? We said it should be cool and we said it should be a big success. Like we’re on the same page without realizing how not true that statement is or that line of thinking. So I’ve gotten a little bit obsessed about setting expectations and getting better at it and be more aware of the expectations in the rooms so to speak. So it’s become a bigger and bigger topic in my mind every day in the last couple of weeks. Hence why we’re talking about this now. But I know that it’s a big topic for you as well. But let’s talk about why expectations are important, right? And why are people particularly typically not good at being aware of their own expectations, the other people’s expectations and setting expectations and getting them on the same page?   [0:06:50] Hiten: Yeah. We grow up and expectations are set for us by our parents or whoever was around us when we grew up. And oftentimes those expectations are unclear to us. You could say they’re subconscious. We’re not conscious to these expectations that we have of ourselves as well as of other people. For example, if you were told that you need to get an A on everything in school. Guess what? You have an expectation of yourself that you’re going to get an a on everything.   [0:07:24] Steli: Right.   [0:07:24] Hiten: And that you need to and you will work your butt off until you do that. That’s kind of the sign of an overachiever, if I were to like box somebody or labeled them. And so I think one of the reasons we’re not conscious to it is that we’ve lived with these expectations all our life and they were not ours. They were put on us by other people, well meaning people, but other people, well well meaning people oftentimes not all the time. And so I like to think about it like if I have, the easiest way for me to recognize this in my experience is that when I have a very strong demand or a strong pull towards what someone else should do or how they should do it or what I’m expecting from them, and it’s just strong, then I really think about that. Wait. Hold on. What is this? Like where does this come from? Does this really make sense in this situation? And then I really start breaking it down, cause really what I’m trying to do in my life and what I like, what I do my best at a around expectations is I want to make sure that if I have them, they matter, whether it’s for me or somebody else. That’s my only concern. Because, yes, I am going to have expectations. And some people will tell you don’t have any expectations, it leads to a happier life or some pithy quote like that. And like, yeah sure, like, yeah, if I wasn’t trying to achieve anything or I didn’t have to work with other people or manage them or whatever or lead them or whatever, then yeah, it’s okay. I don’t need any expectations of myself or anybody else. I can just sit here and do nothing. That’s not the case. Right? So I’m just trying to make sure that whatever expectations I have, they’re good ones. They make sense. They’re important for the other person. And if they’re not that, then it’s my own bullshit, it’s my own crap and I need to like check myself. Same with the expectations for myself, but those are a little bit harder to see.   [0:09:23] Steli: I love that, because that’s not where my mind immediately went with the, when I have expectations. Well, is there ever a time we don’t have expectations when we’re involved, when we are truly engaged in something? Like maybe for a stranger or maybe for an acquaintance, but for most of the people that are close to us in life, our family, our friends, our core, our co founders, our investors, the people that are, that were really engaged with, we tend to have expectation almost any interaction. Right?   [0:09:57] Hiten: Totally.   [0:09:58] Steli: And so in those directions, the question that you ask yourself is, are those expectations that I have, do they make sense? Are they coming from? What does do they make sense mean, right? I have a few assumptions, but I want to hear it from you. Like how do you assess if your expectations are good, quote unquote, or bad or useful or useless or like how do you, what makes an expectation a good one? Let’s just say that.   [0:10:35] Hiten: So what makes an expectation a good one? I think the expectation’s a good one if, let’s say for example, you have an expectation of somebody else or yourself and you’re in a certain role. Is that something that matters for that role? So if you’re a marketer and you’re marketing and I’m managing you, if you can’t measure your marketing and you don’t understand how to measure it, you’re not going to be able to be an effective marketer. So in a role of being a marketer an expectation is that you can measure your efforts in some way. If you can’t measure your efforts, don’t be a marketer. You shouldn’t be a marketer. I think that’s a fair expectation of a marketer is that they can measure what they do, quantify it and do more of it or learn from it. And that’s the expectation. So expectation a lot of times has to do with the role. And I try to keep it very, very objective cause subjective gets really interesting when it comes to expectations. And that’s what I mean by like does this matter for the role? So for example, if someone is a marketer and I expect them to measure their marketing, that’s good. If I expect them to able to write copy, I think that’s a good expectation. If I expect them to be good at shooting video, that’s probably not a reasonable expectation unless they’re focused on video. If I expect them to be experts in SEO, but they’re just a marketer and they’re a generalized marketer, that’s probably not a fair expectation. That being said, if I hire someone and their job is SEO, then guess what? That’s an expectation and I would expect them to be able to do that. So a lot of those expectation has to do with the definition of a role. And I think that’s what people forget. Right? So like if you’re a parent, there’s expectations of you and how you should, you know, be a parent. You should be loving and kind and also at the same time be able to discipline your children, and make sure that they grow up to be, you know, ideally like contributing members of society and good people, if that’s what you care about and your values are. So really expectations as a parent is like, have your kids aligned with your values and do the best you can on that and all that kind of stuff. But you know, that expectation also when it comes to parents, it’s a little subjective because it’s put on by society more than anything else. And same comes for like even a marketer, right? So I would say that role matters so much when it comes to expectations and making sure that someone can live up, that’s why they use that terminology like live up to your expectations. Well it’s like what where do they, like the question is good. Like how do you set them, where do they come from? And I think ultimately it really does boil down to this simple thing, which is what’s your role and what are the expectations of that role?   [0:13:30] Steli: Love that. And I think I’ll add one more thing before we wrap the episode up on this topic. I think another criteria for me at least for what makes a good expectation good is that it’s clearly understood.   [0:13:42] Hiten: Yeah.   [0:13:42] Steli: If I expect something of you in you don’t understand that, then the question is, was this really the right expectation of you? Right? And so I think when I hire you as an SEO expert, you knowing things about SEO is an expectation. It’s understood because you applied for a job that said the expectation is you are an expert in topic X, and then I expect you to be an expert in that topic. But oftentimes, even in that, what does being an expert really mean? Like there’s a bunch of bullet points, oftentimes. You should have experience in X, Y, and Z and if you go a bit deeper than might be a very different understanding of what these things mean, right? At least three years of startup experience. Now, somebody might have done a side hustle startup while they were in a corporate job for two years on their own without ever launching and then worked at a startup for a year. And they’re like, well, I have startup experience with three years. And maybe your expectation when you say somebody needs to have three years of start up experience is somebody has had to have worked in a startup or started a startup and at least for three years been operating with customers and at least have raised this amount of money or had this amount of success, right? When you say three years start up experience, you might have an expectation that’s very different from somebody else’s three year startup experience and both of you might have said, yes. This person might say yes, I check off on that expectation, when you would have said no they don’t. So