In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Social Proof. They share the top tips for using social proof to benefit your business and explain the importance of why to use it. They share a case study to show you the mistakes that can be made and the steps to take to correct them. If you have ever purchased a product because you read a positive review or brought a service because you heard that it is one of the best. Then you have been influenced by social proof. People hate to make mistakes, the hassle of buying the wrong thing or being stuck with poor service, drives people to look for guidance before they make their buying decisions. Social proof can offer huge growth for your business, as it serves to use the need for people to align their actions with the actions of people who have already succeeded. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn to boost your marketing effectiveness with social proof. Steli and Hiten look at how social proof can increase your conversions and help you to understand the importance of social proof. Steli and Hiten’s also share their key tip for getting your startup on top, by using social proof. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:14 The definition of social proof. 01:32 Where should social proof be used. 03:28 What social proof is and what it is not. 04:00 How to find your credibility. 04:54 Examples of social proof. 05:36 How to power-up your social proof. 07:15 How do you get started. 07:45 Key advice of how social proof supports your startup. 08:30  How to structure your social proof. 08:50 The social face of social proof 3 Key Points: If your product is of value there is always someone who is going to be someone singing your praises. As soon as you have the tiniest bit of social proof you need to use it. People will seek external reinforcement to either trust you or run away from you. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this Hiten Shah, and today on The Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about Social Proof, and specifically social proof when you communicate with prospects. Is that right, Steli?   [0:00:13] Steli Efti: That is indeed correct, my friend.   [0:00:17] Hiten Shah: Then teach me because I don’t know how to do this very well.   [0:00:20] Steli Efti: Ar light, alright. So here’s why I wanted to talk to you about this. Yesterday, I had the honor and pleasure to talk virtually at a conference and what they did is basically they had a bunch of startups submit there sales emails to me and I was able to just do a cold email tear down or sales email tear down virtually through Google Hangouts. And one thing that struck me was that I looked through 10 different sales emails from 10 different startup teams, and not a single one of them … Every single one of them, I had to give feedback about the absolute and utter lack of any type of social proof in there. And so here is what I mean by social proof. Social proof means can you point to things you have done or people, and organization, that have recognized you in a way that tells me I should trust you, or I should believe the things you say. And so when you start a relationship with prospect, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cold email or a sales call or even at a conference if you walk over and you say hello to somebody, you try to coney who you are and what you do or what you might be able to do for them. If I understand what you do and if I believe or think maybe this could be interesting to me, the next most important hurdle is for me to then believe that you’re telling me the truth. And the best way to accomplish that is by creating and including some type of social proof. So I was baffled that nobody was doing that. And I thought that might be a good tip to give to people and to point out what are all the different types of social proof, what are kind of cool ways to use it, so that nobody who listens to this podcast ever again makes a pitch, sends an email, or makes a call and just rambles on about what their service does and how valuable it could be without including some kind of social proof to really help them convince others to trust them to give them their money.   [0:02:19] Hiten Shah: So how do I do this? Like how do I actually do this and it be genuine, it not seem wrong. Because there’s psychology in two ways. One is I, myself, writing the email need to do a good job of not feeling guilty for putting it or feeling like I shouldn’t do it and things like that. Then there’s the other aspect of it, which is how do I do it right so that the prospect actually engages me and it actually helps the situation. I guess that’s my psychological barrier to doing it.   [0:02:53] Steli Efti: Yeah, so you’re a unique case because you have so much social proof that it feels awkward for you to use that social proof, to talk about yourself. I think that most startups will not have this problem, but I personally do get what you mean. But here’s the way I think about this, or the way that I think most start ups should think about this. When I say social proof, I don’t mean bragging. I really don’t. I don’t mean tell me how awesome other people say you are. I mean, maybe a little bit of it. But what I’m saying is that you need to create some kind of credibility, especially in situations where the person you’re talking to does not know who you are or what your startup is and so is trying to wonder should I believe this person or not, should I trust this person or not. Does this person hae any kind of credibility? And I’ll give you an example. One of the cold emails, it said a lot of very technical things in terms of describing what their product and service was doing. And some of those technical things, I was like should I believe this or not, is this hyperbole, can this be trusted. I really didn’t know. And then in their second cold follow up email, at the very end of a very long email, they actually included that they are all MIT engineers and they were researchers at MIT and that’s how they stumbled over this solution. And to me it was like “Well, holy shit. That’s the thing you should say very early.” Because being a highly technical team of people at MIT is different from