In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about take-home assignments for job applicants. This topic was chosen as a result of mistakes that were made at recent hirings at Close.io and as take-home assignments is an integral part of the hiring process. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what take-home assignments are, how to approach them, mistakes to avoid when handing them out and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:39 Why this topic was chosen. 01:34 A take-home assignment for a recent job posting at Close. 02:17 Hiten’s view on take-home assignments. 02:37 The only way to understand what a person can do. 02:49 An example of a contract to hire approach. 03:10 Why it’s a good idea to have every candidate carry out the same. 04:01 Why you don’t want to give them work that relates too close to your company. 05:10 How to give out take-home assignments. 05:34 Why you should give assignments that are limited in scope. 3 Key Points: I’m a huge fan of understanding what a person can do. Typically, I like every candidate having the same assignment. If it’s an unpaid job, you don’t want to give them work that relates too close to your company. [0:00:01]  Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: In today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we want to talk about take-home assignments for job applicants. Here’s the setting. Here’s why I wanted to talk to you about this, and I thought it would be very valuable to people, Hiten. We are hiring tons of people at Close. If you’re looking for an awesome remote company to work for, a little plug here, check out Close.io/jobs. All of our jobs … There’s not a single position that is open that we would not have a take-home assignment as part of the interviewing process, right? Typically, you have to fill out an application. It goes through some internal reviews. If you check off on all of the main marks, we’ll have somebody on the team have a first conversation with you. If that goes well, typically the very next step in almost all positions will be us giving you a little “homework assignment,” a take-home, so that you can show us how you work. You can create something for us, and we can give you feedback and critique, and you can see … Where both sides can see how we work together versus just talking about working together. These take-homes have always been a kind of key part of our interviewing process, and recently, there’s been a role that we hired for where … It’s just been interesting where … The way we designed the take-home was not very thoughtful, so it created all kinds of weird take-home assignments that then made us realize, oh, we’ve never talked about how to design the take-home. This hiring manager thought about it very differently from how we used to think about it, and he created all these kind of like aha moments that I thought might be useful to people, might save them a lot of time. Before I go into some of my tips, I’m just curious. Is that part of how you’ve been hiring people as well? Have you always been doing take-homes? Are you doing them sometimes for certain positions but wouldn’t use them for others? What’s your kind of overall take on take-homes?   [0:02:12] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it’s either a take-home or some form of assignment. Sometimes we’ll even go as far as making it a paid assignment and putting some constraints around it. Yeah. I’m a huge fan of understanding what the person can do, and the only way to do that is by making them do it. A take-home assignment is definitely one key way. Another one would be, like, spend some time with us and do something with us. That’s more of like a contract-to-hire example, freelancer sort of approach, where you work with the person for a week in some capacity if it’s a little more of a fuzzy job. But typically, I like every candidate having the same assignment, especially if I’m recruiting for a role. I guess if I’m recruiting specifically for a role, there will be an assignment, and all the candidates get the same assignment. What this really helps you do, especially if you’re specifically recruiting for a role … I’ll keep stressing that part of it because that’s a key part of it … Is it helps you evaluate, apples to apple, every single person that does the assignment.   [0:03:30] Steli Efti: Beautiful, yeah. I like that, and that’s a super-critical part. I think the other thing that the … I’ll go through some of the mistakes of this kind of recent example so that people can avoid-   [0:03:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah, please. Yeah, I’m curious.   [0:03:42] Steli Efti: … So people can avoid them. This is the first time that we ran into this for a number of reasons. The person that created the take-homes and is kind of the hiring manager is a new team member. It’s somebody that joined the team and is hiring now but has not been in the company for years, right, which is new for us. It was interesting where there were small mistakes, like the team decided let’s not give somebody an assignment … Oftentimes, if it’s an unpaid assignment, you don’t want to give them work to do that relates too close to your company, right?   [0:04:20] Hiten Shah: Yep.   [0:04:20] Steli Efti: Because later on, if you even do something yourself that seems similar, it could create problems. The person could claim that you used their work, the free work they did for the job application. You didn’t hire them, but then you just used their work, right? It can create all kinds of problems. So, typically companies have adopted the best practice of doing something that maybe relates to your company but is not create a better homepage for us, or something like that, right, that could be like a real job, and then later the person could claim that you used their work in an unethical way without paying them and pretending it was for a job application. The same thing happened here. But in the description of it, instead of saying very clearly, “This is an example of something that doesn’t relate to us. Pretend Close.io would want to start a business in this totally different vertical. If you had to create a landing page with these main goals in mind, how would you do it?” the take-home assignment just said, “Close.io wants to change business model and is going off to these totally different people. Create a landing page for that.” Applicants were confused and were like, “Are you guys changing and pivoting to doing this completely random, different thing?” We’re like, “Why is everybody confused about this?” Then, I read the take-home, and it was like of course they’re confused. It doesn’t say it clearly that this is just an example. It states it almost as a fact. The other thing that was really interesting was that, when you create a take-home, I mean, you want to … I think most of the time, if it’s not a paid contract gig, right, kind of like it’s work together for a few weeks on a contract basis … If it’s a take-home, I am a big fan of doing something that is somewhat limited in scope, right, and gives that limit to people so that you don’t have … You can’t have an apples-to-apples comparison where … You don’t have one person working on that for four hours, and another person working on it for 40 hours, and you compare the two projects together. Right? But you tell people, “Hey, this should not exceed this amount of hours.” I like to keep them somewhat limited so it’s a reasonable ask in the very early stages of the relationship with them. One thing that we didn’t realize that we had to do, and one mistake that came up in this specific example, was that we had different people grade the take-home. Again, usually we’re all … We’ve never experienced being of completely different opinions on take-homes, very rarely. In this case, I saw some of the grading that people got from the take-home. I would look at the take-home, and I’d be just baffled. I’m like, “How in the world are these two people on our team thinking this is a good take-home?” This blew my mind, which then led to me talking to them and be like, “Let’s go through these. Let’s pick three or four take-homes that we got. Let’s go through them, and you explain to me how you’re evaluating this. Then, I’ll tell you how I evaluate this.” Once we went through the exercise, we all three looked at each other, and we went, “Oh. We use completely different criteria for how we’re grading these fucking take-homes,” right? Of course we’re not on the same page. Which then made us realize that, as part of the process now, when we put together a new take-home, we’ll have a little section for internal purposes that explains exactly how we grade the take-home, like what are the criteria that we’re rating and ranking and grading it on? As your team grows, maybe in the early days when you’re two or three people, maybe even then it’s useful to do to make sure that you have full alignment and you’re on the same page. But as the company grows and become bigger and bigger teams, and as new and newer team members are starting to be part of the interviewing process … This was a mistake that we made that we didn’t think about, and then it got to the point where I was baffled why we all seemed to be on totally different pages how we rank these take-homes. Now it has helped us get on the same page and get much better results in terms of being in agreement on who’s succeeding on the take-home based on what criteria and who isn’t.   [0:08:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think that’s really important, knowing what your success criteria is and what you’re assessing people for. What we do when we create these assignments is we actually think of those things first, so what’s our … How are we going to evaluate the assignment? Even before we do the assignment, we think through how are we going to evaluate this assignment, even who’s going to evaluate it, what’s the criteria we’re going to use to evaluate the candidate based on the assignment, and then we create the assignment. Because basically the assignment has to be designed to get us what we need, which is an assessment of the various candidates, an objective assessment. We need to know who’s going to review it, too, because it’s a … You know, these things are a coordinated effort. You’re bringing someone new on your team, and there’s a process. The people that work with that person or can assess that person or that candidate for that role are really key in bringing into the conversation.   [0:09:36] Steli Efti: Absolutely. All right. I think that’s it from us for this episode on some tips on dos and don’ts, when to use take-homes, what to do and what not to do, what mistakes to avoid. Hopefully, it’s going to help the people that are listening to find the right people faster that they want to onboard on their startup. That’s it from us for this episode. If anybody has interesting tips or seen crazy-cool or crazy-terrible take-homes and wants to share them with us, we always love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us, steli@close.io, hnshah@gmail.com. We always love to hear from you, and we do so frequently So, thanks for that. Until next time, that’s it from us.   [0:10:16] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:10:18] The post 359: How to Create a Great Take-Home Assignment for New Job Applicants appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to consume opposing opinions. Whether we know it or not, we are all stuck in our own little bubble. While this can be a good thing, to live a more balanced business and work life, it is a good idea to be open to views that are different from our own. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on how opposing views can be valuable, how you can be more welcoming to opposing views and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:30 About today’s topic. 00:47 One of Hiten’s favorite books. 01:25 One huge value of opposing views. 01:54 How we are all, to an extent, living in our own bubble. 02:30 Why being aware is really valuable. 03:40 How thinking differently can help you understand others and their worldviews better. 04:27 How it can be very easy to get stuck in your bubble. 05:03 How listening to opposing views can help you get out of a sticky situation. 05:45 Some things you can do to help you consume opposing views. 06:50 How having an opposing viewpoint can be instrumental in living a good life. 3 Key Points: Whatever you think, think the opposite. Opposing views opens you up to possibilities and ideas you were not thinking off. I think it’s arrogant to assume that one does not live in a certain version of reality that is not shared by everybody on this planet. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah, and today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about a longstanding topic. We don’t have many of those, but it’s a longstanding one which is I think, Steli, you said it as how to consume opposing opinions. Is that about right?   [0:00:19] Steli Efti: Yeah. Even more specifically the value of consuming opposing opinions, or breaking through your echo chamber or whatever you want to call it.   [0:00:31] Hiten Shah: I know we love books. One of my favorite books is actually The Five Elements of Effective Thinking. One of the tips they have in it, one of the five is actually whatever you think, think the opposite, and just play that exercise out. I think that I read that book probably once every nine to twelve months, nine to eighteen months depending on how I’m feeling. It’s always got all those reminders I need to just think differently, all those reminders I need to have more effective thinking. One of them is this, so I think that there’s a tremendous amount of value. One of the things I’ll say first about it is the value of thinking about opposing views is highly based on what it does to your mind, and how it opens you up to possibilities and ideas that you are closed off to if you are not thinking about an opposing viewpoint or an opposing idea, or the opposite of whatever you’re thinking.   [0:01:32] Steli Efti: I love that. I think we all to a certain extent live in some kind of a …   [0:01:40] Hiten Shah: Bubble.   [0:01:40] Steli Efti: Whatever you want to call it. A bubble. Some bubbles are bigger than others. Some of them are more solid than others, but we all do. I think it’s arrogant to assume that one does not live in a certain version of reality that is not shared by everybody on this planet. The cultures we live in, the communities we live in, the people we surround ourselves with do shield us, do make us part of certain tribes and certain groupthinks, and certain ways of consuming information and certain leanings in terms of our thinking, and maybe instinctual make us reject other groups, other tribes, other ways of thinking about certain topics. I think that, A, being aware that that is happening is really valuable and that we’re all to a certain extent “victims” of that. Then, actively working against that to either extend the bubble or switch bubbles once in a while. I love the example that you brought which is like, “Whatever you think, try to think the opposite for a little while and see how that feels.” Which is basically like switching your bubble, like going to the opposing bubble and see how they think and feel and how it would feel to you to think that way. I think all of that, like all these activities that try to get you either to expand or burst your bubble and join others is to become more self-aware and to, in my mind, create more flexibility in thinking, or at least counteract rigidity in thinking, habitual thinking. You’re always thinking a certain way or you respond really strongly against certain types of ideas out of instinct versus out of good reasoning. You become more flexible, more creative in the way you think, and probably become more empathetic. You understand others and their world views much better. Therefore, hopefully you become a better human all around, and a better entrepreneur for certain. As an entrepreneur you’re going to have to service probably and hopefully a wider range of people. You’re going to have to work with lots of different type of people, so if you have more flexibility, if you have less of a super-hardcore echo chamber and bubble, the more people you’re going to be able to empathize with, understand, talk to, communicate with and build things for, at the end of the day.   [0:04:13] Hiten Shah: We all want to get better, and we want to make improvements. If we don’t and if you don’t, you’re not in the right place. You shouldn’t be listening to this, and I think that it’s very easy to get stuck in whatever ways you’re thinking or whatever beliefs you have. A lot of this to me is also about really understanding more about yourself and what you believe when you start thinking about the concept of opposing views, a concept of thinking differently than you currently are. A lot of times when you’re stuck I find this to be most useful. If you’re stuck on something, you’re stuck on how to grow your business, or you’re stuck on even what to eat for dinner today, there’s a lot of opposing ways. You might be habitual and you might go to the same place every Wednesday or whatever. What if you went somewhere differently? What if you thought about it differently? What if you tried something new? I think to me this whole tactic, this whole thing has been all about, this idea for me in my life has been all about how do I get beyond any of my own beliefs that are holding me back.   [0:05:27] Steli Efti: I love that.   [0:05:28] Hiten Shah: That’s really important to me.   [0:05:30] Steli Efti: Let’s share a few tactical things before we wrap this episode up. You came out of the gate guns blazing with your tip, both giving a book recommendation as well as picking out one specific tactic out of that book that you use a lot. One thing that I’ve started to do, just to share, in terms of starting to consume more opposing opinions and data points is that I used to curate my Twitter feed unconsciously based on people I agreed or disagreed with. I have more liberal tendencies, and I’m more liberal leanings in my ways of thinking, just letting people do whatever the hell they want. Whenever I would see somebody overly political and overly conservative in some ways that I disagreed with I would just unfollow people. I’d be like, “I don’t want to see this stuff. I’m not interested in this type of content. I disagree vehemently with your point of view, so let me just clean you out of my feed.” I did that until I realized I only have a certain type of person in my feed, which then also made me concerned. One thing that I started doing in the last maybe 18 months or so was to start following people that I thought were very thoughtful or smart or in some way I respected but had very different world views about certain things than me. Either following people that were advocates of things that I was against, or that were living a certain lifestyle, or people that were running their businesses in a very different way than I like to run my business, but they still had to have something I respected. It was a person that I was like, “I’m interested in this person’s opinion, although I know that a lot of the things they write about on Twitter, for instance, I disagree with.” I started creating a much more diverse list of people that I follow. There’s still a lot more work to be done, but I follow a bunch of people that their opinions are insane to me, but they always stimulate, they always make me think a little bit more. They always make me go, “Why do I disagree with this instinctively although I don’t have any data about it?” They make me think more about my own opinions. I use their opposing views as a training mechanism for me to think more flexibly and to start reading different types of media, because they share certain articles from media sources I don’t consume myself. That’s been something that I think has helped me a lot to understand different types of world views better, and consume a lot more variety in the world views on a specific medium like Twitter. Versus before, I had done a lot of practicing on homogenizing my feed and having only a certain type of person with a certain type of world view on it.   [0:08:25] Hiten Shah: I really like that. I think having this ability to have viewpoints that are not your own is such a critical aspect of, I think, living a good life, to be honest, and being able to actually even interact with other people. It’s likely that every person you meet or even every person you know has a different viewpoint than you about something, probably most things. I think that’s really valuable to think through and think about. My tip is just that, which is like since I already gave some, like you said, which is just like it will lead to a better life if you can have that openness to at least not even accept or anything, but be able to entertain other viewpoints.   [0:09:11] Steli Efti: Yeah. Maybe to round off this episode I’ll double click on one thing that’s been interesting for me, which is that for the past six months or so, again, I heard about this from an old philosopher who was in the 60s studying a lot of conspiracy theories. When he was interviewed why, people were like, “Why do you know so much about conspiracy theories? Why do you study them so much? Do you really believe all this stuff?” He said, “No. I think most of this stuff is totally crazy and not really probable to me. One thing why I love reading these is because it really challenges me to think differently and start questioning things that I would just take for granted.” I read that, and I was like, “That’s interesting.” I started actually following some super-hardcore conspiracy theorists online and just consuming a little bit of the stuff that they share. It has been a really interesting exercise. Some of that stuff is so crazy, it’s so out there that my initial response is to immediately dismiss it, but I’ve tried to exercise of like what would have to happen to convince me that this is true. What would happen to convince me that something …   [0:10:24] Hiten Shah: I like that.   [0:10:26] Steli Efti: … Is true that the vast majority of humans would disagree with me on? It has happened in the past that the majority of humans believed something that today we know is not true. What would it take for me to take a minority point view, and reject the majority? It’s been a fascinating experiment. Most of these things have not convinced me, but not just outright rejecting them because they seem ridiculous, but playing with them a little bit more in my mind, and going, “What would I have to do to believe this stuff?” Made me just think a bit more critically about certain things that I just took for granted and always believed without actually knowing a lot about this stuff.   [0:11:05] Hiten Shah: I really like that. Conspiracy theories are fun. It also can open up your creativity.   [0:11:11] Steli Efti: Absolutely. These are some tips that we have to share if you listen to this and you have experimented with consuming opposing opinions and you’ve tried things, and you have ideas to share or stories to share, we always love to hear from you. Send us an email, steli@close.io, hnshah@gmail.com. Until next time, we’ll hear you very soon.   [0:11:33] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:11:34] The post 358: The Value of Consuming Opposing Opinions appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to act, move and execute faster. In the startup world, speed is everything. If you don’t execute fast, you’re very likely to fail. However, moving at such a fast pace can be scary to some founders and employees. Which is why it’s important to put in place processes that allow you to execute at a fast pace, otherwise your competition will. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on why speed is important for startups to succeed, they give examples of big companies that are excellent at executing and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 01:10 Why startups are special. 02:02 What makes a startup move fast. 02:34 Why you may want to move fast. 03:38 Why you need a sense of urgency. 06:49 Why you need to be hyper-focused and prioritize. 07:03 Why it’s important that your team understands what needs to be prioritized. 07:54 Steli’s thoughts on why moving faster is so important. 08:34 Other factors that could slow down your startup. 3 Key Points: Speed is everything. It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eats the slow. It’s important to figure out what you need to do in your startup to win. [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: In today episode of the Startup Chat, we want to talk about how to act, move, and execute faster in your startup. The reason why I want to talk about speed with you Hiten is that recently I saw on your Twitter stream, you had posted out kind of a picture of a frame that had a quote in it that said, “It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eats the slow.” I thought, oh, this is a good topic to talk about, speed.   [0:00:31] Hiten Shah: Speed’s everything. I think that I’m excited to talk to you about this too because this is like the [inaudible] in startup’s that I rarely see spoken about. I see everything sort of talking about the execution, what you need to do, and we even talk about how you get from this to that, right? Zero to ten customers, ten to 100, 100 to a million, I don’t know. And like, the people don’t talk about why startups are special. What makes them even like exist? Why do they exist? What makes it so that they need to exist? There’s these big companies out there that should be solving problems for our customers, not startup’s. Like these big companies are designed around, they solve a problem for customers, they have a lot of capital, they have a lot of people, but yet, startup’s still exist and startups come in and they kick the butt of big companies. Not all of them, obviously, but like that’s how they win. It’s important to figure out what you need to do in your startup to win. And win means, win the market, win the customer, et cetera. I think that speed is all you got.   [0:01:50] Steli Efti: How, so okay. Let’s talk about speed, right? What makes a startup move fast? What does, you know, if you think about some of the companies in team startup’s, teams that you’ve seen that move the fastest, what stood out as kind of key indicators, or key cultural things that they had that made they move faster than other startup’s? When you see startup’s slow down or move to slow, what’s the main reason? I mean, the one thing … I have a lot of thoughts, but I actually want to hear your thoughts before I throw in my two cents. What do you think make startup’s fast, versus what makes them slow?   [0:02:29] Hiten Shah: Sure. Well, let’s define why you want to go fast. Let’s just start there, right?   [0:02:41] Steli Efti: Okay.   [0:02:41] Hiten Shah: You want to go fast because if you don’t fast, you die.   [0:02:48] Steli Efti: Why?   [0:02:48] Hiten Shah: I think you run out of money.   [0:02:52] Steli Efti: You run out of money.   [0:02:52] Hiten Shah: You run out of money.   [0:02:52] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:02:54] Hiten Shah: Most startup’s, even if they’re self-funded, they’re some finite, you know, running out of money point, right?   [0:03:00] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:03:01] Hiten Shah: In fact, a lot of startup’s that have raised a lot of money, are so patient with themselves, that they run out of money too because they just raise so much money that they have a lot of money, so the money actually creates a lack of urgency. I think for me, you want to go fast because you will run out of money if you don’t figure it out fast. There’s a culture where you have a sense of urgency. That’s what I’m looking for, whether it’s in my own company’s, or when I look at other company’s I’m involved in, or when I just access a company. I’m like, do they have a sense of urgency. That sense of urgency doesn’t just have to be about a small company, like a startup. It can be a big company. I mean, I love using this example, we’ve used it before, but like, Facebook has a sense of urgency. At their size, that’s ridiculous. Google does not seem to have a sense of urgency. Do you know what? Apple, they have a sense of urgency. They have a cadence. They’re giving you a new phone every year, period.   [0:04:09] Steli Efti: Every year, yeah.   [0:04:10] Hiten Shah: Every year, they’re doing to launch that new phone. Do you know what? Back in the day, that wasn’t the case. Like, a lot of these companies, these phone companies that created the phones, because of carriers, and all this messy stuff, they couldn’t launch a phone every year and like make it a big one, make it a big deal. Apple makes it a big deal, every time, right? There’s a sense of urgency at that company. In fact, when you think about all the innovation that goes into every year’s new phone, whether it’s even the, you know, every two years, they launch a massive upgrade, but every year they’re launching in improvements in existing phone. They’re trying to make your battery life longer, and give you more processing power in your phone, and all the other fantastic stuff, even when it’s like, you know, a middle sort of between big release. That’s not easy. There’s a sense of urgency to doing that. There’s a, I mean they’re buying a bunch of chip manufacturers and then vertically integrating their whole business for a very good reason. That’s a sense of urgency. Their execution makes you feel like the company is on a mission and will do whatever it takes as fast as possible to get there. This company, Apple, at even at their scale, you know, the most valuable company in the world, makes you feel like there’s always going to be something new that’s coming from that company that you need. That’s the sense of urgency that goes all the way to the customer, in that case. In Facebook’s case, they don’t make you feel like that, they just execute like crazy. They have an internal sense of urgency, but they’re not selling the same thing that Apple is. Eventually though, now that they’re doing hardware, maybe they’ll do the same thing. Amazon, oh man does Amazon make you feel like they have a sense of urgency. In fact, it’s built in. Like, they want to get you whatever you order as fast as possible. That again goes back to the customer. What I really admire about Apple and Amazon, in a way where like I think Facebook’s a little different, is that they focus on the customer and they focus on making the customer happier, and the happiest in their category. Nobody else in eCommerce is making you happier on a consistent basis than Amazon is.   [0:06:17] Steli Efti: True.   [0:06:19] Hiten Shah: That’s sense of urgency of the company dominating that made them come up with things like Prime. It made them come up with things like Alexa. I think that like to me, the sense of urgency is really what you’re aiming for in your company. I gave you a few examples of big companies that are dominating.   [0:06:36] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:06:36] Hiten Shah: It’s not just about little company’s. Honestly, if you’re competing with Amazon, Apple, or Facebook, good luck, because their sense of urgency makes them dominate, and makes it so that even the companies that are competing with those companies have a hard time.   [0:06:50] Steli Efti: Incredible. All right. I’ll just throw out my two cents on top of this, right?   [0:06:55] Hiten Shah: Please, yeah.   [0:06:56] Steli Efti: I think that the two things that to me, still are missing, you can have an incredible sense of urgency, but if you don’t know how to be hyper-focused in prioritizing what is truly important, and what isn’t, you could be working like crazy all day and really not accomplish that much. I think that’s one that goes hand in hand with my second point, which is alignment, right? Making sure that everybody within your team truly understands what the priorities are, and what the things are that truly will matter, and really move the needle, and have like real massive potential for impact, and leverage, verses, what the things are that are nice to have that incremental, and that can wait, right, because they’re not going to make or break the company. If you can’t have incredible alignment so that everybody is going in the same direction, pushing in the same direction, instead of everybody’s going off slightly in a different direction, and pulling in different directions, and if the company’s incredibly good at saying no to lots, and lots things, and say yes to the things that truly matter most, you add those two components with a sense of urgency culture, and you’re crushing it. You’re moving so much faster than anybody else that is not even funny. Moving faster, you know, part of … I was thinking when you said that in the beginning, I was thinking, will somebody ask themselves, why is moving faster important in today’s world? One thing that’s obvious is that you know, anything you do can easily and quickly be copied. The slower you go, the less of an advantage it is anytime you innovate, and you build something. And so, that’s a big one. Also, the world is changing at faster and faster pace, so the slower you change, and the slower you can adapt to the market that’s changing, the more of a risk every day is, where the world is changing all around you. Anything else before we wrap this episode up that comes up as like something that really slows company’s down or something that really helps speed them up?   [0:09:02] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think underneath what you’re saying in reference to the sense of urgency is like, what’s your sense of urgency about? I think it’s about, like you said, doing the right thing. Well, what is the right thing? How do you figure that out? I believe the right thing that matters is whatever’s right for your customer. I’ll go back to my three examples because it’s better to talk about these big company’s then startup’s because if the big companies can do it, I think it’s good. We all know these big companies. Facebook’s sense of urgency towards the customer is making sure that they retain. They acquire and retain more users, more customers, than anybody else. And so, all their moves of like attacking Snap Chat had everything to do with that. Attacking meaning, basically, getting what Snap Chat, which is a time from a certain demographic, and learning everything they could about why Snap Chat is working, by basically putting their core feature stories in every product they have. Before that, actually launching standalone products that had stories built into them. You know, obviously, getting rid of those products because those are not popular. I think that’s a really important key, which is like, what are you being urgent about? What are you going after and how do you prioritize? Facebook prioritizes based on having more and more people spend more and more time on Facebook or their properties. Amazon, I think Amazon already knows that the sense of urgency there is actually the sense of urgency the customer has on when they buy something, how fast they can get it, and to be able to get it to you as fast as possible. They are self-proclaimed. They have customer obsession, completely self-proclaim obsession. Everything they do is oriented around, how do we serve the customer better than anyone else? So, their sense of urgency has to do with that. Apple, I think, I mean, it’s Apple. Like, there’s a huge, huge, vast majority of the population that just loves everything Apple. Even if they don’t love everything Apple, they know everything Apple. You know when Apple when comes out with a new phone, even if you’re an Android lover, basically. I think like that that’s like the key there for Apple, which is the similar type of customer obsession that Amazon has, except they take it to the next level by, you know, over the many years of being in business, built up this desire. This desire from the customer of just wanting what they have, knowing they are the best. I think, you know, you can say, oh Android this, that, or the other, and that’s totally cool, but the majority of the money in the market goes to Apple. I think that those three are all about what are the things that matter for our business, for the what we do to the customer, and how can we make sure that we’re constantly up on that? Our urgency is around getting more of that.   [0:11:47] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right. I think that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon and until then, start moving faster.   [0:11:54] Hiten Shah: Please. [0:11:55] The post 357: It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small. It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow. appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about whether being an entrepreneur really the right way to gain more freedom in life. It’s common for some people to think that being an entrepreneur is the right way to gain more freedom in life. However, this is not often the case, as sometimes, entrepreneurship can rob you of as many freedoms as it gives to you. In this episode, Steli and Hiten address this belief by many that entrepreneurship grants you all freedoms in life, they stress the importance of defining what freedom means to you and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:34 About today’s topic. 01:38 Isn’t freedom the main motivator for people becoming an entrepreneur? 02:09 Why you should do what whatever you need to do. 03:06 Why other people telling you what to do is easy. 03:53 How there’s a value in being told what to do. 05:31 Why you’re gonna need to have to work with people to be successful at something. 06:16 How entrepreneurship can rob you of many freedoms. 07:20 How you can design a life of freedom. 07:53 Why it’s important to define what freedom means to you. 08:22 How you can have a boss and still not feel like you’re being told what to do. 08:48 The biggest problem with the word “freedom”. 3 Key Points: If you want the freedom to do whatever you want, then go on and do it. Other people telling you what to do is easy. The way everyone defines freedom might not be the same. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Alright everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And, this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:06] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, I accomplished one of my favorite things to accomplish when I talk to Hiten, which is when I suggest a topic, and his reaction is, “oh God” or some version of that. That is usually, that means we are on to something interesting here. So, here’s what I want to talk to you about today, Hiten, to share this with the listeners. Which is, somebody recently asked me, two days ago to be precise, is being an entrepreneur and is running a start up really the right way to gain more freedom in life?   [0:00:42] Hiten Shah: No   [0:00:44] Steli Efti: Nice, alright so, this is it from us for this episode of The Startup Chat.   [0:00:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah, we’re done. No.   [0:00:49] Steli Efti: No [crosstalk]   [0:00:50] Hiten Shah: You want special, go away, go do something else. Please do something else, do yourself a favor. Right now, don’t do this, stop.   [0:00:57] Steli Efti: Alright, so, let me challenge you now. I will play the devil’s advocate, you know I really agree with you, but just for the fun of it. Aren’t most people or aren’t many people becoming entrepreneurs because they want to be their own boss, they want to have more freedom and do whatever they want, they want to achieve financial freedom and get so wealthy that they can do anything they want in life. Isn’t freedom the main motivator why people become entrepreneurs?   [0:01:24] Hiten Shah: If you want freedom to do one thing, one specific thing, yes you should become a founder, entrepreneur, start your own business. That one thing is simple, if you want freedom to do whatever you want, whatever you want, you should do that, yes. Whatever you want doesn’t mean go on vacation. Whatever you want doesn’t mean go traveling, but it is whatever you want with your professional life, whatever you want. Meaning, whatever decisions you want, buck stops at you. Nobody is going to really give you any guidance, tell you what to do, sometimes even your co-founders. Yeah. That freedom of space to do what you want, that freedom of not relying on anyone to tell you or hand you responsibility or any of that and you having to figure all that out yourself and wanting that, I do believe, Steli, that one freedom you get. I don’t believe you get any other freedom.   [0:02:25] Steli Efti: But, Hiten, another thing I hear a lot is people saying some version of “the reason I became an entrepreneur is because I can’t have a boss. I just can’t have anybody telling me what to.”   [0:02:43] Hiten Shah: Well I mean, first I will say welcome to the club. Many of us think that other people, we don’t like when other people tell us what to do. But the thing is, that means what you’re telling me is you don’t want the easy life. Other people telling you what to do is easy, it’s a good thing. And trust me no one has really told me what to do in my life. I’ll tell you the truth. My father never did, thank goodness or maybe not. I am the product of not being told what to do by anybody. I think that’s rare and I don’t wish it upon anybody. And, the reason for that is you don’t really have a structure or framework or any concept of how do I decide what to do then? Cause you weren’t taught. What I am trying to say, there is a value in not having a boss and not being told what to do. That being said, I think people think about this the wrong way. Right, I think what you need to think about is work and business and your professional life. It’s not that anyone is telling you what to do. It’s that you are trying to figure out for yourself what can I do to improve the situation that I’m in and improve the situation my company’s in. So if someone’s telling you what to do and you’re being managed by somebody, it is generally because they think you can help the company and they want to tell you how to help the company. There is varying degrees of management there. From micro-management all the way to hey this is the goal, go do whatever you want or even you set your own goals which is even crazier. I would say, I think the way people think about this, they’ve either had terrible bosses or they’ve had an upbringing, like mine, which I’ve heard is rare, where no one has told you what to do so you don’t know how to deal with it. I don’t know how to deal with it. If someone tells me what to do, I have hard time with it unless I already believe in doing it, to be honest.   [0:04:56] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that some of this applies in the sense, that people that are rule breakers, people that don’t just want to conform and do what has been done before them and don’t just want to fit in. A lot of times, that’s not the only thing, but these type of people might be more suited to be entrepreneurs. To start their own things and vent and create new solutions and build new businesses and organizations and all that. But if the sole goal is to not have anybody tell you anything, maybe being an entrepreneur is gonna be useful, but you know, if you want to have success at a certain level of scale you’re always going to have to work with people and you’re gonna have customers that are gonna be telling you what to do and you’re gonna have investors telling you what to do and you’re gonna have advisors and you’re gonna have employees that are going be pushing you and telling you what to do. They might be your strict bosses in the sense that they can just demand you do something, or else. But it doesn’t mean that you can just do whatever you want every day. At the least you’re gonna have customers. Even if you are a single entrepreneur with no employees, no teammates, no advisors, no investors, hopefully, you’ll have customers. These customers are gonna be demanding things of you. You can’t just make money doing whatever you want, usually, you’re gonna have to be of service to others. And, the freedom thing is funny because the way I think about entrepreneurship, it can provide you certain freedoms and it can also rob you of many. Even a simple thing to stop thinking about work once you leave work. The freedom to take a vacation and not be on at least in your mind. The freedom of certain things you’re not gonna have those. The way that I think about this more is, the better vehicle to think about what entrepreneurship can give you is, it is going to give you a lot more responsibility. It might give you a lot bigger chance for impact and for growth. But freedom, maybe, depends on how you design the whole experience for you and what your priorities are. But, not necessarily. It is not like every entrepreneur by default is “more free” than people that are in employment. We could open a can of worms of what even freedom means. How do we define freedom in the grander scheme of things.   [0:07:23] Hiten Shah: You know, yeah when you think about it like that, you could design a life of freedom, for sure. You could design a life where you are like, look I’m gonna get some revenue goal or something for myself and then I am gonna travel the world for some amount of time. Or you could say, again if you are that smart, I’m not this smart, but you’re gonna create a company and in x, y, z amount of years you’re gonna retire because you are gonna to sell it or make enough money that you can quit. Then you have freedom. I think for me this question has a lot to do with, as I think about this, if someone asked me this or told me this statement, I would start by first saying “hey, tell me how you define freedom?” Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing here because the way I define freedom and you define freedom, Steli, might not be the same. The way everyone that’s hearing this defines freedom might not be exactly the same. Cause to me, how I was raised, freedom is what I have right now. No one is telling me what to do, but if I had a boss, I still wouldn’t necessarily think they’re telling me what to do. You can have a boss and still not feel like you’re being told what to do. I think a lot of it is a matter of what do you consider freedom. Some people that I know, for them freedom is literally, I don’t need to work. Period, for money. I think one of the biggest issues with this word and many other words and many other things in startup land and why people think they should be entrepreneurs or shouldn’t has a lot to do with, it is a personal choice. This is one of those personal choices and I think that you need to make it personally based upon what you are looking for. For me, like I said, I have freedom to be creative, I have freedom to make decisions. I also have more responsibility than I knew I was getting into many years ago. And that, actually, is not freedom in some people’s eyes because they don’t want responsibility.   [0:09:30] Steli Efti: Yeah because freedom feels like something like light and responsibility to many people might feel like something really heavy. I’m like shit I wanted to be lighter on my feet and dance just dance around life and now I have this huge bag of stones that I am carrying around. I’m responsible for so many things and it just weighs on me, on my shoulders and this doesn’t feel like freedom and fun and doing whatever you want. I think that’s where that question came from. The context was really just somebody that thought entrepreneurship would give them a lot more freedom and now one year into having quit their job and having hired some people and having tried to launch something, things haven’t worked out. The experience hasn’t been as much adventure and fun and has been a lot more pressure and stress and failure. The person’s in this life crisis of reflecting on, is this really, did I do the right thing? Was entrepreneurship the right way or am I just too dumb to make this work? Is being an entrepreneur really the right way to become, to have more freedom in life, to do more of the things that I want because that hasn’t worked out yet. I think that was the moment in time capture that made this person reach out to me and ask that question.   [0:10:55] Hiten Shah: Yup, I think that a really key thing to think about and I think, defining freedom for yourself, if I were to give a tip on this one would be really think through what freedom means to you. Again, just like with many things you deal with on a daily basis or you deal with in your life, it came from place that you might not be conscious to. It took me a long time to be like, oh crap, I was given a lot of freedom growing up and that’s how my definition of that word, that’s where it comes from. That’s how I was sort of trained to think about what freedom means to me.   [0:11:34] Steli Efti: Love it. Alright, this is it from us for this episode. As always if you join it and you want to spread the love and give a little bit back, do us a favor, go to iTunes or wherever you listen to us and give us all the stars in the world that are available and a little review, highly appreciate it.   [0:11:53] Hiten Shah: See ya.   [0:11:54] Steli Efti: Buh-bye. [0:11:54] The post 356: Are Startups Really the Right Vehicle to Gain Freedom in Life? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the main things that are killing your growth in your startup. Growing a startup can seem complex but it doesn’t have to be. There are several things that a you can do that could kill the growth of your startup and knowing what these things are will help you grow your startup to new heights . In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten share some address some of the most common factors and thing founders do that kills or slows down the growth of their startup. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:43 The reason this topic was chosen. 02:51 One of the big reasons startups grow slowly. 03:52 Another big reason that kills startup growth. 05:01 A story about Grammarly. 06:11 Why you shouldn’t be afraid to do the things that are right. 08:04 How Hiten and his team did user testing on Grammarly website. 09:36 Hiten’s thoughts on the simplicity of homepages. 11:38 How to go from non-data driven to data driven. 3 Key Points: If you can’t measure it, are you really doing it? Your homepage should have a double digit conversion rate. If your product can be valuable to a user within minutes of them signing up, you have an obligation to get them to that value as fast as possible. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli: In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about the main things that are killing your growth in your start up. The reason why we want to talk about this Hiten is that you just recently were moderating a panel on this very topic with some really amazing growth marketers, right?   [0:00:24] Hiten: Yeah, I had three growth marketers on a panel at Drift’s HYPERGROWTH West conference, and the people I had on the panel were a gentleman named Yuriy from Grammarly. He’s been there six and a half years and he’s the head of growth. Then I had Emily who’s from Carta which used to be called eShares, or eShare, I don’t remember, but it’s called Carta. She’s [inaudible] marketing there. Then I had guy named Kamo, who runs a company called Primer. It’s goprimer.com. They do a bunch of work with a whole bunch of companies to help them with growth. Specifically around paid acquisition in Facebook and Google, etc. I chose those three people mainly because I think they all give a different perspective. So Grammarly is a B to C company, Carta is a B to B company for the most part, and then with Primer, Kamo sees all kinds of thing around, from B to B to B to C, to market places, he’s worked with Lift and Uber and many other different companies. That’s the panel of the panelist and the title, like you said is “What’s Killing Your Growth?”   [0:01:46] Steli: The reason why wanted to talk about this on The Startup Chat was that I came to the conference a little bit after the panel, so I missed the panel, was super bumped about it, but I saw an insane amount of responses. People really were sharing the three things I learned that is killing your start up right now. People were enjoying it, and getting a ton of value, and the audience was primarily marketers. A lot of marketers. I felt like, let’s just take the best tid bits and the biggest ah ha moments and share it with our audience as well.   [0:02:17] Hiten: Yeah, and I had some interesting questions like, tell us a story of when the business or the product was not growing. What did you do? I asked them what the number one that kills growth, that they told other people is for them. And the number one trend that these folks have seen around growth. Ill just lay out some of the conclusions or thoughts or whatever that came out of it. I think one of the big ones was, Emily mentioned when she joined Carta, she wanted to start just doing a bunch of tactical marketing things. What she realized is that they didn’t have any measurement framework in place. They didn’t even have sales force set up properly. If she drove leads, or her and her team drove leads, and she started doing, and she started doing any of those initiatives, that have paid acquisition or SEO, and really started getting more out of it, that they’ll be able to measure it. If you can’t measure it, then are you really doing it? That’s what I would say. I think that was a good one for her, which is getting the framework in place, getting the data in place, getting the analytics in place, getting the measurement in place so that she could actually what the outcomes benefits impacts are [inaudible] of what’s she’s doing is. Then, Kamo said one that’s interesting in the end, or the talk that I should share, which basically, when it came to what’s the number one thing killing growth that he tells people, he said you home page. I think lot of what he said had to do with how there’s these big, long homepage’s with all this information. Is that really solving for the majority of people that are coming to your site or are you trying to just appease every single question someone might have about your product, right on your homepage? I think what he really believes in is that your homepage should have a good double digit conversation rate to a lead or a sign up, whatever it is that your product does. Double digits meaning 10, 20, 30 percent. He didn’t say this, but I’ve spent time with him to know that’s how he think about it. When you have all this extraneous things like navigation, too much information, you’re getting away from what people are there to do, which is try it out, get to the next step. These homepages are preventing people from doing that, because they’re built out of compromises. Compromises to solve for every question that any customer might have, when most customers just want to come, and actually just get started, just get going on most sites, and we get in their way. That was the homepage one. I think, one of the things that I really appreciated about Yuriy, was a story he talked about Grammarly. When he joined the company, it was a four paid company. Which means that they only had paid plans. They didn’t have a free plan or anything like that. Now Grammarly is used by millions and millions of people, and they have a massive free plan. They have a Chrome extension, which they didn’t have before. The thing that really shed light to me about with him is, they really, when he came in, they really thought through what do we want to be? How do we want to do this? And really went for changing the business. All the way from the product to the customer base, and even the way that the products are delivered to customers in order to capitalize on the opportunity ahead of them. They also were just a very, very specific grammar checker at the time. Where you downloaded software [inaudible] on the web and you paste it, your content in there, then they really flipped it and made it a lot slicker. If you use Grammarly today, it’s just the Chrome extension. They have a desktop App and other things too, but you plug it in and it gives you super powers when you’re writing. I think that they key there was, don’t be afraid to do the things that are right. Don’t be afraid to go after the bigger addressable market. He said that this allowed them to expand their TAM, which is a total addressable market for the business, and that was a big deal. He also said that that was challenging to do, but they knew it was the right thing. I think that that’s another big one that I took away too.   [0:06:35] Steli: That’s beautiful because it points to the thinking … Growth not just being a marketing function, but thinking about growth from an entire company perspective. From, what is it that we’re trying to accomplish with the vision here? What is our total addressable market that we’re going after, and how do we create … They created a much different user and then customer experience ad journey than they had before, which probably was much shorter pathway that they had put in place in terms of coming to the site, and then deciding we’re going to buy the product or not. Am I going to use it a very specific way, versus now, they’re going after a huge amount of people. They allow for a much longer journey, and much more granular journey with their product.   [0:07:24] Hiten: Exactly.   [0:07:25] Steli: That’s cool stuff. You know the whole … I remember there was a time, I feel like where there was a lot written about … Oh wait, before I even go there, let me quickly ask you, I know that you had done a super detailed, a super valuable breakdown on user onboarding with Grammarly. You guys did a tear down of Grammarly’s user onboarding.   [0:07:47] Hiten: Yeah, we did a user testing on a few sites, including Grammarly.   [0:07:51] Steli: If people want to see the Grammarly one, because I thought that that was one of the most fascinating ones that you did, what do they have to … What is it you rather … What would they have to type in to Google to find [crosstalk]   [0:08:00] Hiten: I never posted it online, so you’re going to have to email me hnshah@gmail.com. I still need to, cause those are really good. I taught people how to do user testing through Grammarly, Mixmax and Duolingo. We went through onboarding, and just tore it down because we watched video’s of people going through it, and asked them a bunch of questions and all that. You’d have to email me hnshah@gmail.com, and ill definitely send you that, but yeah, you’re right, that was some fun stuff.   [0:08:30] Steli: All right, beautiful. The thing that I wanted to ask about the website, and what he just had mentioned with the website is trying to give information about anything and everything. Answer all possible questions that somebody could possibly have, verus just solving for the number one problem they have when they come to your site and keeping things simple. I remember there was a trend and a time were a lot was written about having a homepage that has as little links as possible, other than the one actually you want people to take, which is probably to sign up for a trial or something of that nature. And how these long websites with tons of menu items and tons of content, how they were performing much poorer than these almost singular focused landing pages that just had one big button. There was a trend where a lot of, even big companies had super, super simple websites. I think what I’ve noticed in the past two or three years, is that there’s a trend against that again. It’s very rare that I go to a website of any kind of sized company that is hyper focused and super simple, and doesn’t have a lot of menu and link items in the footer or the top left, or something like that. What’s your reading on that, the simplicity of the website and trends in what you’re seeing there?   [0:09:48] Hiten: We just swing back and forth. We just swing back and forth. The reason is people put out a bunch of experiments they run and you realize that less stuff is better for a conversion rate. Then, all of a sudden if a site has that, new people come on or whatever, then you turn it into a … Honestly becomes internally a game of compromise, to make multiple stakeholders or teams happy with having more and more stuff on the marketing site. These days, I’m very much opposed to that and very focused on something that I call going back to basics, which is, the basic thing is that, that used to work, it still works. In fact, having a simpler site and really focused on the one goal that people could have on it, really helps you increase your conversions. Here’s the thing, if your product can be valuable in a short amount of time with people within minutes of them signing up, you have an obligation to get that customer, that visitor to your site to that value, as fast as possible. All this crap on your website is getting in the way of that.   [0:10:57] Steli: Yeah, beautiful. Now let me ask you, let’s quickly touch on the analytics part. Not being data driven, not having numbers as being one of the main reasons that could kill your growth. I think a lot of times people are paralyzed at how to approach this topic. Especially for companies or start ups that have been around for a minute. We’re not talking about clean slates, day one. We’re talking about, you’ve been around for a year or so. There’s a ton of things that you’re using, but you don’t have really good grasp on your data. So, either you as a founder want to something about it, or you’re hiring a marketing person, and that person wants to do something about it. Any best tips on how to go from, let’s say non data driven to data driven. How to clean house and how to approach this again in a way that’s not too overwhelming and all encompassing-   [0:11:49] Hiten: Yeah, I just … I don’t see enough people audit what they’re already doing. What are you already doing? What tools do you have in place? How can you get … It’s really simple, how do you get more utility out of that? Focus on what you already have, and figure out how to get more out of it, out of whatever tools you’re already using. You’re probably using Google analytics. Are you tracking conversions using Google analytics? Probably not. Just start with the basics. The basics there are look at what already implemented and have on your site. Then start figuring out how to more use out of it. Integrate more … Task more data in, or start looking at the reports more. Those are basically the two things you do in analytics. Task more data and look at the reports, and ideally take action based on it. I think just start with where you’re at. Where you’re at is you have a bunch of tools on your site, are you utilizing them? Have you integrated them well enough? If you haven’t, then just do more of that first.   [0:12:42] Steli: Beautiful. Any other things that came up as growth killers during the-   [0:12:47] Hiten: No, that was honestly the highlights. There’s more content stuff that, and people were tweeting, but at the end of the day those were the things that really stood out to me. I think that, even just asking the question, what’s killing your growth could probably be pretty valuable for most companies out there.   [0:13:03] Steli: Beautiful. All right. Ask yourself what is killing our growth right now? That’s it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.   [0:13:11] Hiten: See ‘ya. [0:13:12] The post 355: What Is Killing Your Startup Growth? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about two parts of the business trifecta, the vision and mission statements. As a founder, you should have a clear mission and vision for your company. Mission and vision statements are similar and knowing the difference between both can go a long way in moving your company in the right direction.   In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what a company’s vision should be, how it differs from its mission, how to create early versions of these statements and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:43 Why this topic was chosen. 01:34 What’s a mission statement. 02:28 What’s a vision statement. 03:41 Why you might not need both statements at the same time. 04:04 You can also have a product vision. 05:10 The right time to have a mission statement. 05:43 Why both statements are tools to help you run your company. 06:51 One of the main goals of these statements. 07:19 How these statements can help you make better decisions. 09:20 How to create an early version of your statements. 3 Key Points: It’s not about if it’s trendy, it’s all about if it’s useful to you. If you don’t know where you’re going you’re not going to get there. Mission and vision statements are tools to help you run your company. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about two parts of a trifecta for a company that we haven’t talked about. We’ve talked about values before, so company values. I don’t think you and I have talked about company vision, so the vision for your company, your business, or company mission, which is a mission for your company. I think there are just really really interesting, just like values, in that they can actually, you know, cause people on your team, because this is really about the people on your team, to be motivated toward a common, sort of set of beliefs, set of goals, if you want to go there.   [0:00:51] Steli Efti: Yeah. The episode on how to define your company values, is episode 336, 336, for people who want to check that out. Let’s talk a little bit, first, maybe let’s define what is the company … What is a company vision and what is a company mission, and how is this different? I see there’s a little confusing between vision and mission statements, often times.   [0:01:13] Hiten Shah: Take a crack at is, Steli.   [0:01:16] Steli Efti: All right. I’ll do my best. For me, vision is really all about super long-term, the north star of the company, you know, kind of where potentially even an unattainable future, where you want your company to be. Ideally, the vision statement is something that gives people direction without being hyper-specific about all the specific steps, right? As my example, I always love to bring up Google’s original vision statement that was like, take all the world’s information and make it universally accessible to people. That’s both, very specific, but also so broad that there’s a lot of different things a company or people in your company could do that would potentially help the company move closer to that vision. A mission statement, in my definition, the way that I would think about it and talk about, is a bit more on the tactile side, in terms of trying to answer the question on how are we going to get to our vision? Like, how do we deliver this? You know, adding a bit more specifics on like, what are we going to have to do in the kind of more immediate future? Maybe, you know, a vision statement could be like a 100 year thing, verses, a mission statement could be a five year thing, or a three year thing of like, here’s the part of the world, or part of our product, or part of the customer base that we want to go after. You know, we want to make … I don’t know what the mission statement is of Google, to be honest, but like, you know, building the best search engine, or building a search engine that gives people the answer they were looking for in the very first result, or something along those lines that still kind of hard, and doesn’t tell you how to do it specifically, but it’s kind of more concrete.   [0:03:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I like that. I think that when you think about it as time, a one being way further out the vision, and another one being a little closer, the mission, that’s a good way to differentiate those two. I think it’s also like, you know, something where like you might not actually need both at the same time. That’s something I would point out to folks who are just like, I have values, or I need to get values, I need a mission statement, I need, you know, some kind of vision. I think that you know, if you’re sort of early, even just a year or two old, you can have a product vision. You might not need to go after a full-on company vision. And then, you have a mission that’s supposed to help you realize that product vision, which might be a simpler way to think about in the short run for your company if you’re like somewhat small, in terms of a number of people, and still figuring stuff out.   [0:04:17] Steli Efti: This is interesting. I like that framework. One question I wanted to ask you because somebody sent me an email a few days ago, and they basically asked vision, mission, and value statement, and if that’s something that they said, both still quote-unquote, still trendy. So, still, something that a lot of companies what to do, and asked specifically, is this only valuable at our later stage, or is this also valuable for me as a single founder, when I just get started, or for a tiny team when we’re like five or six people? I thought that that was a really interesting question. Like, would you define a vision, mission, value statement at the stage of just being one person? Is it still trendy? I thought that’s an interesting question to ask.   [0:05:04] Hiten Shah: Yeah, you know, that’s interesting. I think for me, you have to think about how do you onboard new people into the company? If you’re one person, and other people are going to come onboard, it can be helpful to have some kind of product vision, and some idea of what the mission is right now, right? And so, I think people, you know, in terms of the trendy thing, yeah. I mean, these are tools, values, mission, vision, these are tools to help you run your company, to be honest.   [0:05:36] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:05:36] Hiten Shah: They’re tools to help you define the culture. They’re tools to help you get to where you’re looking to go. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not going to get there. If you’re, you know, early like this person that emailed you and is asking if it’s trendy, it’s not about if it’s trendy, it’s about if it’s useful to you? Does it help you shape the culture? Does it help you bring people into the company in the right way? I would say, absolutely, yeah. If you’re one person, and you can have some idea of a product vision that you feel like makes sense right now, and you can have a mission statement about, you know, related to like, kind of like what you said, which is, how do we realize that long-term product vision, but in the sort of, short term, what is one big category of thing we’re doing, or the thing we’re doing? I think that it can be hugely valuable. In fact, those two things might be more valuable than values, when you’re like smaller because you might not know your values yet, right?   [0:06:33] Steli Efti: Yeah, yeah. I think, you know we’ve talked about this. I think to me, vision, mission, values, these kinds of things, one of the big kind of goals of these tools is to create team alignment, right?   [0:06:49] Hiten Shah: Yep.   [0:06:49] Steli Efti: To make people understand like, what are we trying to do, where are we trying to go? We recorded … One of the probably most important episodes ever on the Startup Chat was the episode was how to accomplish team alignment. It was episode number 76, so people will want to check that out. To me, having people understand that the directions of where we’re trying to go, and how we want to get there, is helping ultimately, should be helping people make better decisions, or understand the decisions of other team members better, so there’s less friction, and there’s less pulling in, you know, quote-unquote, different directions. Like, where people are just arguing about details because they don’t understand like the picture, where we want to go, right? If we don’t have an end destination, and we start walking, and you want to take a left, and I want to take a right, we might argue that you know, the left way looks more friendly. I’m going to be like, “Well, but the right way looks like it has more people, so we’ll meet more people.” We could argue on those points forever, without understanding, how could we make a decision, what is the best direction, if we don’t know where we want to end up, right? A lot of times, people argue on these details small, like should we take a step here or a step there, that those arguments would never happen if on a high level we both understood what our priorities are, what the direction is, and the end destination that we’re going to get to, and how we decided originally we want to get to it. If we had that high-level understanding, it’d be much easier for us to make decisions, day to day, right?   [0:08:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.   [0:08:22] Steli Efti: Let’s say, you know, we’re early stage. Let’s maybe not take the example of like, I’m a one person that has not done anything and I’m thinking about a startup. Maybe vision, values, mission statement, I don’t think it’s the biggest waste of time, but it could be. But, let’s say you’re a small team. You have a few people and you’re hiring people, right? So, team alignment, team onboarding, these things are truly important. How do you create, kind of a version one? I’m going to throw out there, one of my main tips with this type of stuff, applies to vision and mission, as well as values, is that you should think about these things as versions, just like a product, and not think of them as like once we’ve set it, or put it on paper, it’s, you know, it can’t be touched, it can’t be edited, it can’t be expanded on, or retracted on. As the world changes, as you change, as the company changes, the competitiveness space changes, and your customers are changing, you might have to revisit these things, and add, subtract, expand on them, right, as things are changing in the world. I think a lot of times, one of the reasons why people have a such a difficult time defining these things is because they feel like, they need to, quote-unquote, get it right the first time. When you have that kind of a pressure, it creates this kind of an unnatural situation, where it’s going to take you forever. It will never feel like you’re ready to actually write it down. Think about it as a version one, that’s good enough. To me, good enough would be, hit’s the criteria of, we all are excited about this. We all are in agreement. This helps us makes us better decisions day to day, and understand the decisions that we make in a better way. If you can create something that helps with these points, you have a good enough version one. And then, it might make sense, you know, when you’re small, maybe to once a quarter, or once every six months, to revisit, and take a look and see, is this still helpful? Does this still seem right? Are we acting in accordance with what we’ve written down here, and kind of like, update, or change, or adjust it? That would be my first step. Still, I would assume that a lot of people have a very, and a lot of teams have a very difficult time to do this. Do you have any kind of best practices, or like advice that you would give a founding, or a startup team, that tries to sit down and write this out for the very first time?   [0:10:41] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think your tip is really important. Like, this is a working document, especially early on. It’s something you shouldn’t feel like you can’t change, within reason because you’re still learning a lot about your market, your customer, and things like that. My best tip is like, you know, something I said earlier, which is if early on you’re working on a product, it tends to be, whether it’s a services business, or a software business, or some kind of marketplace, or whatever it is, think about it more as a product vision. What are you looking to achieve with your product? What’s the sort of short-term, or medium-term end goal with your product? Instead of worrying about a company vision, think about what the product vision should be. Where’s this product trying to get to? Where are you trying to get to with your product? The reason is, most of the people you’re hiring are going to be very helpful in determining what that looks like for your product. And then, the mission would be exactly the kind of thing that basically, whatever encompasses the tactics you’re taking or employing, in one statement to head toward that product vision. Let’s say I’m out there and I want to create the best vegan dog food, right? I don’t even know if that’s a good thing or not. I know it’s a thing. My product vision might be that, you know, to basically to enable dog owners, actually, right? So, that’s a customer, so this is like a product vision type thing. So, dog owners to enable vegetarian dog owners, or vegan dog owners, to feed their dogs like they eat, right? That’s my product vision. That’s what the product should be able to do, right? And then, our mission could be like, create vegan dog food that dogs love. See, what I did there is, I didn’t try to make it about the company, although it is. I made it about, what are we looking to achieve for humanity, right? That’s the vision, right? And what humans, right? Just to get specific. And then, in the mission, I went for what’s a short-term way to think about what the company needs to do. So, if I’m recruiting people, I’m like look, our job here is to make it so that people who are vegan, their dogs are able to eat like they do, right, because that seems to be a problem. If you’re vegan, you probably want your dogs to eat like you do. And then, the mission would be, create food that the dogs want to eat. If they don’t want to eat it, guess what? That vision will never come true.   [0:13:31] Steli Efti: I love it. I love it. All right. That’s it. That’s, I think everything that we wanted to pack into this episode in terms of both describing why it might be useful and rather important, and then talk a little bit about how people should think about this, and how they can get this done in, I think, less burdening, and less like intimidating way. I think people put too much pressure on like, we need to write something that, you know, I don’t know, is going to be like earth-shattering.   [0:13:58] Hiten Shah: It’s going to last forever.   [0:13:59] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s last forever, and it needs to be a statement that when you read you get goosebumps, and it’s earth-shattering. They create that kind of crazy pressure that then makes it impossible for them to get it done, or get it done in a way that’s useful. All right. That’s it from us. If you are playing around with your vision, values, mission statement, and you want Hiten and my feedback, just shoot us an email at steli@ [inaudible] and hitenshah@gmail.com. We always love to hear from you. We always love to give more specific feedback, and advice, and help to our listeners. Until next time, we’ll hear you seen.   [0:14:31] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:14:31] The post 354: How to Create Vision & Mission Statements appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what it takes to grow your company from one million to ten million in revenue. Hitting the million dollar revenue mark is a great achievement and something to congratulate yourself on. However, once you do, the new challenge now becomes growing your revenue to newer heights and this can be quite a challenge. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on surpassing the one million revenue mark and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:50 How long it takes you to get to the ten million milestone. 02:31 Why the growth rate is really what’s important when you’re trying to scale to $10 million. 02:43 What happens when you try to scale pass one million. 03:15 Things that break as you try to scale. 03:47 What it takes to get you to one million. 04:08 The big difference between leadership and management. 05:25 Why your goal should be to hit ten million with 3 or 4 years. 06:50 How to find team members that can scale to ten million when you’re still growing. 3 Key Points: There’s a big difference between leadership and management As you try to go from one to ten, everything breaks. What got you to one doesn’t get you to ten.   [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk a little bit about what it takes to grow from one million in revenue to 10 million in revenue, right? So, we have a prior episode of the Startup Chat, where we talk about how to get to your first million in revenue. And, we talked a little bit on that episode about this concept that today, it seems easier and faster for many companies to get to that one million mark than ever before. Especially if we focus it on kind of the software space. And then particularly on the SAS space, getting to kind of a one million run rate, or a R rate, is easier than ever before, and many, many companies are breaking that milestone, they’re breaking it faster and faster. So, you know, what we thought would be cool is to take that next morsel and say, alright, so once a company surpasses the one million mark, the next kind of stepping stones and milestones that usually are on the five million market and surpassing the ten. And that’s also the areas where there’s like resistant lines, right, where companies have to, have usually a tough time breaking through, or where some company just like, getting stuck and they’re many years in the four or five million mark. Or many years close to the ten but can’t quite go through. So, I thought it’d be cool to just talk a little bit about our observations, our own experiences, what it takes for somebody to take a business that’s running around the one million mark and pushing it beyond the ten. [0:01:36] Hiten: Yeah, let’s do some math, so if you’re doubling every year at one million, it will take you about three and a half years, roughly speaking, it will take you three to get to eight. If you’re tripling every year, it’ll take you, what was it? Almost, just two to get to nine. [0:01:54] Steli: Right. [0:01:55] Hiten: And so, you know, I think my first piece of advice on anybody that’s like trying to go from one to ten, is what’s your growth rate? How fast can you get the business to grow, because it’s really about how fast can you get to ten? And the reason is, like, one to ten is, I mean, zero to one is obviously very difficult. One to ten is not necessarily much easier, it’s just different. And, the growth rate is really what’s important in terms of how fast are you growing every month, every year in your revenue, in order to go from one to ten? And, I would say that as you try to go from one to ten, everything breaks, and, you know, I mean these days, because I have new things that I work on, I know what breaks at one to ten. And so, I actually spend more time on the zero to one to take care of the things that break. And because I want a very high growth rate when I’m at one, to get to ten. That’s like my logic, if that makes any sense. [0:03:00] Steli: Yeah, so let’s talk about that. What are the things that are breaking usually between one to ten? That you’re now kind of aware of that you weren’t aware of the first time that you did that? [0:03:09] Hiten: Your team. What got you to one doesn’t get you to ten. What even got you to a product, period, that people love, which means you’re probably not at one yet, doesn’t necessarily scale. Like it doesn’t necessarily, those people, don’t necessarily get you to one, and then they definitely don’t necessarily get you to ten. Because the skill sets tend to be different a lot of the time. And, you know, I think that, for example, what it takes to start something and get to one, is usually a lot of what I would call, just brute force, and leadership. What I mean by leadership is you’re able to get people to do things, just get them to do things. Like, not, you’re not managing. So, to me, I think this brings up a big point that I have in my mind about team, which is, there’s a big different between leadership and management. [0:04:01] Steli: Yeah. [0:04:02] Hiten: Leadership is motivating. Management is managing, and running, right, and scaling. Leadership doesn’t necessarily scale alone, without management. So, what happens is, you might have, you know, a really strong founding team, with a few people who can just brute force build stuff. Right? And that can, and sell stuff let’s say. That can get you to one. But to get to ten, if you want to get there as fast as possible, you’re creating systems, you’re repeating things. Sometimes when you get to one you don’t even have things that are repeatable. So, you have to step back and say, “What do we have that’s repeatable that we can keep repeating, and keep doing over and over again? And what are the things that we just totally just need to fix, right? And need to make repeatable. And do we have the right people who can do that? Do we have the manager type people?” And that’s a big issue. I’d say that’s the number one issue in my mind when I think about companies trying to go from one to ten fast. And fast is what matters, it’s not about like one to ten in ten years. It’s about one to ten in as little time as possible considering your, you know, amount of cash you have, your market, and all kinds of wonderful things like that. Right? But like, you don’t want to get to ten in five years. Your goal should be to try to get to ten within three to four years. Maybe less. Because these are years now, right? And, you know, if you’re, if you set yourself up, you can get there in one or two. One to ten in one year means you’ve done, like, some ridiculous amount of work to do that up front. But one to ten in two years is about like, is doable, but very challenging. And, in three years, you know, that’s about, I would say roughly speaking probably closer to the norm. [0:05:51] Steli: But how do you do this? Because in the early days you need very kind of, you know, generalist entrepreneurial people that will do- [0:05:59] Hiten: Scrappy. [0:06:00] Steli: Scrappy, and then then, once you get to the ten million mark, you need, you know, more managers, more structures, more things, and many people cannot, most people cannot be both. Like most people can’t be amazing first team members when the team is five people, and then be incredible managers when the team is, you know, 50 or 100 or 150 people large. Most people can have that either flexibility to be both, or examine that growth to go from one to the next phase. Can you really prepare for that and know that up front? Because if you hire a bunch of manager types in the early days where you’re still figuring out what it is you do, they’re not gonna really be the right fit typically. So, how do you find the people that can scale like that? [0:06:47] Hiten: Look for people who are actually thinking about process, writing things down, and making things repeatable that already are in your company. At about one, you’ll have at least one or two people like that. They might be in marketing, they might be in sales, they might be in product. You know, usually they tend to be in either marketing or product. Right? Sales at that scale, your experience might be different, and I’d love to hear your opinion, sales at that scale at one, usually isn’t repeatable, not like pure play, like, you can add more team members and- [0:07:16] Steli: Yeah. [0:07:16] Hiten: Repeat it. [0:07:16] Steli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true. [0:07:17] Hiten: Right, it still requires a lot of like, you know, usually you might not even have like a manager type person in sales. You might have a founder. But not necessarily a manager. Marketing tends to be, if your marketing helped you get to one, then there’s some repeatability there. Because whatever you’re doing is getting you leads, you know? For example, or sign ups depending on your business, or users. So, to me, I just look at a company at one, and say, “Okay, what are you doing, and what are you doing really well?” And what I mean by well is, you can predict it. Like, you can tell what’s going to happen next month. It’s usually amount of leads. Or, amount of sign ups, right, if you’re not getting sign ups through marketing or something like that. And, some of that has some repeatability to it, or at least regularity. So, I think there’s not repeatable, there’s regular, which means it just happens, but maybe you don’t know why or you can’t repeat it, like, or make it grow. And then there’s repeatable, which means, you can make more of it happen. It will continue, you have processes in place to do it. Even like product development, sometimes, at one is not very repeatable. It’s not something where you can build more features easily. Right? Or scale. So like these days, what we do, you know, even pre one, is almost do things that you do at one million. And, that’s if we know this business is going to last. So, then what we do is we really think through, oh, what needs to be repeated? How do we make, how do we ship product? Like, very regularly, like at a very regular cadence, where the process is, what’s the pipeline for that? How do we do marketing? So, what I mean by that is, how do we have a system where we start earlier than at one, run experiments on multiple channels. Because to get to ten, you have to, you typically have to go beyond one or two marketing channels that are your core. It’s very rare to get to ten, and only have one marketing channel that you’re primarily utilizing. [0:09:23] Steli: Beautiful, I think that, you know, the summary, or what I’ll add to it, to kind of double click on what you said is that, you know, you hear this phrase oftentimes, what got you there won’t get you here, or something along those lines- [0:09:36] Hiten: One of my favorites, one of my favorites, yeah. [0:09:39] Steli: So, the thing is, when you get to a million. When you go from nothing to have something that kind of works, to have that something be a million dollar business, or surpass a million dollar business. There’s a certain, I think, success that creates attachment. And that attachment to what got you there, then hinders you to get to where you want to go next, right? So, the way that you get to the million was awesome, and you need to stay true to it to a certain kernel, but you need to be very flexible and very detached from both the marketing channels, the sales approach, but also from the customer you were going after, maybe the customers that got you to a million will get you to ten. But maybe you’ll have to grow out of that customer base into another one to get to ten. Maybe you’ll have to, you know, outgrow the kind of the direction of the product, and broaden it, or narrow it to get to ten. And, again, like we say so many times before in many other prior episodes. It’s not a destination, once you’ve got to one million, you don’t now have product market fit, and all you have to do is now, either just doing what you’re doing to get to ten really quickly, or, you know, raise a shit ton of money to scale it quickly. Because it’s not an end destination. You might have product market fit to one million, but if you want to get to ten, the world has now changed in the last year, and you have to completely rethink who you are and how you build product, and what you do to be able to grow into that size of a business. So, I think, attachment to what got you there is really what hinders most, and that goes