I think being more specific, more granular in the way that I set expectations so that they’re are harder to misunderstand. They’re harder for the other party to have a completely different understanding of what I mean makes I think a good expectation good or a bad expectation bad. As I say something that the more people could misunderstand something, the easier it is to misunderstand an expectation the worse to me it is to have or to communicate in the first place. So, how easy is it to understand your expectation or how easy is it to misunderstand your expectation to me is a big part of what makes an expectation a good one. All right, I think that’s it for the philosophical version of the expectation episode. We might do a few more tactical ones. How to set an expectation with freelancers, how to set expectations with new hires that I think can be really useful. I think this is one of those topics, Hiten, where it’s like this seems so obvious, that it is, that we have to create a list of things that are so obvious that almost they can’t but be misunderstood, right? I think the more obvious a topic or an area seems, the harder it is to attain real mastery in it, right? Because we all just think a surface level of this thing because we’ve heard it so much and we instantly think we are the standard and everybody, no matter if they’re young or old instantly thinks yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. This is not this complicated, so I didn’t need to spend a lot of time with. But these are the topics were most of us are really terrible at it because of our lack of investment in mastery, in learning it and studying it. And expectations is one of these things that’s like, I could hear so many people listening to us and go, I get it, it’s not that difficult, tell me something cool, something complicated, something new and innovative and exciting. I don’t want to hear about this bullshit. And then that’s the little area of bullshit that’s holding them back in their life, holding back their startup from succeeding, these basic fundamental things that we don’t investigate enough.   [0:17:42] Hiten: Couldn’t agree more. We’ll keep investigating.   [0:17:45] Steli: We shall. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.   [0:17:50] Hiten: Cheers. [0:17:51] The post 395: How to Set Clear Expectations to Get Good Results? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about your level of incompetence. Sometimes, situations arise when you are unable to handle a situation properly. This could be because you don’t have the skill sets to handle that situation or you’re unable to figure out how to handle said situation. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what being incompetent means, why it’s important to figure out what’s causing you to be incompetent at managing a situation, how to deal with situations you feel incompetent about and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:29 Why this topic was chosen. 02:53 The definition of incompetence. 03:30 How you can be incompetent at one thing but competent at other things. 04:30 Why it’s important to figure out what to do when feeling incompetent at something. 06:00 An example of what incompetence can lead to. 07:31 How to deal with situations you feel incompetent about. 08:31 How not knowing how to manage people is a huge level of incompetence. 09:06 Sometimes, what’s causing you to be incompetent at something is not so obvious. 09:32 How to get better at realizing hidden incompetencies. 3 Key Points: I’m not incompetent at reading code, I’m incompetent at writing code A lot of us have strategies of what to do when we hit that level of incompetence. The key is to figure out what’s causing you to be incompetent   [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And, this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: On today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about your level of incompetence. Here’s why I want to talk about this. The framing of this is really what I want to talk about, which I thought was super interesting. Just recently, I was in a conversation about getting COs on the phone, cold calling, selling to really kind of high-end demand professionals and how difficult that is. One person said something that stood out to me, which was that when you talk to, when you reach … He was saying the people that he’s trying to reach and sell to, he usually does not have a hard time once he gets them on the phone to get their attention and to get time from them. Because he was like, the people that he’s talking to, they’re operating at a level of competence where they have time. He’s like, “If I ever talk to somebody that doesn’t have a few minutes to talk because they’re so quote unquote busy, to me that just means they’re now operating at a level of incompetence that creates busyness for them. Right? That creates stress busyness.” That framing was really interesting. That’s something that I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, which is the idea that whenever things are getting overwhelming, whenever things are getting incredibly stressful, whenever you are quote unquote busy. “I’m so busy right now” or “Things are so busy, I’m so under pressure, have so much stress, there’s so much overwhelming, there’s just too many projects, too much stuff going on.” When things become really, really difficult and friction-full, maybe you just now hit a level of your incompetence. Now you’re operating at a level that’s much higher than what your competence level is, so things are not quite simple and easy for you to do. Now things are overwhelming, difficult, stressful for you to do. Thinking about stressful and busy times as times where you hit a level of incompetence was a way of thinking about it or framing it, especially the incompetence part that I was thought was interesting. I don’t know quite what it is, but there’s something in that topic. There was something in that framing, in that word, that made me go, huh, I want to bring this up to Hiten and see if we can dissect this word and see where it leads us to.   [0:02:29] Hiten Shah: Yeah, incompetence and hitting a point of incompetence is kind of really interesting. I just looked it up. It means inability to do something successfully. It’s pretty broad and kind of vague. Incompetence, I think another way to say that is, sometimes I would say, “Oh, that’s above my pay grade.” Just jokingly because it’s something I don’t want to deal with or something that I don’t know anything about. Or I would say, “That’s too deep for me. That’s like in the weeds.” So for example, if you try to get me to write a line of code, I’m sure this is the case for you, that would be too deep right? Like my incompetence would show up because I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d start writing words. So that’s a good extreme example. If either of us tried to write some code right now, we wouldn’t know what to do. Now, here’s the funny thing. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not incompetent at reading code. I’m incompetent at writing code. So, and that might sound super weird, but I think most code is logical. I might not know what is going on, but I can read it and manipulate it if I need to go [inaudible] copy on a page. You know? I just dig around the code and find a copy. So I think I’m compensating for my incompetence by just brute force, which is just like, figure it out regardless of knowing anything about it. And a lot of us have strategies of what to do when we feel like we hit that level of incompetence. So, I think the worthy part of this is when you hit that level like, I don’t know what to do. I’m unable to do anything. This is out of my depth or above my pay grade or it’s too deep for me. I think what’s important is what do you do when you feel like that? How do you get past that? That’s kind of important. I mean that’s the part that’s most interesting.   [0:04:49] Steli Efti: I love that. There’s actually two parts. One is what you just said, which is yes, when you hit that, when you realize that, hey, I’m working on something or I’m involved in something or I’m responsible for something that I don’t have competence in, what is your response? What are your coping mechanisms? How do you deal? Do you run and hid away from it, and try to avoid it? Do you try to distract yourself from that fact? Do you try to overcompensate by pretending, just like, I know what I’m doing, this is all easy, I’m going to get this done. I don’t know if you watched the Fyre documentary on Hulu or Netflix? For those that might have not watched it, I highly recommend it. Have you watched it?   [0:05:40] Hiten Shah: I have not, no.   [0:05:41] Steli Efti: It is fairly entertaining, and there might be some lessons learned there for people. But that is a good-   [0:05:49] Hiten Shah: I’m waiting for the blog post.   [0:05:51] Steli Efti: Yeah, for the notes. Well I think that documentary is a crass and very entertaining and funny, but big example of somebody operating way above their competence and trying to compensate for that with pure confidence. And you can do that if the difference is fairly small, so when you stretch, you can reach that. But there’s obviously just being super confident that you’re going to win the Olympics when you’ve never run a day in your life or never competed a day in your life, is not going to be enough. Any confidence in the world, if you’ve never exercised a day in your life will not compensate for you just showing up at the Olympics tomorrow and thinking you would win. And that’s sort of the thing that happened there. They tried to do something that is incredibly hard, this massive event, and they had no competence whatsoever. And there were many, many signs all the way leading up to the event that it was going to be a catastrophe, and they didn’t have their shit together, and they couldn’t do it. And they would meet all these advisors and people that would tell them this is not going to happen, and they tried to basically positive think and confidence their way out of all of this until they had to start to actually use fraudulent tactics to maintain the façade. And at the end, inevitably, the whole card house fell apart, and it didn’t work out. So, I think what is your coping mechanism, right? Do you use over confidence? Do you fake things? Do you run away? Do you get sad and depressed? Like, what are your coping mechanisms when you are responsible for something. That’s one thing. The other thing that I find interesting about this, Hiten, is there are areas where you know … Like reading code for instance, that’s a great example. If somebody told me, “Well, there’s a bug in our product, and all our engineers are sick, and it needs to be fixed asap. Steli, here’s access to the code. Go and fix it.” Now that’s obviously a skillset I don’t possess. Now there’s maybe work around this coping mechanisms. I would think, well I can find a way to recreate the bug. I can find a way to document it. I could try to find people that know how to read code to help me. Like there’s things that I could do to try to fix this problem, but if I had to do it on my own, I would know in that moment, this is an area I have no competence in, so how am I going to do this? But there’s other times where we are involved in activities or tasks that we are competent in, but we just have, let’s say, the incompetence is just more hidden. I think that’s the interesting [inaudible] case that comes to my mind. Let’s say you’re doing a bunch of activities that you’re competent in doing, but all of a sudden because you hired, let’s say, a bunch of people, and now you’re doing all these activities. And now you have to also do it to them, and teach them how to do them, and you’re getting overwhelmed, and you don’t quite realize that you’ve hit a level of incompetence because all the things you do every single day, all the little things you explain to people, you have to critique or give feedback on. All that stuff is stuff that you feel competent in, but the incompetence is more hidden. The incompetence in this case is that you don’t know how to manage people, you don’t know how to onboard them, or don’t know how to delegate. And these things, how to delegate, is much more of a hidden incompetence than, I don’t know how to code. Or I don’t know how to play the piano. That’s a very obvious incompetence. If you sit me at a piano, it’s very obvious to me. But if you give me ten people to manage when I’ve never managed anybody, if I get overwhelmed in how to teach them what I do and how to do the things, that incompetence might not be as obvious to me. It might not be obvious that what’s creating stress and overwhelming and why things are so difficult is not the reading, the blog post or the telling somebody how to do something, it’s that I don’t know how to onboard, how to delegate, how to manage, that kind of thing. And realizing maybe hidden incompetencies is also an interesting thing that I think people … How do people get better at that? How do people get good at that? That’s an interesting, I think, other side of the coin.   [0:10:22] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean, the key is to figure out what causes you to be incompetent. So if you don’t know how to delegate or you don’t know how to manage, and you’re new to it, simply what you have to do is realize that this is new to you and you don’t know how to do it. And then use whatever process is fastest or most effective for you, fastest and most effective to learn up, basically learn about that thing and get good at it. I mean, a lot of these topics that we feel out of our depth on, we don’t necessarily need to know how to do it before we start doing it, and we also don’t necessarily need to believe that we can’t learn it really fast. So I think there’s a combination of just knowing when you don’t know what you’re doing, and finding the right ways for yourself to admit it to yourself before someone else does because often times we wait for someone else to basically indicate it to us. Whether it’s the person we’re trying to manage, which usually can be harsh, like they quit. Or through incompetence, say you’re not doing a good job and it’s just clear to you or other people that you’re not doing a great job. So I think it’s a matter of awareness.   [0:11:46] Steli Efti: I love it. Alright, coming back to self-awareness, which is a big topic on the Startup Chat. We have touched on that a number of times, but the episode that I will leave you with, that I will recommend everybody listen to, is episode number 45, Founder Self-awareness, and number 65, How to Become More Self-aware. Two of my favorite episodes. Self-awareness is really the key to almost everything we are ever talking about, Hiten, so we’ll leave all the listeners with those two episode recommendations. And we’ll see you very soon.   [0:12:26] Hiten Shah: I think you saw that coming, am I right?   [0:12:30] Steli Efti: I did. [0:12:30] The post 394: What’s Your Level of Incompetence? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how not to make dumb mistakes under pressure. It’s common in business to find ourselves in situations where we have to make our most important decisions under pressure. And this pressure could be as a result of a lack of time, emotional stress, or desperation. Most times, when we make decisions under pressure, it ends up being a bad decision. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on why you shouldn’t make very important decisions under pressure, how to handle these kinds of situations why they arise and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 03:01 Why you should never refer a client that thinking of switching to one that’s successfully switched. 08:10 Why you shouldn’t give references when you don’t control the message. 08:30 Why you should never ever think or say the words “I’m gonna roll the dice”. 09:33 How to handle decision making under pressure. 10:25 How we all make mistakes. 11:30 Hiten’s opinion about why Steli’s friend made this particular mistake. 12:15 A big irony in this situation. 12:49 How not listening to an adviser could be a relationship killer. 3 Key Points: You can’t stop people from doing stupid things. Don’t give references when you don’t control the message. Never ever think or say the words “I’m gonna roll the dice”.   [0:00:00]Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah..   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on the startup chat, a little Steli Efti rant on how not to negotiate and how not to give references to prospects. All right-   [0:00:14] Hiten Shah: Let’s do it.   [0:00:14] Steli Efti: So heres the deal Hiten, over the last two, three weeks, I’ve been helping a friend in a negotiation with a large customer that his company had, that was just going through the motions of currently considering to switch to a competitor right, so these guys were customers for them for a year, their renewal is coming up and so they are now thinking about switching to a larger competitor. My friend has tried to talk to them, visit them and kind of try to negotiate with them and figure out a way to keep them as customers and to convince them that his product at his company, his service is gonna be serving them much better than the competitor. Now, the competitor has gone through a lot of efforts to sway them and send over a huge team, rolled out the red carpet, you know, steaks, dinners at expensive restaurants, everything you could think of. My friend was not used to having to compete on that kind of very enterprise sales level, so he was surprised by that and he was also surprised that the customer was really appreciating the attention and time and care that that competitor was funneling their way and channeling their way. So throughout the entire time I’ve tried to give advice and give tips on how to help with the negotiation to keep the customer around. One really big thing was that switching to the competitor would take a long time in the transition, using the competitor would take a lot of money to integrate and customize and utilize that product. There were a lot of hidden cost that the competitor wasn’t highlighting that I wanted my friend to make them aware of. In the final hour, one thing that happened a few days ago is, it looked really good, it looked like they came around and they wanted to stay with him, they did a bit of research, they listened to his pitch or his argument, they appreciated his increased effort and showing them that he really cared and his company cared about keeping him as a customer as much as the competitor cared about winning them. It started to look really, really good and I started to become confident that they’re gonna be able to keep the customer and I was really happy about that, and then my friend calls me a few days ago and the conversation starts with “Steli Efti I have to make a confession, I did something you probably are gonna be really unhappy about.” I was like “Oh God.”-   [0:02:54] Hiten Shah: Oh no.   [0:02:54] Steli Efti: “Oh no, what happened?” He’s like “Well, in my last meeting.” He had a final meeting where he visited them to make his proposal pitch. He called me after that meeting and he told me almost everything that had happened, but he left out a really crucial thing, and that was the thing he was admitting to in that call. He’s like “Well one thing that happened that I didn’t tell you about is that, the very end this customer had asked me if I’d known any other company that had made the switch between our solution and our competitors solution, that they could talk to. I said I probably have and I had to think about it, and then what I did Steli without consulting you, without asking for your advice. I thought bout it a little bit and I thought I had done this in the past and sometimes it does work, and sometime it hasn’t, and I just thought I’ll roll the dice, so I connected them with a prior customer that left for that same competitor, and I knew that that customer, it had taken him much longer to make the transition and the transition wasn’t much more frustrating than they originally thought. So I just sent an intro hoping that would help us.” I was like “Okay, and what happened next?” He’s like “Well, this customer was supposed to make a decision by today, they just informed by email that they postponed the decision for another week and they are flying to this reference company that I made to them, their flying there tomorrow to visit with them to get more insight before they make a final decision.” Okay, heres my next question Hiten, to him. I go “Well, when you gave him that reference, do you know what that person will tell them exactly?” He’s like “Well I assumed they would be telling them that it was really frustrating.” I’m like “Yeah but would they tell them, hey it was frustrating because we made X, Y, Z mistake, heres how to avoid these mistakes? Or, we still stand by the decision to switch and we encourage you, we think this is the right thing to do, or will they say, no, never make the switch, stay with the other solution, this is a bad … Like do you know what exactly they told them?” And he obviously went “Ah, no.” And I was like “Okay, did you tell the reference customer what your expectation was? Did you tell them hey heres a current customer of ours, I don’t want them to leave, would you be open to talk to them and encourage them to stay with us? Or did you just say, heres a current customer that is trying to leave, they also want to leave just to the same competitor that you left us to, can you talk to them?” And he’s like “Well I did the latter.” This just caused me a little bit of frustration right? For obvious reasons. So heres what’s really happened, I wanted to share this one, to rant and vent, but also hopefully to share this as a lesson to people. What I think happened-   [0:06:07] Hiten Shah: Don’t do that.   [0:06:08] Steli Efti: Don’t fucking do that! Just never ever do that please. You might be able to even hear that I was like holding my face while I was saying that, just never do this.   [0:06:19] Hiten Shah: Yes.   [0:06:20] Steli Efti: Never ever do this. Heres what happened Hiten, I guarantee it to you-   [0:06:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:06:25] Steli Efti: That reference customer, that person, he wasn’t aware what the intent and expectation was. He probably talked to them and said “Yeah we made a lot of mistakes, we underestimated X, Y, and Z. We worked through a few consultants that were able to help us and some of them were shit, but finally we found somebody that was good, heres how you should make the switch.” And then that customer was like “Wow, this is … Can I just fly over and see exactly how you set up the implementation, just learn more and I’ll bring my team with me to learn from your team, and maybe you can bring your consultant so we can get to know him and maybe we’ll use him too, or her.” And he was like “Yeah, sure, I’m happy to help.” Now they are much further down the line of making the switch rather than being encouraged to stay.   [0:07:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:07:12] Steli Efti: Help me out here, give me your … Talk a little bit before I just keep ranting on this note.   [0:07:26] Hiten Shah: You can’t stop people from dong stupid things. Especially when they’re under pressure. Your friend was under pressure.   [0:07:36] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:07:37] Hiten Shah: He did something stupid! You can’t stop people from doing stupid things when they’re under pressure. He had you helping him along the whole way and he knew what he did was stupid.   [0:07:49] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:07:49] Hiten Shah: So, when you’re under pressure, don’t use that as an excuse to do something stupid.   [0:07:59] Steli Efti: Yeah, well you-   [0:08:00] Hiten Shah: That’s the lesson.   [0:08:03] Steli Efti: I think-   [0:08:03] Hiten Shah: Yeah, of course what he did was stupid, I mean he just didn’t think it through and he was really desperate.   [0:08:09] Steli Efti: Yeah, so I wanna double click on what you just said, and I think that’s gonna be the lesson we should zero in on and focus on because it’s the more universal thing that we should highlight. The quick run through though the technical one that I want to do before that on the sale side of things, is this. Don’t give references when you don’t control the message, and you don’t create clear expectations to the messenger, right? Never ever do that, and never ever say the words, or think the words “I’m gonna roll the dice, sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.” In a negotiation … This isn’t Vegas, you’re not playing a game, this is not the time to go “Ah, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, let’s just roll the dice and see what.” No! If rolling the dice is the next best thing in your mind, you need to keep looking for somebody to give you better advice and a better strategy. In a negotiation, you should never jut roll the dice and see what happens, just randomly do something and see if you get lucky. No. Now, coming back to your point, under pressure, none of us is safe from doing dumb things, we are all very qualified to do dumb things no matter how smart, quote unquote we think we are or how experienced we are, we all can do a dumb thing. The important tactic I think here, is that, when you know you’re under pressure, you cannot trust yourself, so you need to find somebody that’s gonna be your … The person that checks yourself to not wreck yourself, the person that you’re gonna be using as an advisor to a sanity check to prevent yourself from doing dumb shit. Two years ago I had a large negotiation that fell on my lap, I was busy with a bunch of other projects and I had no energy or time to handle that large negotiation, and I knew that about myself, and that person I was negotiating with was an incredibly good negotiator, I knew that as well, and a very annoying negotiator, I knew that as well. The moment I started the negotiation I knew I can’t trust myself. I know that some people, a lot of people come to me as like a negotiation quote unquote expert. I help all these people, I’ve written a book on negotiation, so I know a lot about this topic, but I know enough to know that I’m also just human and at times I cannot be trusted right? And so, the entire negotiation I had an advisor, a person that I would check in on every single decision I was making because I knew I was very impatient, I just wanted to get it over with and I knew that the person I was negotiating with was this annoying and very patient and very effective negotiator. So I knew that after a few weeks of negotiations, I wasn’t effective any more because I just wanted to get over it. So I needed somebody else to keep me straight and keep me from making this mistake. The two things here are, we all make dumb mistakes. Under pressure, humans make more dumb mistakes than usual, My tip here is, use an advisor, but now I want to ask you Hiten, he had an an advisor, he was talking to me. I was helpful, I was friendly, and still, the moment where he choose to do something dumb, he also chose not to tell me, which is a very human thing too. Why? Why do you think that is?   [0:11:52] Hiten Shah: He was desperate. He was just desperate. He didn’t think, he didn’t realize that he shouldn’t do it. If you have someones advice and they’re an expert, and you’re using it, you’ve been using it, and you keep using it, you don’t go against that relationship, you don’t go against that advice. That’s like what you do, unless you don’t value that advice, or unless you’re so desperate that you’re just trying to do anything. ‘Cause honestly, he could have got to the same conclusion without any of your help. In a way, it’s like you wasted your time.   [0:12:32] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:12:33] Hiten Shah: That’s okay, I’m sure you don’t care too much, but you wanted him to succeed, you’re incentivized to do that, and the irony is just, he knew that he shouldn’t do it, but yet he also had your help. In a way, I’ll go a little extreme and say in a way it’s like a relationship killer if you’re gonna do that, cause it’s like you’re sitting there invested in getting him a win right?   [0:12:58] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:12:59] Hiten Shah: And he’s sitting there and he’s sabotaging it. He might have just fully sabotaged it, especially if that client is gonna fly over there. There’s only one reason, I don’t see any other reason, they’re spending their money, their time, they’re gonna fly over there, that also means this was probably a big deal.   [0:13:17] Steli Efti: Yeah, it was.   [0:13:20] Hiten Shah: So, yeah, I mean there’s nothing to really say, sometimes it’s a personality type that’ll do that, and sometimes it’s just literally just the fact that the person’s so desperate that they’ll just do anything. Often times, I see this happen when someones getting advice from multiple people on the same topic and just doesn’t know who to listen to and is getting conflicting advice, so that can happen as well.   [0:13:45] Steli Efti: Yeah, very good point. All right, I think we’ll wrap this up here. Let this episode be a lesson to all of you start up people and the founders. Please, when you’re under pressure, just be self aware enough to know that your chances of making dumb mistakes increase every day and every hour and use somebody … And in this case, one person or group instead of multiple advisors. Use one person you truly trust to help you avoid these mistakes and then please, please, please keep that person in the loop. It makes no sense to use somebody and to ask for peoples advice, when you withhold information from them, where you tell them just parts of what’s going on cause other parts you’re embarrassed of. They’re not going to be able to give you advice, they’re probably gonna give you bad advice because they don’t know the full picture. So, that’s it for me and from us for this episode, we’ll hear you very soon.   [0:14:49] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:14:50] The post 393: How Not to Make Dumb Mistakes Under Pressure appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of the startup chat, Steli and Hiten talk about why Steli is always looking to understand the person behind the message. Sometimes when we receive a message, it difficult for us to understand the true meaning of that message. And one of the reasons why we don’t is because we lack context around who the messenger is and why they are saying what they are saying. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why it’s important to understand the person behind a message, how doing so can help you understand the message better and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:27 Why this topic was chosen. 03:41 Something Hiten and Steli have in common. 04:36 How Hiten researches new people. 05:01 Why Steli researches the people behind a message. 06:37 How Steli can’t respond to a message without context. 07:23 How finding something negative about a person could affect our ability to receive the message. 08:14 Why Hiten likes to understand the person behind the message. 09:20 How understanding the context could help you understand the message better. 10:25 How there are a lot of messages out there in today’s world. 10:42 What understanding a message boils down to. 3 Key Points: We are careful about who we bring into our lives. I’m trying to understand who the person is. I’m much more curious about people than I am about things.   [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hello, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today, at the start of the chat, I’m about to be surprised.   [0:00:08] Steli Efti: Yeah, Hiten doesn’t know what we’re going to talk about. The reason for that is that just as we wrapped up the last episode, the recording of it, I remembered a conversation I had and I was like, “Oh, my God. I need to record an episode based on this with Hiten right now.” I think you all will enjoy it. Here’s the topic: Recently, I had a friend visiting me in New York for a few days over the weekend. One thing that happened three times during those three days and then led to a discussion we had, was that, at different points in time, he was telling me about somebody’s content that he enjoyed. So he would say something like, “Oh, do you know so and so?” And I would go, “No, never heard of them.” “Wow, they have amazing YouTube videos about this topic and I’ve watched a few of them and I learned a lot.” So, they would pull up the videos and try to show me those videos or he would try to show me these videos, and my instinctive reaction to that was to go, “All right. Who are these people? What are their backgrounds?” You know, would ask a bunch of questions, not about the content of the video or the person was presenting it, but about the person. Like, “Who is this person? What is their background? Where do they live? What are they working on? Why are they qualified to talk about this? What’s the context behind this?” And he didn’t know, so I would start doing some research on my phone. Very quickly, I’d be like, “Oh, interesting. This person actually, who is giving now these sales negotiation videos on YouTube that are really well-made, but he actually started in the online dating how-to-pickup-artist world.” You know, I did a bit of research. Ah, interesting. A lot of these guys started in the kind of pickup-world and then they learned all about body language and all about influence and manipulation. Then they’d branch off to other stuff. It’s interesting. They always use “charm” in their brand names. It’s like the “charm on demand,” “the art of the charm,” “the charm of this.” Charm is always a key word for people coming from the pickup world. And I kept [inaudible], “Oh, he lives there,” and “He’s done two little things that didn’t work.” “Oh, a startup that didn’t work at all.” And, “Oh, this, no actual sales background in any corporate bank.” And I did, like within 50 minutes, I had a bunch of facts about this person that I could research. This happened three different times about three different things. So another time, it was a book recommendation. “Oh, I read this book and it was really brilliant.” I was like, “Oh, cool. What did you learn in the book? Who’s the author? What’s their background?” And again, I did a bit of research and learned all these things about them.” Then, my friend eventually went, “You know, I never realized this about you, but this is actually really true. You go really deep on trying to understand the people in your life or the people in business. You don’t just look at what they’re doing. You don’t just look at their company or at their book or video or podcast or latest piece of content. You don’t just evaluate the content on itself. You’re trying to understand the percent of context around where this person’s coming from, where they acquired that knowledge, how credible it is.” And in some situations, I could say, “This video is amazingly produced and they’ve done all these things really right, but the content itself is actually bullshit. And I disagree with it.” He’s like, “You’re really, you’re different in that way.” And I know that one thing we have in common, Heaton, is the deep focus of people in our life, right? We put people at the center of everything we do, right?   [0:03:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:03:30] Steli Efti: People are really the way we solve all our problems or the way we enrich our lives. It’s always selecting amazing humans or bringing the right type of humans into our lives. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how we do research on people or how we try to understand people, and how you do this and how you evaluate this. I just though it was an interesting discussion. And honestly, up until last weekend when he brought this up, I didn’t do this consciously. I didn’t notice that this was a pattern where, when I encountered somebody new, a person of authority and somebody new, that I would instantly go into this deep type of research and try to understand who they are; what their background is, what the contexts of the knowledge they’re sharing or the success they’re having right now, instead of just evaluating the piece of content on face value. I don’t know, I said a lot. I’m curious to hear your thoughts, the way you approach this. I felt this would make for an interesting episode.   [0:04:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean look. Why don’t you tell me why this is so interesting to you? Why is it interesting for you to dig into the people behind the message? Because that’s what I call it, right? Everyone’s got a message. There’s a YouTuber, there’s a person writing some content. Why do you do that? What are you trying to do?   [0:05:15] Steli Efti: I think that I’m trying to understand who the person is. It might be that I can … To me, it’s hard to evaluate your information or your actions or your words or even your result. It’s very hard for me to evaluate them, to understand them or to use them in a vacuum. I have the need to understand the context around it and who these people are and how they’ve gotten to where they are, in order to now have your words or your actions in the context of a bigger picture, to now be able to really understand. For me, I need the context, I need the story behind the people before I can receive the message. And before I can have a response to the message, I need to understand the context behind the people there. I don’t know why. It’s something that I’ve been doing. I mean, my whole life, I’ve been fascinated by people and once I started reading a lot, I started to always, when I heard about somebody, I would try to read all the books about them. If I find them fascinating or interesting for some reason, I would read like four, five, six books about a certain person to really try to dig deep and understand who they were and what really happened and what the context is of them behind their life. I don’t know why I have that deep need to understand people or why I’m so curious about people. I’m much more curious about people than I am about things, in many ways.   [0:06:45] Hiten Shah: Yes, same here.   [0:06:46] Steli Efti: So, I don’t know. But I know that, like-   [0:06:49] Hiten Shah: I like that.   [0:06:49] Steli Efti: I know that I definitely, if you tell me, “Here’s a strategy,” maybe I’m inflexible in that sense, but I can’t respond to that message in and of itself. I will have the need to understand the person behind the message, to then go back, look at the message and go, “Hm, how do I evaluate this?” That’s another thing that we figured out with my friend. He figured out that when, a lot of times, he doesn’t do the research because if he does the research … Like one thing that he’s found out about himself in this conversation is that if he finds something about the person that he dislikes or doesn’t respect, he will not be able to receive the message or do anything with it, even if it’s actually a positive one. He thought it was interesting that, to me, that is not the case. I could find out things about you that I find despicable and horrible. And I could think you were a terrible human being and I could then still go back to your message and go, “That message still is good,” or “I can still learn something from that message.” But I still need to evaluate you to understand the entire picture. I honestly don’t know why.   [0:08:04] Hiten Shah: I’m the same. I don’t have a problem learning something about somebody that might be negative or whatever and then still, without judgment, taking the message and seeing if it’s good for me. But I do like to understand where someone’s coming from. I think my take on this is like, if I hear something or know that someone has this content or this thing, and they’re sharing it and it’s good or appears to be good, or someone shared it with me and there’s a bunch of it, I like to really know a lot more about the person behind the message, just to understand where they’re coming from. For me, I think that helps me understand, contextually, where their message is even coming from. Like, why does Gary Vee keep talking about hustling? Why?   [0:08:57] Steli Efti: Yeah, is he-   [0:08:57] Hiten Shah: Does it have something to do with where he grew up and when he grew up and what he did as a child? Probably.   [0:09:05] Steli Efti: Probably, yeah.   [0:09:07] Hiten Shah: If I could go figure that out about him, that helps me understand the context of Gary Vee. Simple as that.   [0:09:15] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:09:15] Hiten Shah: Right? And this is someone who’s very loud about something very specific. Right?   [0:09:23] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:09:23] Hiten Shah: So to me, it’s that simple. If I really get into somebody or something, to understand it or even if someone mentions something, I try to explain that. I was talking to somebody … I’ve talked to people multiple times about Gary Vee and what I’m able to do is explain to them his context just because I feel like they should have it. If they have it, they might understand the person better. They might even understand, more importantly, the message better. So that’s important, I think, to think through and see what works for you. I really like what you said about your friend realizing that if he or she or whatever, looks into the person, they’re unable to actually move forward if they find something they don’t like. And then, they just miss the message completely. It’s good to know that about yourself. It’s really good to know that about yourself because if you are like that, then you might not want to look into those people until you are not like that or whatever. I think this is an important topic simply because the way we’re consuming information these days tends to be from messages from other people; whether it’s video or texts, whether it’s email or an email newsletter or tweet storm or a Facebook message or an Instagram post or whatever and just understanding what’s behind that. Or even a story on Instagram is probably the newest, best way right now. It’s useful. It’s really useful because in the world that we live in today, there are a lot of messages out there. Some of them are similar. Some of them are not and understand the people behind them can give you a much different perspective on the message.   [0:11:10] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. I really think it boils down to trying to have the proper context or value of the message in and of itself and try to understand what you can truly learn from somebody. I think the context of why they say something actually matters. Even if it’s a very similar message, you have two different people that they … You pick up on a similar message on both of them, but they have lived drastically different lives. It’s interesting because you can then put it in a context of why they’re sharing this message. What is their drive and motivation for it? How deep does their knowledge and experience go in this area or how surface level is it? That helps, both to learn what to take away from the message, but also how much more you’re going to want to dig into learning from this person or how you’re going to be learning from this person. I think a lot of times, most people, now that I think about this, that I interact with, even when we’re talking about people that we’ve all read a lot about and know a lot about, it seems that I usually have a lot more detailed information about these people. The reason is that, a) I’m very curious, but b) I really want to understand who you are and where you’re coming from and how you’ve arrived at this message, to be able to maximize my learnings versus just getting the end result from