being another group of engineers that might have as much credibility as the institution that MIT has when it comes to technical things. So what university you’re from. What press you have received. What customers you have been able to acquire. Customers could be … You could create different types of social proof. It could be a very big logo, a very recognizable brand, but it could also just be a very relatable brand or a local customer. I’m a business that’s in Santa Barbara. Do you have other businesses that are using your service that are also in Santa Barbara. Location and proximity can really create a high level of social proof. Using customer quotes or customer case studies. So instead of just telling me we’re helping lots of customers like you increase their revenue by 10 percent. That’s okay. But now I’m like, is this bullshit, is this not? Rather than just tell me about what you do generically for an anonymous crowd, tell me hey there’s a customer in Santa Barbara just like you. That customer is called XYZ and here’s what we’ve been able to do for them specifically. We helped them include their revenue by 11.25 percent or whatever. Or here’s a customer quote. Here’s a quote from that customer in Santa Barbara. So using real proof from other institutions or people individuals and customers to convince me that what you’re telling me you can do, other people and other groups can verify, versus you just telling me everything that you think you can do for me. I think that that’s not rocket science, but it’s surprising that nobody does it. And I think the more important part may be the one thing that we can touch on is how do you generate social proof in the early days when you don’t already have a ton of it. You don’t have that many customers, you are not famous, you don’t come from a great school, you have not received any press or awards. How do you do that in the very early days. I think that that might be maybe a different episode or maybe we’ll address it in this one. But if you have any, you should always use it and you should never feel ashamed of using that.   [0:06:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Huh. I get it. I totally get it. And I totally get that if you’re somebody that’s starting out, it’s super important to go get it. I guess my approach is always like if your product has a value, there’s always gonna be somebody who is gonna say that. And them saying that is an opportunity for you to sort of take it and use it. And so for me, you hear this commonly in customer support, or live chat, if people are singing your praises, your product’s praises, or how good your support is, or whatever. So often times, what I’ll do is, I will ask them if do you mind if I attribute it to you and your company. And so I found that to be a pretty easy way to sort of put this type of social proof into different places, especially even like a cold email.   [0:07:39] Steli Efti: I love that. And I think just being aware … We’ve done a previous episode that you guys are gonna be able to find pretty recent where we talk about how to do testimonials and how to ask for testimonials from customers. That should be part of the process in how you build your marketing, your branding, you build up your company and then utilizing those testimonials and case studies in your outreach, in your marketing, in your sales, is super, super effective. But really just recognizing that in the beginning, you wanna create social proof as quickly as possible because it’s a very valuable currency as you are trying to convince more and more customers to purchase your solution, trust your business. And then as soon as you have the tiniest bit of it, you really need to use it. You can’t just send me generic emails and tell me all the great things you’re doing for people when you can’t give me a name, an example, point to something specific that I can trust. And the other thing I’ll say, in today’s world, social proof, you can talk about it from a company level. Here’s what our startup, or our product, has done for customer XYZ, or here’s how we’ve been highlighted by this important media outlet, or whatever it is. Or this big investment firm has put a lot of money in us. Anything that people take as credible. But the other thing is yourself. Often times, I’ll look at emails and things people are trying to pitch me and I will go directly to the person and I will either pop up their Twitter account or their LinkedIn and try to figure out who is person talking to me and if their footprint online isn’t existent or if it is existent but it’s very lacking or not impressive, or maybe off-putting in some way, I will immediately dismiss everything they are telling me and I will decide that this is not a person that I wanna engage with or probably worth my time. So being conscious and aware of yourself, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram, whatever the hell you do, and knowing that people … Because it’s easy today, when you send them an email or you reach out to them, people will quickly check who you are online and will try to find social proof that you are a trustworthy person or a person that people like and find credible and want to business with. That matters more and more and more and that can be something that you don’t recognize or realize how important it is because nobody will ever tell you. If I click on your LinkedIn profile or Twitter and I find you to be not credible, I’m not gonna email you and give you that feedback. But being aware that people will seek any kind of external reinforcement to either trust you and wanna continue the conversation with you, or run away from you, you need to be aware of that and you need to prepare for that and invest in these things, because they’re gonna make a big difference on the results you’re gonna be able to generate.   [0:10:23] Hiten Shah: Yep, couldn’t agree more.   [0:10:25] Steli Efti: Alright. I think that’s it for us for this episode. More social proof please. That’s the call to action. We’ll hear you guys very soon.   [0:10:34] Hiten Shah: There you have it. See yeah. [0:10:35] The post 309: How to Use Social Proof in Your Emails, Copy, and Sales Pitches appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the pros and cons of feature creep and why too much of a good thing can be bad. They investigate why feature creep happens, what to do when you realize it is happening and how to avoid it happening in the future. Feature creep can be a major risk for your startup and can lead to increased complexity, effort, budget and time input. Feature creep, feature fatigue and featuritis, all describe what happens when adding excessive features to your product or service. Adding extra features can positively or negatively impact your startup. The key is to find the right balance and ensure that you are serving your customer in the best way possible, without getting in the way of key functionality. Feature creep if left uncontrolled has the power to overwhelm your startup and place you in hot water. This can happen especially when adding extra features just to try and improve sales, which may result in a bloated mix of features. Why utilize 10 features when 3 will work optimally? Why bake a cake with 12 people when it is advisable to bake with just 1 or 2 people. Too many cooks in the kitchen will spoil the cake. Too many features involved in a project or service can actually ruin it. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to see how feature creep may affect your business and how to make informed decisions when adding new features. Also learn the key to being clear, about who your audience is and how you will serve them. As well as Steli and Hiten’s top tips to creating the best product or service while protecting yourself from the bloat of feature creep. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:30 The issue of feature creep. 01:24 How sales can influence feature creep. 02:02 Signs of an undisciplined sales team. 02:48 How market buzzwords can influence feature creep. 04:40 The reasons why you run into feature creep. 05:11 Focus on making your features amazing. 05:26 Hubspot’s ‘All in One Tool’ case study. 06:22 How to know your strengths. 07:43 When feature creep is good. 08:24 When feature creep is bad. 3 Key Points: One of the main reasons for feature creep is pressure. Where people mess up is when people add features without a strategy around it. Feature creep isn’t bad if it is what your market needs. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about feature creep.   [0:00:12] Hiten Shah: Feature creep. Feature creep is amazing. It’s amazing because it’s something, if you’ve every worked on product development for more than a year, maybe even six months, you start seeing this and you see this issue. The issue is, basically, the idea, high-level, that you just keep building more features into your product. And how that has this opinion, by a lot of people, that it’s a bad thing. I’m not here to say it’s bad or it’s good. I think the reason we’re talking about this is because it’s super easy to just build new features and I’d love to hear from you, Steli , on sales. One of the pressures that I’ve gotten historically is shit … For this quarter, for sales to make sales, close deals, they need a new, shiny object to sell to customers. So what say you?   [0:01:09] Steli Efti: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think that most sales teams, if you don’t enforce a level of discipline, they will try to find the easiest path to the money. What are two very easy ways to the money? One is promising customers whatever they want. The customer wants feature X Y Z just saying, “Yes, we’re gonna build it. Yes, we’re gonna have it soon.” That’s an easy way to get the customer’s money. And the other easy way to get to the customer’s money is just to say to whatever the price is that the customer is telling you they want to pay. So being heavy handed on discounts and heavy handed on agreements on the feature requirements or requests of prospects. Those are the two strong signs of an undisciplined sales team. And if you don’t create a structure that forces salespeople and a sales organization to be disciplined, they’re not gonna be because they are trying to do what’s in their best interest, which is finding the fastest and easiest way to the money. The easiest way to the money is just to agree that customer is saying they want, right? And to overpromise on what they are requesting. So salespeople will always say yes to the things that customers say they need because they thinking that’s gonna get them to get the customer’s money. The other things is also just to defend salespeople is that oftentimes, prospects don’t really know what features they really need and they are getting their education or they are getting their pointers from the overall market. So they will look around and say well shit, everybody in the market right now talks about, let’s say AI, or Crypto or some other buzz word. Something that’s everywhere is written about, it’s the next big thing, everybody’s talked about it, everybody’s talking about it, and then they’ll look around and say, “Well this seems to be a super hot thing and our competitors seemingly are investing in that thing, so I think we also need this thing.” They’ll point us from there so all of a sudden what’s gonna happen is that a lot of prospects will start bringing up the same feature request, or they’ll start bringing up the same buzz word as, “Well how do you guys do AI in your product? I think today, if you don’t have AI, I’m not sure we can purchase your product.” And now the sales reps not just hear this once, but start hearing it more and more and they will get to the logical conclusion that shit, this is what the market wants. We should just say yes to this. We should probably just build this immediately because people, the market wants it. So salespeople will start feeling bad about telling people they’re not gonna do this and will feel the pressure to just agree with the prospect of whatever they say because they’ll keep hearing it a lot and they think it will get them to the money faster.   [0:04:14] Hiten Shah: Wow, yeah. That’s exactly the problem I used to run in to and it was hilarious that product would get so much pressure from sales cause of something they’re hearing, or some competitor saying or doing something out there in the market. AI is a very classic, good one. To me, you run into feature creep for a number of reasons. I think the most prominent one actually ends up being pressure from the rest of the company and sales to basically be able to filter it and also give them a message to say. So it’s not that sales is wrong, that AI is important or not important or our competitors have it, it’s more so, from a feature standpoint, how do you make your features so good that it doesn’t matter if you add more? What happens is you just start adding features and then every last feature you’ve built is stale, it’s not any good anymore. So the companies today that are winning are ones that don’t … Whether it’s 100 features, or five features, it’s a strategy, right? I like to use HubSpot as a good example. They have a lot of features. They call themselves an all-in-one tool. They have to have a lot of features if they call themselves the all-in-one. In HubSpot’s case, they use their sales team early on to figure out what their market wanted. Their market wanted an all-in-one tool. That’s what they found product market fit with. So now, they built a team and a bunch of engineering teams that are designed around building and scaling and maintaining an all-in-one tool. It’s that simple. I’m not a hater on feature creep. What I think people mess up is when they just willy-nilly add features that have no strategy around it. And even HubSpot. Every single one of their features is not as good as a competitor that is doing less things that them. But all of it’s in one and it’s sort of glued together makes people want to use it. So it’s really about knowing your value proposition, knowing your market, knowing the customer need and the pain and then building towards it. I’m not against feature creep. I don’t think feature creep is bad if it’s what your market needs. You just have to be conscious of it and build a team for it. Because you have to constantly reevaluate those features you have and make them better whenever you build them. So the team structure and dynamic changes with that and you’re ability to push back on engineering, I’m sorry, sales and marketing and other areas of the company is only gonna be dictated by the fact that your customers are super happy and those customers can be used in great ways in your sales efforts, in your marketing efforts. That’s another big point I would make about how to push back, cause I don’t want to say that sales is bad for saying that, I want to say that there’s product teams and founders that are working on this problem right now that probably don’t realize that your best customers are gonna help you make sure you avoid feature creep and axoid building the wrong things, cause that’s really what feature creep is about.   [0:07:19] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that there’s a distinction that needs to be made between feature creep, and feature – I don’t even have a good word for it…   [0:07:25] Hiten Shah: Featureitis?   [0:07:26] Steli Efti: Featureitis? No, featureitis is also is like a disease, right? It’s like a … Feature expansion, it’s feature completion.   [0:07:36] Hiten Shah: Yeah, cool. Yeah.   [0:07:38] Steli Efti: Basically what you were saying is building a shit ton of features is not necessarily a bad thing, right?   [0:07:44] Hiten Shah: No.   [0:07:45] Steli Efti: We should not knee-jerk react to saying, “Well, this product has few features, this product has many, therefore, the product with many features is a bad product that nobody will care about eventually. We’ll lose.” No, it’s not true. Obviously for some customers in some markets, having a product that’s fully complete and has a shit ton of features is the right thing to do and the best product to build. And for other markets of customers, it isn’t. So creep to me, to double-down on what you said earlier, is when the team and company had a vision for what they wanted to build but were lacking the mindfulness and the process to decide what to include in that build and what not. So eventually, every voice was heard and thing crept up into the product world map that shouldn’t be in there because nobody was of the right mind to stop that and there was no process to stop that, right? Customers, team members, investors, PR and press and reporters, friends and family, everybody put a little bug in the start-up team’s ear of this is what you need to build and this is what we’d like to have and this is what would be cool to see and all of a sudden, something that should have become X has become X+Y+Z but not because there was a strategy behind it. Not because that’s what the customers really needed, but because that’s what randomly happened. If you pay attention, if you listen to everybody around you, you’re gonna end up building something that has no direction and that’s where feature creep is coming in and where it’s a bad thing.   [0:09:29] Hiten Shah: That’s right.   [0:09:31] Steli Efti: Alright, I think that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.   [0:09:37] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:09:37] The post 308: Feature Creep appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about sales and email automation. They lay out why sales automation could be a useful tool in your business and they give you some key tips for how to create great emails which get the outcome that you are looking for. Steli and Hiten also share their candid list of what not to do when creating your new email sequences. Sales automation emails are aimed at supporting the sales team and sales process. But how can you be sure that the emails in your automation sequences, are geared towards the result that you are looking for? One of the most important points of email automation is ensuring that the copy within your emails is compelling enough to elicit a positive response. There is no ‘one size fits all’ when creating your sales automation email sequences. But there are a few success tips that we can all follow to have more success with our automated email sequences. Tune into this week’s episode, of The Startup Chat to learn about the step by step actions to creating the kind of email sequences that crush it and how they can help the success of your business sales. Follow Steli and Hiten’s top tips to make your own email sequences, and learn how to stand out in a crowd, of all the bad emails, that your target market are receiving every day. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:49 The link between marketing and sales. 01:06 Introduction to automated emails.   02:01 Automation and outbound prospecting for sales teams. 02:40 The benefit of the automation process. 05:07 The negative side of automation. 05:35 The good, the bad and the ugly of automation. 07:42 Steps to stand out from the ‘crappy’ email crowd. 09:50 What you must understand for successful automation. 10:10 How not have successful automation. 10:45 What to know about tools and templates. 3 Key Points: The days of mediocre and even good email is dead, but great emails are alive because they are so rare. Understand the environment in which you are competing, which is the inbox of your prospect. Start manually first and then automate. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah, and today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about, I think one of Steli’s favorite topics that I want to learn about a lot more, because I don’t do this right now at my companies, at least I don’t, is how to do basically email sequences when you’re doing outbound emailing for sales. [0:00:24] Steli Efti: Yeah, so this is a fascinating topic, and we’ll bang out some tips and try to give people a framework of how to think about this. But back in the … I think when it comes to email, marketing has always been, or in many other areas when it comes to technology in general, I feel like marketing is always kind of a little bit of a step ahead of sales. But sales is always following suit, falling behind on marketing. I know that I remember when marketing teams started to use drip emails, started to use automated emails that were personalized, depending on a person’s life cycle in the marketing funnel, or depending on their life cycle as a customer or as a user of a product. So you would set up this drip email system from a marketing perspective, and then if I as a user or as a trial user, if I visited the pricing page multiple times, you would fire off a personalized and customized email that responds to that. Or if I stop logging into the product, you might fire off another customized and personalized email that says, “Hey, we haven’t seen you around in a while. Maybe either you should watch this tutorial, or maybe we should jump on a quick demo call,” or whatever, and just use logged scale customization in an automated way, and that was kind of a brilliant trend. We might do an episode on that, specifically. Recently over the last few years, that has spilled over to the way that sales teams do outbound email prospecting. Because it used to work like this, where a sales rep, when they were doing outbound sales, a lot of sales reps would, or a sales teams would build SDR teams. And SDR teams, what they would do is, they would do a lot of manual labor of researching leads, researching their email address, and then sending them an email to try to get them to agree to a demo or an exploratory call. And then many times they would realize that one email is just not enough, because timing is of such significance. So they would create a system of going back to the same lead, and emailing them, usually six to eight times, to get them to agree or respond and start a conversation. And that’s obviously insanely labor intense, right, if you have to do this with hundreds and hundreds of new leads every month, and you have to send every lead eight emails, have to remember all that. It’s a super manual and labor intense process. And very, very repetitive. And so we started seeing the introduction of email sequences, or sales automation tools, quote, unquote, that basically mean that now, many sales people, many sales teams, what they’ll do is, they will use a piece of software that allows them to define that sequence. Say, “Hey I wanna write these eight emails to a cold prospect.” Then upload a list of leads every day, and then fire off that sequence. That sequence now is fully automated, so the prospect gets email number one on day one, and then on day three gets email number two, and then on day seven gets the email number four, and the sequence runs though automatically until the prospect replies. And the moment the prospect replies usually, the automated part of the sequence stops, and now you as a rep can start engaging with the prospect. Doesn’t matter if they say, “Not interested, please unsubscribe me,” or if they say, “Yes, I wanna schedule a call, let’s jump on it,” or if they just send you some kind of a question, “How do you guys do, X Y Z?” The automated part stops at that moment, and now a real salesperson or an SDR can engage with the prospect, and explore if they should buy or not. That is obviously, when it was first introduced became such a massive success, because it empowered sales reps and sales teams to be so much more productive, that it has exploded. So today there is hundreds and hundreds of these email sequence tools out there that people can purchase, and especially in technology and in start ups, almost every sales team today, that’s doing op-on sales is using this type of software methodology to do op-on prospecting. [0:04:43] Hiten Shah: Oh man, you couldn’t have said it better. There are hundreds of tools to help you do this, and they have just cropped up in literally the last two years. And it is absolutely ridiculous, how many emails I get that are so fucking shitty, Steli, so before we’re done with this, I need you to tell me, “How do I write good outbound email.” I get the sequencing, I get that these fucking tools exist, and they make it easier for me to spam other people. I get that I could get the list too, in some of these tools, so hey, everything’s easy, but now I get more email. And if I’m doing outbound, I don’t wanna send shitty email, what do I do? [0:05:23] Steli Efti: So, I think that, that’s a really important part, because I think step one is, the good news is, the tools are there today and it’s easy. Right? That’s the good news. So even if you are, if you’re a one person sales team, if you’re a one