to people, that goes to marketing and sales channels, those goes to product development, it goes to almost anything that you’ve done, it’s a tough balancing act between staying true to the core culture of the company and some of the things that make you unique, and made you worthwhile, made you get to one million. But then, outgrowing that and becoming a new kind of a company, a new kind of a product, a new kind of an organization, to get to the next phase of growth. That, once people have success, they get really attached to what got them success, and that attachment is really what slows things down or stops progress. [0:11:53] Hiten: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think that attachment is such a good way to put it, you’re just used to whatever you’re doing. You’re stuck in it, sometimes, you know that attachment, sometimes attachment is to people. [0:12:05] Steli: Yeah. [0:12:05] Hiten: They started this company with us, they, you know, I mean, I’ve spent countless times, and I’m trying to do better on this. Spending too much effort on somebody who’s not scaling. [0:12:23] Steli: Yeah, that’s a tough one, and that’s why, what you said in the beginning, makes so much sense, that you’re now much more careful about the people, and you have also the experience to realize that just because somebody is an amazing rock star, you know, in that first phase of the company, does not ultimately make them a rock star for, you know, the entire journey up to, you know, a hundred million in revenue, right? Some people can grow from zero all the way up, but most people are just great at a certain portion of the journey. And I think when you don’t have that experience, you just assume once you work with somebody that is great, you just think they’re great forever. Right? And then when they are not, it poses a really big challenge in what to do about it, right? And a real dissonance and like, but this person’s really amazing, and you just try too hard and for too long to make something work that just isn’t working anymore, and it would be better for them to go somewhere else where they can be really a rock star, and for you to find somebody that’s right for that portion of the journey now for the company. [0:13:23] Hiten: Yup, exactly. [0:13:25] Steli: Alright, let’s wrap this episode up at this point for now. If you are listening to us, and you are running a company that’s above the one and below the ten million mark, and you’re trying to get to ten million as quickly or as successfully and happily as possible. And you want to share some of the challenges, some of your thoughts, we always love to hear from you, just always send us an email Steli@closer.io, hitenshah@gmail.com, until next time, we’ll hear you soon. [0:13:56] Hiten: Later. [0:13:56] The post 353: Growing from $1MM to $10MM appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about speaking at conferences. As you become more experienced and successful in business, you may get invited to speak at conferences. This could be for small acceptance of an award, to join a panel with your peers, or to keynote a major conference. One great thing about speaking at events and conferences is that it provides you with a huge opportunity to get your personal brand and company out in the limelight while, at the same time, entertaining and educating those who attend. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what it takes to speak at conferences and they share some tips that can help you do so effectively. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:33 Why Hiten prefers speaking at panels. 02:09 The number of times Steli speaks in a year. 03:18 Why Steli chooses to speak at conferences. 04:08 Steli breaks down how he decides what conference to speak at. 05:19 How to maximize your speaking gigs. 16:15 How not to prepare for a conference. 07:01 How Steli prepares for keynotes. 09:04 How Hiten prepares for his speaking gigs. 10:42 One tip that can help you prepare for your keynote. 3 Key Points: Speaking at conferences helps acquire new customers. I say no to a lot of conferences. I do a lot of speaking because it’s a good fit for me as a founder and my skill set. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today. Oh, go ahead Steli.   [0:00:06] Steli Efti: No, you do it, you do it.   [0:00:09] Hiten Shah: And today on the startup chat we are gonna talk about conferences and speaking at conferences. I’m going to start right now by saying that I used to speak at a lot of conferences like Steli still does.   [0:00:19] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:00:20] Hiten Shah: And I definitely ramped that down quite a bit. I do speak at smaller events sometimes and I do, do some other things where I speak, but recently we both spoke at Hypergrowth, which is Hypergrowth West, which is Drift.com’s conference. I didn’t actually speak, I actually had a panel which is something I have been doing more because most people think panels suck and I think I want to learn how to make them awesome, so I’ve done probably over a dozen panels now I think. I did a panel on stage and the title of the panel was “What’s Killing Your Growth” and that was fun! I like to make them entertaining and I like to be a good moderator, so I have a whole process for doing it. It’s pretty simple, where I talk to the folks early and just get an idea of how they think about the topic and then I come up with questions, I create a document with an overview and questions, and I send it over to them. They have time to think about it, they might ask a couple questions back or comments on the questions I laid out, and then it’s just go time on that day, so it’s about fifteen to thirty minutes of prep, fifteen for them, another fifteen for me to write the document, and I’ve sent it off to them. That’s how I do panel’s. That’s kinda my new thing when it comes to conferences, what I like to do is moderate a panel with a bunch of folks on it. That’s my spiel about speaking and since I haven’t done it in a while, with like a deck and a presentation and all that, I think Steli, off to you. I probably have a bunch of questions for you, but how many times do you speak a year?   [0:02:00] Steli Efti: That’s a good question. If we strictly focus on big conferences, it’s about twelve to fifteen big conferences a year.   [0:02:11] Hiten Shah: Oh, wow, okay.   [0:02:12] Steli Efti: There’s probably a bunch more small workshops or meetup type stuff, there’s probably another ten or so, ten, fifteen, of like smaller events.   [0:02:24] Hiten Shah: Got it.   [0:02:24] Steli Efti: But when we speak like proper conference, probably like twelve a year.   [0:02:28] Hiten Shah: Cool!   [0:02:28] Steli Efti: We recorded an episode once, it’s episode 248 on how to use conferences to grow your startup, this is more like marketing at a conference as it makes sense to do sponsorships there, yes or no, but I get asked so often and so frequently about speaking at a conference as a founder and if it’s valuable or not or a waste of time or not, how to do it, that I thought it might be fun to check with your [inaudible] , especially because you shifted your focus right and you’ve kinda like adjusted and changed your approach to it recently. For me, it’s a bunch of ways that I do it and why I still feel that it is valuable to my company. It’s starts with some very practical things, the reason I speak at a conference, there’s three main reasons. One is it helps acquire customers, B. It helps hire great people, and C. It helps create brand awareness, it helps create new contents and new kind content generation engine for our content marketing team overall. To me, when I get invited to a ton of conferences, probably like thirty to forty conferences a year and I only go to twelve, so I say no to a lot of these. The reason is that my first question when I get asked to speak at a conference, the first question that I have is always, are the people that go to this conference, a good amount of these people become customers of my product or my company and is there a chance that a good amount of these people could be people we would want to hire today or tomorrow? If the answer to both of the questions is yes, then I will entertain going and speaking there. Then my next question is, does this fit into my travel schedule? If it’s a month that I was planning not to travel, I still might say no, but if it’s a month or period when I’m traveling and it fits into my travel schedule, right, so I have three conferences in Europe and this would be a fourth one in Europe and it’s kind of close to the conference time before and after, it’s very likely that I will say yes, if the audience is the right fit in terms of customer and potential hiring or recruiting play gram. That’s kind of how I make decisions about will entertain it or not. Could this get me customers, could this get me new team members, and does this fit into my travel schedule anyways? If all three check out then I’ll say yes to going and speaking there. There might be some other little details in terms of budget and how much money they have and all that stuff, but those are kind of the main questions I ask to figure out if this could be a good fit or not. When it come to then speaking at a conference in a way that gets the maximum to value to accomplish these three goals, there are a few things that I want to highlight that are unique to my situation, we can focus on the things that we think most folks can get out of this, but the number one thing that I’ll bring up is that I do so much conference speaking A because it’s working very well for us as a business, but also because it’s a very good fit for me as a founder and my skill sets, right. I have a lot of friends that are founders and CEO’s that go and speak at conferences, many of them often times do it because they want to build their personal brand further, and a lot of them are way more brilliant than I am and have a lot to say and a lot to teach, but it is very hard for them to come up with a talk or come up with a keynote, so it takes them a lot of time and a lot of practice to do this, so they might spend two or three weeks of preparing to design a keynote and then once they design one keynote, they might not speak that much, so they might just do it once or twice a year. I know other people that had to spend a month to come up with a good keynote and then because it took them so much time, they give the same keynote pretty much everywhere they go, right, and the way I do it, which I don’t think translates that well to most people is that for whatever reason in my natural talent, it is, quote unquote, easy for me to come up with a topic to talk about. Because I generate so much content anyways, we have these podcasts where we talk about topics, I create so much   [0:07:02] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:07:02] Steli Efti: video content, so much blog content, so I have this never ending muscle I’m training about how to do storytelling and how to share content, that I will spend usually one to two hours the night before my keynote to come up with the entire keynote.   [0:07:19] Hiten Shah: Cool.   [0:07:19] Steli Efti: I used to do all of my keynotes were brand new for the first three or four years that I did this, and the last two years to be honest, I would say that it’s about like fifty, fifty, so half of my keynotes are brand new keynotes that I’ve never given before, like the one I did this week in San Francisco, the one that you did the panel on   [0:07:38] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:07:38] Steli Efti: was a brand new one that I created the night before and then half of them are keynotes that I have given before just because of the sheer demand of these talks and workshops and meetups that I do now. Sometimes people will tell me, we want you to come and talk about this specific thing you’ve talked before to our audience because we know   [0:07:55] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:07:55] Steli Efti: that’s going to be the most valuable thing for them.   [0:07:57] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:07:58] Steli Efti: So, that’s kind of my process. Also, like the way I do slides is usually, I don’t use video, I don’t do animation, I don’t have great design, it’s usually white background and just one big sentence or just three, four words. It’s just like very simple, simply designed, not just because I like it, but also because it makes it so easy for me to prepare the keynote the day before right.   [0:08:22] Hiten Shah: That’s right.   [0:08:22] Steli Efti: I don’t have to work with designers, I don’t get any glitches with video, animation, cool. I don’t do anything complicated, I keep it as simple as possible, that allows me to be very, very efficient. Because I have this pressure sometimes of creating something brand new the night before, for whatever reason, that creative pressure. I don’t always enjoy it, sometimes I will get into a panic in minute forty five, like shit, I have one more hour and I’m still really far away from how to make this happen, but that creative, that pressure usually creates something, it forces me to create something or to get really creative, it works for my creative work process. Usually I come up with something that I’m really surprised by myself and often times people, audiences will tell me that they really enjoyed, got a lot of value from it.   [0:09:12] Hiten Shah: Nothing like procrastination. I didn’t know your process. I too can come up with topics, I think it takes me a little bit longer to make the decks unless they’re material I already have, then I usually just re [inaudible] , add some things, and make it flow. Also, if it’s a topic, in your case, like I think a lot of time you’re talking about sales, right?   [0:09:34] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:09:35] Hiten Shah: Your good at that topic and you have so many subtopics inside of it that you can pull out and so many stories and things like that, that I think that as long as it doesn’t get old and there’s not as many people that have heard you speak before, it’s not so bad to kind of reuse parts of it if not all of it depending on who you’re talking to. When you can do it that fast and it’s on a topic that something you have given a lot I’m sure it’s a lot of fun, to kinda have that pressure. So that’s a really interesting process, I haven’t heard anyone else do it quite like that.   [0:10:14] Steli Efti: Yeah, I don’t either. I also think it’s…sometimes I’ll…You know when you have such a huge content library, even just the startup chat right, where were approaching, I don’t know how many episodes at this point, like were gonna be.   [0:10:32] Hiten Shah: We’ll be at 400 sooner than later.   [0:10:34] Steli Efti: There you go, right. So, when you’re at that level there’s just certain topics and themes that we’ve talked about so much, right?   [0:10:42] Hiten Shah: Yeah,   [0:10:43] Steli Efti: That it’s sometimes just easier for me to pick one topic like how to say no, right, or team alignment, or.   [0:10:51] Hiten Shah: Yep,   [0:10:51] Steli Efti: There’s just certain topics we’ve spoken about so much, we’ve shared so many tips that I could just like assimilate that into a kernel and give a talk on it. I think one tip that I give often to people, to founders that are thinking about giving a talk at a startup conference, because I’ve not just given so many myself, but I’ve also saw and heard so many other founders,   [0:11:13] Hiten Shah: Yeah, of course.   [0:11:14] Steli Efti: give talks. I’m curious to hear your tip on this, but one thing that I have, or one of the biggest tips that I give to people is to really be self aware and self accepting with your strengths as a speaker and not try to be somebody else. What I mean by that is that some people that are kind of much more shy and reserved in their personality and much more kind of, a calm and quiet energy, that’s what they’re natural and authentic self is, they might see somebody like me on stage that’s screaming at people and cursing all the time and see that people, the audiences respond really strongly and positively to it and then might make the wrong kind of conclusion out of that, that I should curse more and I should be really loud and obnoxious on stage. That probably works for Steli, it will probably work for me as well. The obvious answer to that is no, I’ve seen a lot of people bomb, and sometimes sadly even right after my talks, unfortunately sometimes people will be influenced to adjust, to change their style because their intimidated by my loudness and that will not work well for them. And just the reverses can be true as well, I’ve seen founders that their natural personality might be a lot louder and more outgoing and then they see somebody give a really data driven, really quiet, really kind of strategic and data and rational presentation and then they will try to be that way. They’ll like, oh I need to be a super data driven, give a super data driven presentation to impress people and then they’ll try to do that, but it’s not something they do day to day, it’s not the way they think, it’s not the way they work, so then that will bomb. They’ll go on stage and they’ll try to be this data scientist and people will see through that, that’s not their authentic self, that you don’t really have that expertise, the knowledge, the data they’re sharing is not that accurate, or useful, or helpful. So, I think people succeed screaming and being really loud and I see people be really quiet and be really of a complete different style from me and be super successful and connect with an audience in a really powerful way, and everything in between obviously, but my biggest tip here is be your authentic self and ask yourself what I can give the audience that they need to hear right now that’s going to be useful and valuable to them versus how can I make myself look as good as possible. If you go on stage and you go from a selfish perspective and you try to copy somebody else’s style, the audience as a collective, is incredibly accurate at judging what you’re doing on stage, how authentic it is, and what your reasoning and motivation behind it is and if they feel that it’s a selfish thing or not an authentic thing, they will either literally or you know, non literally give you the middle finger, right. They’ll let you bomb and they won’t respond, they won’t listen, and it’s going to be a really horrible experience both for you on stage and also for the entire conference and you’re destroying value versus creating it.   [0:14:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean you have to be yourself, otherwise people will see through it and you’ll bomb like you said. I think it’s pretty simple, it’s probably one of the hardest things for people to do though because they think they have to get onstage and not be themselves and that’s actually, the exact opposite is true.   [0:14:35] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it for this episode on how, when, and why you should give keynotes at startup conferences or conferences in general.   [0:14:45] Hiten Shah: Enjoyed speaking!   [0:14:46] Steli Efti: Alright, bye, bye. [0:14:46] The post 352: Speaking at Conferences Worth Your Time? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the importance of having scripts and templates in your sales process. While it may not be needed during the early days of a startup, documents and scripts are crucial in helping your salespeople communicate your value. Listen as Steli shares how he learned the value of scripts from his own experience in sales and crucial tips that will help you make the most of your own templates. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:05 – Today’s episode is about using scripts and templates in your sales process 00:50 – Steli talks about his early experience in sales 01:42 – Steli did sales training when he was just 19 years old and realized the trainees were struggling with their work 02:28 – Steli remembered a workshop he attended 03:06 – Another participant in the workshop used a workbook and Steli thought it was a bad presentation 04:20 – The participant told Steli that the workbook he used was for his employees so they can replicate what he does 05:22 – Steli had an “ah-ha moment” where he realized that his employees could not replicate what he was doing because what he was doing worked for his personality and not their own 06:15 – In the startup world, there is a resistance to documentation and scripts 07:15 – Hiten says the lesson is to help other people know what you know 08:31 – Sales ends up as an afterthought because the founders think they can do it themselves 09:25 – The way you think as a founder is very different and you should embrace that 10:07 – As a founder, you must accept that other people may think differently than you 11:02 – In documentation, what you are aiming for is the middle ground 11:17 – You should create a script that is flexible and for different circumstances 12:15 – Make it in a way that people can still use their own language and allow space for creativity 12:54 – Scripts should be updated and developed regularly 13:29 – Salespeople will have bad days and the script can help them still have good conversations that will convert and have value 14:40 – In sales, repeatability is critical 15:04 – It is crucial for startups to be able to repeat everything – revenue, marketing, sales, product development and even fundraising 15:32 – Whatever NEEDS to be repeated should be documented 16:00 – The Ultimate Sales Bundle has 20 different sales templates for free 16:40 – End of today’s episode 3 Key Points: While it might be boring, scripts and templates is a valuable resource that can function as a guide for salespeople. Make your scripts and documentation in a way that allows creativity and flexibility for those who use it. Repeatability is crucial to the growth of your business—especially in regards to the information that NEEDS to be communicated to future clients. Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.   Steli: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we wanted to talk about why you need to use scripts and templates in your sales process. But even in general, I think why too many startups try to avoid documentation in any form and want to embrace creativity and individuality and why that is counterproductive, especially as you scale, right. So let me set the scene here with a quick story that I learned really, really early on.   Hiten: Sounds good.   Steli: One of the main reasons why I’ve always struggled … For most of my career, I struggled being a good sales manager, right. When I started in sales, one of the things that I figured out fairly early on was that I was … I had some natural gifts when it came to selling but I also was fairly creative in the interaction with my prospects. And I thrived on that creativity that made the job fun for me and it made me be able to attract talent to want to come and work for me. So salespeople wanted to work for me because they saw how creative and how successful I was able to be in certain interactions with customers. So all that is great, right. That was fun, great, and it made me fairly successful in a very young age. I was like 19, 20, 19 years old, and having a 30-person sales team. Lots of these people much older than I. So, that’s all great and funky. But the thing that was curious was that I was doing these sales training with these people every single day and a lot of my salespeople, although they were pretty talented, they were struggling every single day in their sales calls, in their sales conversations, in their sales presentations, and I was spending so much time coaching them, so much time investing in them and honestly I was disheartened at a certain point. Why isn’t this going better? Why aren’t these people improving much much faster? Hiten, everyday I’d show up and I’d demonstrate to them how to be brilliant and they love it and they’re passionate, they’re excited, they’re motivated, they’re hardworking, and then they’re not generating the results I want them to. What’s happening here? And then I remember a crucial moment. I went to a little local sales workshop seminar for sales managers thing. They do these small groups, they do all these kinds of trainings. But in one of those small group settings, they basically had four managers and we all had to make sales presentations to each other and then tell each other how we teach them to our sales reps. So we’re going through the exercise and I do my crazy … I didn’t think about what I would say in that moment and I just out of the moment said something really creative and interesting and I was enjoying myself and people were laughing and I’m like, “Oh, I did a really good job with this presentation.” Then the next sales guy, an older sales guy, makes this presentation and he actually grabs into his bag and he brings out a super old, super used-up sales presentation. It was basically in really thick … I don’t even know how to say it in English but it was like, basically like a PowerPoint printed out on nice paper and then you know when you do that plastic on top of it not to scratch it or rip it apart? I don’t know how to call that. He had this super ugly sales presentation and he went through it to us as if it was his first day in selling and I know this guy was making millions and was very successful as a sales manager. He would just go through these different pages and give us a very standard presentation: nothing exciting, nothing fancy, nothing flashy, nothing really interesting. And I was like, “How is it possible that this guy that’s so much more successful and makes a ton of money, why is he using such a shitty presentation when I could just pull it out of my ass and do something completely fresh and new in the moment?” At the end of the presentation, I challenged him and I was like, “Dude, this was … It was a solid presentation but not that great. Do you really, honestly use this thing every day when you make presentation or when you coach your people?” And he was like, “Absolutely.” And he looked me in the eye and he said, “Steli, I don’t need this. I’ve been doing this presentation for years. I don’t need this fucking thing. But if I give presentations without it, how are my new reps going to learn what to do? They don’t have 10 years of experience, just pull it out of their ass. I want them to make the exact same presentation I make. In order for that to be realistic, I need to use a template that they can use. I need to use a formula they can replicate. That’s the only way I can scale to” … I think at that point he had like 80 sales reps. “If I do something without this, then they won’t be able to replicate my results.” That was a real wow moment, which actually made me turn around and ask him, “Hey, when I give my presentation, what did you think of it?” Because I thought I did amazing and he loved it because he was laughing and he was fairly engaged. He was like, “Oh, it was fun, but if that’s the way you teach your reps to do sales, they’re all gonna fail because it’s not something that everybody’s going to be able to pull off.” That was really an aha moment which made me realize, I do love individuality and I love creativity. I love to be authentic and have my own voice. I don’t enjoy giving the same presentation again and again and again and having a script or a template. But the reason all my reps were struggling was that they could not replicate what I was doing because I was doing something new everyday. And I was doing something that worked for my personality but most of my reps were not like me. So I was setting them up for failure although I thought I was having this super-creative team and I was coaching them so much and scripts are stupid and templates are stupid and all that. This is over 15 years ago when that moment happened, but it really had an impact on me and it really made me realize how bad of a sales manager I was. Coming to present time, one thing I see every single day is, especially in the startup world, people wanting to hire sales people, build a sales team, scale their sales process, take what they did and they want to replicate it and grow it and build upon it and they resist any kind of documentation, any kind of real process, and they hate scripts. Oh my god. Scripts are the devil’s work. Nobody should ever do a script because doing a script, what we all associate with it, is some person just reading off a piece of paper and being a robot and being totally stupid and mindless. But if you don’t have scripts and you don’t have any documentation and you don’t have process and you want to hire all these sales people and help them succeed, you’re going to struggle. So I wanted to talk about the value of documentation and scripts and having some of it and how to use that with you. I’m curious. I know that you’ve built some sales teams in your companies and you’ve been exposed to a lot of it. We’ve never talked about this. I’m not sure if your position is scripts are stupid and the devil’s work or really harmful or not. What your comments are on this, on this little story.   Hiten: I think it’s an awesome lesson. I think it’s something that … I’m excited that you got the lesson and I’m also excited that we get to share about it because it just points to the fact that when we talk and we give presentations or when we’re just doing work, it’s hard to think about having someone else do it. And how should someone else do it. And so to me it’s just super powerful and one of the key lessons in startups is whatever you’re doing today that you’re doing yourself if you’re a really small team, it’s likely that other people are going to have to do some of those same things. And if you’re not thinking about how can other people do it, then you’re not actually doing the right thing for your business and you’re just basically stuck on a method that only works for you. This is funny because … And you think founders … What ends up happening to a lot of founders is, “Oh, the age-old saying of if you want to get something done right, do it yourself.”   Steli: Yeah.   Hiten: That’s what gets in people’s heads because of this simple thing which is, “Well, other people can’t do what you do.” And if they cannot do what you do the way you do it, then you have to do it a different way if your goal is to have other people also do it and that’s required to scale your business and I think in sales, this is one of the number one problems. This might even be … We might have just discovered here why a lot of founders don’t like sales.   Steli: Yeah.   Hiten: Especially engineering-driven, product-driven, marketing-driven founders. Sales ends up being an afterthought because they think they can sell better than other people or they haven’t really put in the time to think of it as a repeatable thing. It’s so awesome that you got to learn this lesson yourself.   Steli: You know, I think that you just said something that really clicked in my head which was that, probably by definition a founder is somebody that does things in a way that most other people won’t. Right? So by definition, we will have certain skills or certain tendencies or certain ways of approaching things that most people that we’re going to hire once we’ve had success and the company needs to grow, they will not think that way. They will not have these tendencies or capabilities because they are not the founders of this business. So I think it’s that … And it’s not about better or smarter necessarily. There’s a lot of employees that are a lot more … Most of the people who work in my company are smarter than I am. It’s not that. It’s that the way you think is very different and if you don’t embrace it and understand that, you’re going to be a horrible manager, which is what most founders are, honestly. For most of my life, I’ve been a horrible manager and I’ve just every day tried to be a little less horrible at this. But most founders are not amazing managers because they teach people the way that they would do things or the way they think or the way that they would learn and they then think, “Well, why is nobody capable of doing this? I showed them how. I demonstrated to them how I would approach this. Yeah, I didn’t tell them XYZ but why can’t they fill in the blanks? I mean it’s obvious.” No, it’s not, and most people will be very different in their thinking from you and you need to really internalize that first as a founder before you’re really able to be a leader and become a good manager. Most founders don’t and the result is that they come up with a conclusion of, “People suck, it’s hard to find good people. Most people aren’t able to do it. I’d rather do it myself. I’ll do it in much less time than teaching others how to do it.” All that kind of stuff. All that means you don’t know how to hire and onboard and manage people, right. And you’re probably doing it wrong. In the early days I don’t think it matters. In the early days, in the founding team, you want a handful of people that are very entrepreneurial, but once you’re beyond that phase, you need to set up things that are allowing people to get onboarded and to succeed in the job. And you need to document things, right. And you need to also understand … Here’s one thing that I really truly remember when it comes to documentation, especially in sales, is that what you’re aiming for is a middle ground where you’re not so rigid that everybody’s a robot, right. So when we write sales scripts for instance … There’s two great examples for documents that I think every sales team should have: a sales script for whatever it is. If it’s a demo you’re giving, if it’s a cold call you do, if it’s a qualifying conversation you have, whatever it is. If you have a sales conversation you have over and over and over again, you should have a script for that. And the reason to have that is that you want to be mindful and design the conversation in a way that works, just like you would design an app or a sign-up funnel on a landing page from ad creative to landing page to what happens in the thank-you form to what happens in the next step of the funnel. You want to be really mindful of the user experience. Same thing is true for a call. If I call you, I want to be mindful of that conversation. It has a beginning, a middle and an end and it needs to make sense and it needs to be valuable to you and it needs to be optimized to convert in the best possible way. So I think that it’s important to create that script. And in the early days when people don’t have the knowledge base to deviate from it, you give them something they can hold onto and that they can perform at a certain level that will convert. Eventually, what you really want to do is you want to do it in a way where people can use their language, they can customize the script a little bit, and at times where they feel really creative, at times where they are at their best, if they can come up with something better in the moment, if they have a brilliant insight on how to pitch this product better or how to change something, they can do it and perform better and then bring it back to the team and back to the original script and improve it, right. Scripts are not set in stone. They’re not like some holy document that can’t be changed or edited. In most sales teams, I tell them create a really rough version one of a script today in 30 minutes, and then it needs to be a living breathing document. Every two weeks, every week, sit down with your sales team and go, “Does this thing work? Is there something here that’s stupid? Is there something anybody has tried consistently that works better than this that we can update this with?” And you collaboratively work on the sales conversation like you would do on a product and you constantly would iterate and improve it depending on what happens in the market and what kind of things you’re learning. So you’re allowing the salesperson to be creative and deviate away from it when they feel they have an insight or an idea. But every salesperson also … It’s like a performance sport, every salesperson will have really bad days where you don’t feel creative, you’re not passionate, you don’t have great ideas, and what happens if you don’t have a script, something, some basic outline on how the conversation needs to go that you can hold onto, if you don’t have that, on your great days you might be much better than the average that the sales script gives you, but on your bad days you’re going to have horrible conversations that are completely without any direction and that will not convert and will be destroying value. So having something that gives everybody a standard average benchmark of performance and then still allow the team to perform better that that and raise the benchmark and improve it and change it is the way to think about using documentation and scripts in a sales process. And not as like a, “Oh, now I have a” … Every salesperson just sitting there reading off a piece of paper, which is obviously horrible, right. It is not what this is intended to do. That’s just one example. Another example that we might get into but I really want to hear your thoughts on that before I jump into that.   