you without the kind of, how you got here. Like, how did you get to this idea, this thought or this message. And yeah, he was actually mind blown. When he realized this about himself, he was like, “You know, Steli, when I first picked up on this, the way you do research about people, I was like, ‘Wow, this is so inspiring. I need to do this, too, myself. And now that I realize what consequences would come from that, I’m like, I’m not ready for this. Like, I’m not ready to do this research because I’m going to find something I don’t like about all these people and then I can’t learn anything.'” “‘He was like, ‘Huh, this is … ‘ He’s like, ‘And now I have to kind of unfuck myself on this topic trying to figure out how to get better at learning from people, even if I don’t fully agree with their entire life story and with everything they’ve done.'” It was just interesting for both of us to discover some things about ourselves. This is the thing that I’ve been doing so much my entire life and I’ve never really thought about in those terms. I didn’t even notice that I instantly go to deep dive research on the person. It’s just habitual at this point. I don’t even think about it. It’s almost subconscious. I can spend an hour researching you and that hour is like … Although it was just a thought in my mind and then I just move on. But it just goes back so quickly and it’s so instinctual, it’s interesting. All right, maybe and hopefully, this was an interesting episode for people. It was definitely one of the more, kind of not straightforward ones, but the one that we kind of unpack our own thoughts and what’s going on as we talk to each other. I always love these ones. As always, if you enjoyed this, please give us a five star review. We highly appreciate it, on iTunes. And also, if you have any thoughts about how you do research on people, how you look behind the person behind the message or anything else; any other thought or self-reflection that you want to share with us, we always love to hear from you. Steli@closeio, hnshah@gmail.com. Until next time, we’ll be here very soon.   [0:14:26] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:14:28] The post 392: Why Steli Is Always Looking to Understand the Person Behind the Message (People Research Episode) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to create comparison pages to highlight the differences between you and your competitors. The startup industry can be super competitive, and buyers are continually looking for better solutions to their problems. One way to show potential customers that your product is better than your competitors is by creating a comparison page on your site. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten dive into what a comparison page is, who it should be targeted at, the right time to create one and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:50 Why this topic was chosen. 01:36 Who to target your comparison pages at. 02:02 How these pages are for search engines. 03:45 Another target for your comparison pages. 04:40 One thing that puzzles Steli. 06:04 How to create a compelling comparison page. 07:53 What makes a comparison page compelling. 08:00 Why comparing features is a good thing. 09:49 When to create a comparison page. 3 Key Points: These pages are for search engines. You could be doing it for a visitor that’s already on your site. Act like you’re unbiased and write your best possible content that you can.   [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Everybody, this is Steli Efti [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on the Startup Chat we’re gonna talk about how to create comparison pages to basically highlight you versus your competitor. So your business, your product versus a competitor. [0:00:19] Steli Efti: Right? So, you know, oftentimes … Well, first of all, I think the definition that you’ve already given is super useful. It’s usually a landing page that compares your product or company with a direct competitor or multiple competitors, right? The thing that you see … And so maybe we’ll break it down to this episode in terms of who … When should you use this kind of tactic? When is it effective? When isn’t it? Is this something that you … When should you utilize it? Is this a pure SEO play where you try to drive traffic when people are searching for you versus a competitor or should you send these kind of or use these kinds of pages in the sales process, etc. And then also the kind of style. I’ve seen a ton of these comparison pages. Usually I’m not very impressed so I’d love to do a little bit of a back and forth between you and how, like what are the different templates that are out there that companies use and how potentially to improve on those kind of standard boilerplate templates of comparison pages. [0:01:25] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:01:26] Steli Efti: Alright. So let’s start with the … [0:01:30] Hiten Shah: Well go ahead. [0:01:31] Steli Efti: Let’s start with the when … Who are these pages typically for? Who do we … If I have a SAS product in my company and I am a startup and I’m thinking and I have competitors, let’s say that, I have competitors, when is it worth my time even thinking about building a comparison page? [0:01:54] Hiten Shah: Steli, you’re going to love this. These pages are for search engines. [0:02:01] Steli Efti: I thought that you would say that. Alright. [0:02:03] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:02:03] Steli Efti: Give me more. [0:02:04] Hiten Shah: I mean think about it, this is the thing, okay, let me go through the one on one and then we can get into the good stuff. Right? [0:02:13] Steli Efti: Boom. [0:02:14] Hiten Shah: So like, look, these pages are for search engines because people are typing in things like, let’s say Zendesk alternative. In fact, Zendesk was so good at this that they created a whole alternative band. I just somehow retweeted something about it. [0:02:26] Steli Efti: You tweeted this. I just saw this yesterday. [0:02:29] Hiten Shah: At my company we’re, one of my companies, we’re really digging into channels and B2B marketing and we noticed that a while ago, but someone actually tweeted it recently. Dated this back in like 2014 or something I think. So number one, and they’ve been great at SEO, but number one, you do it for search engines so that you can get new visitors who are typing in things like some company name alternative. So like Zendesk alternative and then that leads to who you’re really doing it for. You’re doing it for these new visitors that have never met you before, essentially. [0:03:03] Steli Efti: Mm. [0:03:04] Hiten Shah: Or you’re doing it for visitors who are Googling, who might’ve come to your site before, but they’re trying to figure out the difference between you and a competitor. So the alternative terminology is really about “I’m looking for an alternative for a product that’s usually not somebody who is doing research on your product.” They’re doing research on a competitor and then you come up because you ranked in Google for it and you’re an alternative. So that’s … Number one is search engine, because search engines and then even things like Zendesk versus Help Scout, that page is also for search engInes, because if someone is evaluating which customer support tool to use, they might type that in Google, right? [0:03:43] Steli Efti: Right. [0:03:44] Hiten Shah: So search engines, you’re doing it for search engines. That’s one of the main reasons or main type of a visitor is somebody coming from the search engine. Another one is that sometimes you have people who come to your site and in most product, with most products, you don’t know if they’re using a competitor or not, but you can always ask if you really want to on your site and then you’re … So you could be doing it for a website visitor that’s already on your website. That about summarizes. Why you would do this and there’s versions of this like Zendesk alternative. Then there’s versions where what we’re really talking about is comparison pages, like Zendesk versus Help Scout, to basically provide a page that shows the difference between the two products and if you’re Help Scout and you have that page, I believe they have that page on their site. Let’s talk about how you do it, how you break it down. [0:04:42] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm(affirmative). [0:04:43] Hiten Shah: Go for it. [0:04:44] Steli Efti: Well so … [0:04:45] Hiten Shah: I know you’ve thought about this. Yeah. So the one thing … I’m not surprised that you said you’re doing it for search engines, because that’s the main use case that I’ve seen comparison pages being used in. The thing that I’m oftentimes puzzled is when you click on one of those comparison pages and you can tell “Hey, they did a good job at ranking high for this, for these key words”, right? So they are probably getting high quality, very targeted traffic on this, but then the page itself is so obviously just written for a search engine that when you’re trying to read, consume that content, from a persuasion and sales point of view, I’m reading this and I’m not getting excited to now feel like your product is better, but I am actually getting bored, overwhelmed, I feel the urge to leave this page because it seems like worthless. If you actually want to start reading the content or try to consume any of the content on the website, oftentimes it’s not compelling content. I’ve been oftentimes thinking about this from the point of view of “I wonder if many of these companies are overly optimizing to rank very high?” So ranking is the metric or the KPI they’re gunning for and once they rank high they’re kind of happy, but they’re not really measuring how much of that traffic is converting to whatever the call to action is, the trial sign up or whatever else that you’re trying to do and how long are people staying on that page, because the content is oftentimes not that compelling. So that’s the thing that I really wanted to talk to you about, which is the different types of content to make a comparison page truly compelling for a human once that human arrives on your page. The thing is, the searches will keep you ranked if you basically are creating a shitty page. [0:06:44] Steli Efti: Mm. [0:06:44] Hiten Shah: If you’re creating a page that people won’t stay on, eventually your rankings will drop. [0:06:48] Steli Efti: Mm. [0:06:50] Hiten Shah: So really how to create a compelling page is almost pretty much act like you’re unbiased and write a page that’s the best page on the topic. You do that by looking at all the other pages on the topic, because there will be other pages in most cases, and you create the best possible version of that page that exists, that answers people’s questions about the topic and the topic in this case is the comparison of two softwares. You’ll see companies like G2 Crowd and other sites that are supposed to be unbiased and they probably are by nature of what they do. They write these pages pretty well. They include ratings of each company and any accolades for each company and things like that. Just to give an example, because everybody loves examples, my opinion is that the HubSpot versus Marketo page is a pretty good page on HubSpot. On HubSpot sites, if you typed in HubSpot Marketo, you’ll get their page. It’s like one of the top three or five, you should check it out because, in their case, HubSpot has a really high ratings on G2 Crowd. So they’re basically using that information on that page and framing it and they’re not talking about we or anything like that. They’re literally acting like this is a HubSpot marketing software versus Marketo and you might … I mean if you read it there is obviously bias because it’s very heavily HubSpot oriented and the ratings are high, but you don’t really feel like you’re on a HubSpot page with the way that they’ve written it. [0:08:36] Steli Efti: Nice. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What makes it compelling, right? So there’s multiple things that you can put in the way that you try to compare your product versus a competitor. Features are what seems to be a very obvious route right? Comparing feature by feature, what does your product include or is capable of versus your competitors and have that kind of a matrix that shows the checkpoints are all green on your side and a bunch of red on your competitor’s side. So comparing features is one thing. Comparing pricing is another obvious route, right? How much do You have to pay for useful, neutral versus a competitor solution, but then there’s other really interesting, compelling content that I think people can use. Here in the HubSpot example they do a great job of using their rating, right? So very early out of the gate they’re showing their G2 Crowd that they are leader Fall 2018 in marketing automation and then right after they show some kind of a gardener, prettier inside Customers Choice Award that they got, right? So what do they do? They use social proof and credibility. They’re like “Look at these awards, look at these third party vendor analysts that have come out and said that our product is better than the competition.” So that’s one and then they use heavily quotes and customer references, right? I would assume, I don’t see this here, but I would assume if you could you would want to even skew heavily towards a customer of yours that used to be a customer of your competitors, Competitor X, and can give a relevant quote that says “I used to use”, whatever, “Marketo, but we had X, Y and Z problem. Since we switched to HubSpot X, Z and Z is amazing.” I wouLd tell every CMO to make the switch or something. That is obviously super compelling, really powerful content. [0:10:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:10:34] Steli Efti: When you have your customers saying that they prefer your product over the competition, they’ve tried both or they’ve been customers of both. What other stuff can you even have as like compelling content within comparison pages? One thing I’ll throw out, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts before we wrap up this episode at this point, is one thing I never see or very, very rarely are two things. One is actually highlighting non obvious things about the competitor. Sometimes the feature to feature comparison to me is boring. It’s like we have this thing and both companies have it, but features are not all created equal and sometimes companies can do a terrible job at building a feature that doesn’t really work, but it’s their, quote unquote, versus another company that’s done an amazing job building something in an incredibly thoughtful way that works incredibly well. So highlighting not just that a competitor has or doesn’t have a feature, but how the difference in how features work. I think that that’s something that can be super compelling and harder and not obviously to uncover for the customer. The other thing is service and support. This is something companies obviously, apparently many companies, don’t want to highlight, but if you have a company that has outstanding customer service and support, that can make a big difference. The people, the culture of your company, the way that you treat your customers, the way you think about product development, these things, these cultural things, or these customer service facing things, can make a real big difference in how I compare your company and your product with other competitors. Oftentimes I don’t see these things really being utilized in these comparison pages. So it’s just an idea to throw out there for something. If you really have a strong and differentiated way that you do customer support or successful service, that’s something that is not not valuable. It’s not like “Well, if it’s not a feature, we can’t really compare ourselves with somebody else.” I think that companies should do that more when they are much better at these things then their competitors and I think that customers are interested in that information. [0:12:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So basically highlight any key differentiation. [0:12:48] Steli Efti: Right. [0:12:49] Hiten Shah: Especially if it’s from the customer’s eyes that makes it easier to talk about on an unbiased page. [0:12:55] Steli Efti: Right. Mm-hmm(affirmative). [0:12:58] Hiten Shah: I think you asked early on about timing. [0:13:00] Steli Efti: Oh yeah. [0:13:02] Hiten Shah: I think you should put up these pages as soon as you can and then keep working on them, partly because of SCO and partly just because they’re just pages you want to have on your site. If you can compare yourself to somethIng else, put it up. I think In some cases some products don’t have strong competitors, for a bunch of reasons. So in those cases there’s no pages to put up, but if you’re in a competitive market and there’s even like two or three competitors, it’s worth putting up the page, even if you just link to it in your footer or sometimes link to it from a blog post, but it’s not a big deal on your site, that’s totally fine. I would put it up. [0:13:41] Steli Efti: Awesome. Alright, I think we’ve covered the topic pretty well. Thanks for listening everybody. If you have not done that yet, please do us a favor, go to iTunes, give us a five star review and a rating. We highly appreciate that and until next time, we’ll hear you soon. [0:13:56] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:13:57] The post 391: How to Create Effective Comparison Pages appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.