Hiten: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think you gave a really balanced perspective on it. When it comes to sales, again, this repeatability is so critical. So if you can’t figure out a way to get that done and keep yourself happy, then it just won’t work. Again, my biggest takeaway on this is what you were saying earlier. It’s not just about sales or anything like that, although sales is a place where you can actually do this and your success or failure in scaling sales has everything to do with the repeatability of the process. But in most parts of a startup, you start by no repeatable process and as fast as you can get into repeatability: repeatability of revenue, repeatability of marketing, repeatability of sales, repeatability of creating the right product and all those kind of things, even repeatability of being able to fundraise every single year once you start if that’s your path. That’s what causes you to succeed. That’s what gets you to grow. It’s one of the most boring things because who wants to repeat the same thing over and over again?   Steli: Yeah. All right, so I think that in sales there’s these things that … Whatever your reps have to do consistently, whatever they have to do multiple times a day, is something you should think about documenting. So sales script, objection management, all that stuff. One thing that I’ve done recently and we’ve just launched this, is actually we looked at all the resources and templates and scripts that we had put together and we created a little free bundle for people to get you kickstarted on this. So there’s over 20 templates, documents, scripts, that you can just use to get started with this. It’s called the Ultimate Sales Bundle, and you can find a free copy of that. It’s over 20 different resources and templates at resources.close.io/salesbundle. Resources.close.io/salesbundle if you want to get 20 sales templates from me, the templates we use in our company. To get an example, to get a taste of what we’re taking about and get kickstart to it. I don’t want to just talk about the problem but I want to offer people a kickstart to the solution. That’s where people can get that and I think with that being said, we’re ready to wrap up this episode. We’ll hear you guys very soon.   Hiten: Later. Get the bundle. The post 351: Encore Episode – How to Use Scripts to Empower Your Sales Team appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the idea of figuring out the answer to the question “who am I?”. This is a question that we all ask ourselves at some point in our lives. However, in order for you to find yourself, you need to learn about yourself first. And this is no small feat. Figuring out who you are and what you want out of life can be challenging, and affects the kind of founder you will become. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what this question means to them and share some tips that can help you answer the question. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:44 Steli’s thought on how to figure the answer to this question. 02:55 Why you have to ask and answer this question. 03:18 The impact our childhood has on us as adults. 04:26 How our experiences are changing as we grow older. 05:03 A quote that came to Steli’s mind. 05:43 Steli thoughts on being who you want to be. 06:18 The importance of acknowledging who you are at your core. 06:56 A big lesson Steli’s learned after arriving at the valley. 07:48 Hiten’s point of view on finding yourself versus defining yourself. 3 Key Points: This is one of those things that most people will struggle with at one point or another. Some of the choices we make might be right, but many tend not to be. Don’t try to find yourself, define yourself.   [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about this idea of trying to figure out or figuring out, if you’re lucky, the answer to the question who am I? We wanted to give you some thoughts on that. So, Steli?   [0:00:20] Steli Efti: Yes.   [0:00:22] Hiten Shah: How do we tell people to figure this one out?   [0:00:25] Steli Efti: That’s a good one. I don’t know, so this is good question, right? I think this is one of those things that seems so obvious and people have heard so many times that I think it’s easy to underestimate the weight of the question and the importance of finding the true answer to this in your life. I think it’s one of those things that most people will struggle with at some point or another. I think when we’re really young it’s a really big central topic of our existence, right? Especially kind of like the … At least it was for me and for most people that I observe kind of the teenage years are years that I feel like are centered all around the question of who the hell am I? And trying out different personalities and different lives. Being like, am I a sports person? Am I into music? Am I a cool kid? Am I a nerd? What are my interests? What are my hobbies? What is my tribe? What is my identity? I feel like those are the years that we’re trying to figure out who we are. Then it seems to me that too many of us too quickly are getting attached to whatever story it is and we’re just stuck there. Some of the choices that we do early might be right, but many of them might not be. A lot of people I’m not sure re-examine this often enough. What happens is that because we’re all incredibly insecure, we usually look outside to find someone that seems to know what they’re doing and we just think we need to be like that person to also be happy, successful, significant, whatever it is that we’re aiming for. So I do think that most people maybe haven’t answered the question truthfully and are suffering the consequences from it. That’s my instant and initial response when you say, how do you figure out who you are? My first thoughts are that you have to ask the question again and really make sure that you have answered it correctly versus just being attached and stuck in an answer that you might have picked out when you were really young a really long time ago.   [0:02:58] Hiten Shah: I think that’s really powerful. We don’t tend to realize what impact our childhood had on us and what kind of things we picked up as you said, and then also are sort of running with. You know, depending on what circles you kind of roll in or what you read, some would call that programming. So it would be like what were you programmed with as a child? What did you … And there’s a few different layers of that. There’s the behavior you saw in front of you from your family whatever family means to you or whatever family was to you at that time. That’s sort of just mimicking whatever you saw. Then there’s also taking on whatever you saw and then internalizing it and coming up with our own ideas of what it was because as much as we want to believe we remember everything or we can recall an experience or something perfectly, actually what’s happening is as we grow up these experiences that we saw, all these behaviors that we saw in front of us actually change because we’re changing. Our experiences are changing and so the whole revisionist history and this idea that whatever you saw back then, it’s changed because of your own life experiences is real. It’s true, whatever you experience you might have a different reason for who you are based on those experiences from the past. A lot of things you take on from your family members growing up and whoever had the greatest impact on you, whoever you spent the most time with early one, whatever behaviors you observed.   [0:04:40] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s crazy. I think that … I’m wondering, one quote that just came to my mind as we were speaking was this quote of like don’t try to find yourself or, yeah, don’t try to find yourself, define yourself. Like instead of looking for who am I as like this thing that’s whatever, god given or set in stone from the universe or whatever you want … Like something that was there from the get go. People should just make a decision who they want to be and then just become that person through actions, right? I’m in neither camp. It’s funny, like I don’t believe that anybody can be anyone they want to be. I do believe that we are born with a certain DNA setup that makes us strong in some areas and weaker in others. I do believe that we can overcome weaknesses. I do believe that we can change our character to a certain degree or expand it, but I do believe that there’s a kernel that’s there in the very beginning of who we are and I don’t think that fighting against that and trying to be something completely different is wise or smart. It’s kind of a balancing act between acknowledging who you are in your core and what your natural strengths and your natural interests and your natural personality and spirit is and realizing that you can add to that, change it, amplify it and defining what kind of a person you want to be moving forward. But I see so many … If we want to bring this down a little bit to the entrepreneurship world or the founder world, I had mentioned this many times before in episodes prior that when I first arrived in the Valley in the US 30 years ago I wanted, I think like most people at that time, or many founders at that time, I had this idea in my mind that I needed to be like a Steve Jobs type of a founder, right? I was admiring him. He was on top of the world at that time. I was like, this is the type of person I need to become in order to be as successful as I want to be. It took me a few years to wisen up and realize that he was awesome in some ways and probably terrible in others but overall he was an incredible human being but I can’t be a copy of him. It’s a dumb idea to even try because I don’t want to be a copy of him. I’m a completely different person and for me to be happy, fulfilled, and truly successful I need to figure it out on my own and amplify who I truly am. I’m wondering about this concept of being born a certain way and discovering who you are versus defining and developing who you want to be. What’s your point of view of those two things?   [0:07:35] Hiten Shah: I think self development and defining who you want to be is really powerful. The part of it that … What I find a little nuanced is if you truly want to do that at the core, a lot of it has to do with shedding who you aren’t.   [0:08:00] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:08:01] Hiten Shah: Right?   [0:08:01] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:08:01] Hiten Shah: So like if you were taught whatever … But see, it’s one of those things that I find, this is where this whole concept turns into a lifelong journey because you, you know, when you’re going through your different life phases you are essentially a different person. Even every day you might be a different person. You know, something changes, like there’s a new experience. There’s a insight that you get about yourself or life or everything around you and you adjust. So to me, I think a lot of this is like if I were to just be really prescriptive it’s finding those patterns that cause you to feel a certain way or be a certain way or react a certain way and then figuring out whether you want those to continue or not, right? To go all the way to something very positive like helping an old lady cross the street, right? It could be a pattern that if that happens to you and you help a old lady cross the street multiple times in your life and that’s something you like about yourself, that’s the pattern. That’s great. It’s a good one. It’s one that you might want. But you saw it, right? Another example would be, you know, every time you’re in the street and you see a homeless person you decide to give them some money. That’s a pattern. Is that a pattern you want to continue or not? Then it starts getting more interesting. Another example would be you’re driving, someone cuts you off, you get really angry at them. You start driving faster. Your heart starts racing. That might happen to you all the time. In fact, people who are listening probably experience that. Is that what you want? Do you want to hold that anger? Is that a pattern you want to stop? Right, so to me a lot of this has to do with if you’re trying to define who you are you should figure out these sort of subtle things or these patterns and see if you want to change them. You know, some would say, “Oh, you should only keep the positive ones.” And things like that. I don’t think I’m as prescriptive. For me it’s like if you like getting angry when someone cuts you off and there’s something about it that you can’t let go or you don’t want to let go and that helps define you in a small way, maybe a big way, so be it. To me, it’s just finding these things and a lot of them are these triggers. A lot of them are these positive behaviors. A lot of them are things like that. If every time you meet a new person you hug them, is that a thing? Is that something you want to continue? Great, continue it. You know? Or is that something you want to change because you make other people uncomfortable all the time or people come and hug, I don’t know, there’s so many concepts here around patterns like this. To me, it’s like find the pattern, figure out if I want to keep it, if it defines me or not. If it doesn’t define me or I don’t want it to define me then I change it or I at least start becoming aware of it and see what I can do in the moments that it shows up for me.   [0:11:03] Steli Efti: Think one thing that I really want to underline that you said … And I think this is so true in most things in life is that this concept of figuring out who you truly are is not just like most thing, most of the concepts in life, it’s not an end destination.   [0:11:19] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:11:19] Steli Efti: It’s not like some kind of a magical place that once you arrive there you’re set. You don’t have to worry about this anymore. Right? We have this idea about almost anything in life that’s like, success, work, life balance, all these things that we think of as destinations that we’re trying to get to and we think that once we’re there we could just chill for once. We’re just going to forever reap the benefit of having arrived at that destination. That’s not how life works, right? Life is kind of a never ending balancing act and you might be kind of in full harmony with your true self in a way that is really empowering and creates a lot of happiness for you and creates a lot of value for your environment right now. That doesn’t mean that that type of living, thinking and acting a year from now will still be in harmony with the world or yourself. Things, the world is changing, you are changing every day inevitably if you want it or not. I do believe that there’s certain core things that can be true but there’s always some readjustment. There’s always some updating that needs to happen, some reevaluating that needs to happen. I think realizing that and letting go and being okay with that is a big part of taking that journey and enjoying it and not getting stuck at any single place because if you think of it, the reason why … If you thought you were a certain type of person and today that is not serving you anymore, the reason that you had decided that at some point was that it seemed like a good decision or it seemed like a good way of being to you at that moment. It might have been useful back then or it might have been the best thought that you could have with the type of information that you had or the best kind of behavior that you could exhibit in your circumstances. But a year later, 10 years later, a week later, it might just not be true anymore. Having that mental flexibility to reevaluate and to expand and retract and experiment and play even with your personality is I think a really, really useful concept. The other thing that I’ll say in wrapping up the episode is that I think too many of us are looking for answers but are insecure in believing that we are enough and that we are good the way we are and valuable. We are too much outward focused on trying to see who out there seems to have figured out life.   [0:14:02] Hiten Shah: Right.   [0:14:02] Steli Efti: And then once we find these people we don’t examine critically enough if the way that they live life is truly really great for us and we should truly adopt these ways because of that insecurity. Once you’ve met enough people that seem to be admired by lots of people and once you are in that position where people think you are the person that has figured life out and you realize how untrue this is no matter how successful, wealthy or famous people are, the more you can kind of take that wisdom. But that’s one of those wisdoms that we always love to share with people which is that nobody has fucking figured it out. Nobody knows that much better than you and it’s not usually a good idea to try to find somebody that’s famous or rich or anything else like that and be like, let me just do everything that person does and let me just be that person. Then I’m going to live that person’s life which I think based on whatever Instagram pics that it’s really, really happy. But that’s not a way to choose who you truly are. That’s not a good strategy. It might be fine to talk to people, to read, to get inspired, but don’t just try to copy/paste somebody else’s life with the little information you have about them because you don’t trust your inner voice and your own thoughts and your own ideas about who you want to be.   [0:15:25] Hiten Shah: That’s a great way to leave it.   [0:15:27] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it from us for this episode.   [0:15:30] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:15:31] The post 350: Who Am I? (How Do You Figure out Who You Are) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.