single founder, you could be sending hundreds of emails, send multiple followups, and you could automate the entire process. So you could act as if you had a big sales team. That’s kind of awesome, right? The flip side of that is what you just said, which is, and trust me, there’s very few people getting more shitty emails than me, because a lot of people, a lot of people, send me sales emails. On top of it, a lot of people send me their sales emails to get feedback from me about their sales emails. So I get a ton of cold emails, every single day. I think so the flip side is, because it’s so easy to automate and to scale your outbound email efforts, people take their shitty email, and they just automate it and scale it. So there’s the danger that you’re gonna take something that isn’t working or shouldn’t work, and you’re just gonna amplify it, which is a problem, right? You take something that doesn’t work and you amplify it, you’re gonna create a lot more negative noise, and negative consequences for you, and on top of that, it’s not just you now doing this, so now because everybody can scale, and automate, and amplify, you’re in a much noisier, you’ve created a much noisier environment. So now everyone’s, every prospects inbox is a lot more full with shitty cold emails, because all your competitors are also using these tools to send a lot more emails to these people. So I think the flip side is that, or the solution to this is, we’ve talked about this many times in other email related episodes, the days of mediocre or even good email are dead, but great emails are more well and alive than ever before, because they’re so rare. So I think that the way that you do great emails, great outbound emails, and you scale that, is that you first confirm and make sure, that the emails you have written, the templates you have, are truly great and stand out. How do you do that? Well number one is you don’t automate and, customize and scale immediately. You don’t do that in step number one. In step number one, you do write one email. You send it out manually. You see what the responses are. You adjust, you refine, and you improve. You talk to the people that respond to your emails, to get feedback on why they responded, what about your emails is great. You talk to the people that didn’t respond, you reach out to them to try to figure out, “Hey, I sent you an email, you ignored it. Just need two minutes to hear, what about my email sucked? What about it is not that great?” You spend time interviewing your customers, to not just hear about their needs from a product perspective, but also understand what their inbox looks like. “Hey, can you tell me, what kind of emails do you get every day? Why do you hate them? What are the good emails, what are the bad emails?” You need to understand the environment in which you compete in, which is the inbox of your prospects. And you work in the beginning, slower than you would like, on crafting, improving, and editing a great email. An email that truly is awesome. Once you have that and you have the messaging right, you work on making sure that you don’t do high quantity, but you do high quality in terms of the people you’re sending these messages to. You make sure that, these are very, very good high quality lists, where the chances are high that the persons receiving the email from you, wants to hear from you. There’s a high probability that they will need your service or product, and that they’re the right fit. So, you do those two things. You look at the result, and you see that a lot of people open your message, and a lot of people respond to your message in a positive way. That’s the moment where now you can use the power of these email sequencing tools to really scale up something that’s worth scaling, something that’s worth automating. You have to do the heavy lifting, the hard, slow, patient work in the beginning, of working on both your understanding of who you’re trying to reach, and narrowing down your niche and your ideal customer profile, and the messaging, like what is truly a message that will stand out for all the right reasons. And there’s no shortcut for that shit. I can tell you how you’re not gonna get to these two things. You’re not gonna get to it by going to blog.close.io and downloading our email templates, and just copy and pasting those email templates into an email sequencing tool, and then going to data.com, or hoover.com or whatever the fuck, and buying 10,000 leads in some kind of a market. And then uploading those into an email sequencing system, and then hitting, start the campaign. That’s not how you’re gonna do that, right, that’s not gonna lead you to any great results, because so many people and so many teams are using emails sequences to prospect, inboxes have become so noisy, those templates that are being shared out there are so overused, so what you have to do is you have to slow down in the beginning, be patient, do things manually. Craft your messaging, define your niche and your customer better than your competitors. Once you get these two things right, then you use the power of email sequences tools to really scale up your efforts. I think that’s both my tip and my rant on this topic for today’s episode. [0:11:14] Hiten Shah: Thank you for ranting on it, I love it. Start manual and then automate, that’s the key. [0:11:18] Steli Efti: There you go. [0:11:19] Hiten Shah: And make sure manual is working before you automate, that’s so simple, I love it. [0:11:23] Steli Efti: Boom! Got a tip from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:11:26] The post 307: Outbound Email Sequences appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Product-Market Fit. They guide you on the path to identifying if your product is well placed to succeed in its target market and how to define what it means for you and your business.   Perfect Product-Market Fit is the dream of every startup, imagine your product flying off the shelves and into the arms of a crowd of satisfied customers. To define and achieve  Product-Market Fit you have to have a deep understanding of your audience. Integrating the compelling value triggers to solve a key pain point for your target market. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn how to develop your own perfect  Product-Market Fit for your startup and how to do it the right way so that your customers cannot get enough of your products. Steli and Hiten also share their top tips to getting you started on the path to successful product placement. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:12 Product-Market Fit defined. 01:34 How can you achieve Product-Market Fit? 02:04 Three ways to find Product-Market Fit. 03:41 Important things you must be aware of.   04:54 Being honest about product performance. 06:00 The difference between growth and Product-Market Fit. 07:18 The difference between marketing and Product-Market Fit. 07:33 Product-Market Fit equation. 09:10 Top tips for finding Product-Market Fit.    10:16 Top strategy to get genuine confirmation from your market. 3 Key Points: If a customer gives lots of their time, money and if they can not stop talking about the product. Chances are you have found Product-Market Fit. When you think about your product, what will cause them to keep coming back? Go out and try to prove yourself wrong. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today I think we’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is How to Get to Product Market Fit. I think there’s lots of different ways. Steli, what’s your deal with this topic? Do you like this topic?   [0:00:16] Steli Efti: I love this topic. You know why?   [0:00:17] Hiten Shah: All right. Yeah.   [0:00:19] Steli Efti: You know why? I was talking to somebody, I think it was even an email exchange of a listener sending us an email asking us about how to prioritize certain things, and product market fit, and then not being sure they have it and all that and that clicked. That made me realize, “Is it possible that we’ve never, in 300 episodes we’ve never talked about product market fit as the topic of the episode?” I did a bit of a search and boom. I was like, “Oh shit.” I mean we’ve talked about it many, many times within another episode but we’ve never gotten a full episode dedicated to it. So it was like, “Fuck. We need to talk about this.”   [0:00:54] Hiten Shah: All right. Product market fit, let me start by defining it. It’s when your product fits in a market. What that means is that people love your product and they want to use it and they’re telling everybody they know about it. I know that might set a really high bar, but that’s product market fit.   [0:01:14] Steli Efti: I love it. I wish I could disagree, but I won’t. All right?   [0:01:17] Hiten Shah: Oh shit. How do you get to product market fit? Well you build something people absolutely love and love so much that they want to share it with other people. Love so much that when you’re on a sales call with them … Again I’m preempting your answer probably, they’re just like, “Where can I sign,” like, “Let me just pay you.” That means that you could have a verbal product market fit where you’re on a sales call and people are just ready to buy it based on how you’re describing it to them.   [0:01:46] Steli Efti: Yeah. To me, I love this framework but to me it’s like, there’s three things that I’m thinking about instantly when I think about a product market fit. One thing is what you just mentioned, which is urgency. Like when I talk to potential customers of this, how urgent are they in wanting to use or purchase the product? Like how big of a problem it is that they have and solution seems to be what I have that they are driving the urgency. I don’t have to. So urgency is a big sign that I’m looking for. Money is a big sign that I’m looking for. How much money do they want to give me? Right? Or if it’s an end-consumer product maybe it’s like how much usage, how much of their time would they want to give me every day using my product or using my app or software? Then this is the thing that you mentioned, how loud or passionate are they going to be about it? Like how much do they feel the urge to share my product with the rest of the market because they’re so happy, they’re so successful, they’re so fulfilled, they’re so excited about what I’ve given them or what we’ve built for them that they can’t shut up about it? Right? That they need to keep talking about it. If those three things are really strong, if they’re really urgent to act, and use, and purchase, if they want to give me lots of their time and lots of their money, and if they can’t shut up about it, chances are that you’ve built something really fucking awesome that people love and you’ve found product market fit.   [0:03:21] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think that urgency is such a key, key point. Right? People all are just ready to buy, ready to use, or sharing it with people. I mean the thing is I don’t think you get to product market fit without actually figuring out what your product actually is and figuring out the product and is needing a product that people love a problem that really … You know you’re solving a problem that they really care about, and that’s the nuance in how to get to product market fit in my opinion. That’s what I mean when I say, “Look. Even on a sales call, if you’re nailing their problem, you will get to product market fit just on the sales call because you’re nailing their problem and you’re able to tell them how your solution’s going to solve it for them.” So to me the fundamental of how to get to product market fit is nailing the problem that you’re looking to solve for your target market.   [0:04:11] Steli Efti: So why is it then … Let me ask you this. There’s people I think that clearly realize or founders and sort of that clearly realize that they don’t have product market fit. Right?   [0:04:23] Hiten Shah: Yup.   [0:04:24] Steli Efti: But then there’s this other bucket of people that in my opinion, don’t realize that they don’t have product market fit, and they’re trying to grow the business ahead of having really built something people truly love. What are some of the reasons why you think people or startups will misdiagnose themselves as having achieved product market fit although they have not yet truly done that?   [0:04:56] Hiten Shah: They’re not measuring it. They’re not looking for that customer love. They’re not looking for that high net promoter score. They’re not looking for, “What can I do to make sure that people love this product? What can I do to make sure that I’m building the right thing for people,” and so they tend to build a product, put it in the market and wonder why people aren’t buying it. Then they try doing all this marketing stuff, to be honest. Maybe it kind of gets them some signups or something but nobody ends up wanting their product or using it very actively. Then you know. You don’t have product market fit. It’s cool. Like it’s totally fine. That’s like one of the hardest things to get to anyway but yeah. I think they just don’t realize that they need a product people love. Nothing else will solve that problem of getting to product market fit and being able to grow a business.   [0:05:49] Steli Efti: Yeah. In my observation, people confuse growth with product market fit. Right?   [0:05:57] Hiten Shah: Interesting. Okay.   [0:05:58] Steli Efti: So some teams, they’re not able to acquire any customers or any users at any significant numbers so they’re struggling even to get any kind of attention for what they’re doing and then it’s very obvious to them. The struggle is so immediate and so early, “We’re not getting any traction. We’re probably not having product market fit.” But then there’s people and teams that are actually pretty strong on the growth hacking and marketing side of things where they’re all on the sales side of things, where they’re able to get 20, 30, 40 customers or 100 customers or they’re able to get 20,000 downloads in the first week of being in the App Store. Whatever the fuck it is. They equate that early surface level growth with product market fit. “Well, we already have a hundred customers in the first three months. We know we have product market fit.” Wait a second. Customer growth or usage itself, user growth, does not equal product market fit. It could just be that you’ve found some really cool way to market your product or that you are misleading people in the way that you advertise or market what you do. If you give me 100 million I could get a lot of people to download my app, if I spend that money in advertising. It doesn’t mean I have product market fit. Right? Product market fit to me like a part of it is can you acquire a customer’s attention usage? Right? That’s a part of the equation but the other part of the equation, which is even more important in the early days in my opinion, is the retention side of things. Once people then use the product or have become customers, or have downloaded the app, or whatever the hell it is, are they keep coming back? Are they keep paying me? Are they successful and are they rating the product really highly in the NPS Survey three months, six months down the line? Like what’s the retention and success numbers versus just the acquisition numbers? I feel like a lot of times startups are confused because they think, “If we’re able to acquire users or customers early, that means we have product market fit. We’ve built something people truly love. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it, or they wouldn’t purchase it, or they wouldn’t download it.” But I don’t think that that’s enough. You need both acquisition and retention. The biggest confusion I’ve seen startups have when it comes to product market fit is that they see some early success on the acquisition side and they instantly jump to the conclusion that retention is not important since they have acquisition they have found product market fit and that’s just not true.   [0:08:34] Hiten Shah: No, not at all. It’s an important piece of the puzzle but you need a product people love or any growth thing you do or marketing thing you do won’t really help you build a business. That retention thing is more important than ever. People have such less attention span when they use a product than ever before too.   [0:08:51] Steli Efti: Absolutely. Let’s round this episode up with the tip at the very end before we say goodbye to people. So what’s the final tip you want to leave the audience with when it comes to finding product market fit?   [0:09:05] Hiten Shah: Yeah. My tip would be just think about, when you think about your product, what’s actually going to get people ? What’s going to cause them to keep coming back? What’s going to cause them to keep using it? What’s going to cause them to be sticky? It’s not about them loving it at first, it’s about them actually coming back repeatedly and using the product. That will cause them to love it. So many companies I talk to don’t really think about that when they think about their product in the future.   [0:09:32] Steli Efti: I love that. I’ll give people a tip that I actually learned from you and you learned it from a friend of ours, , his lead sort of methodology. I remember hearing you say a lot of times founders are so optimistic that we go out there and if we want to kind of do customer development and prove our hypothesis right, we might look at the world in a way that desires to prove ourselves right so we might look at very weak signals that people like what we do and translate that into very strong signals that this is working or that there’s product market fit. So a hack to counteract that tendency from a founder, or entrepreneurial perspective is to go out there and try to prove yourself wrong. Like try to prove that you don’t have product market fit. So talk to customers or potential customers and ask them questions of like, “Why wouldn’t you use this? Would this be too expensive? Is this nice to have?” Actually push them to confirm to you that this isn’t awesome. Then if they disagree with you, that’s a much stronger signal than if you go and you’re trying to put words in their mouth and proving, telling them, “This is awesome. Right? You’ll really love this. This is something you guys could need, right?” Then pushing them and nudging them in a direction of them just confirming what you want them to say.   [0:10:48] Hiten Shah: Yup. Couldn’t agree more.   [0:10:50] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you soon.   [0:10:53] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:10:53] The post 306: How to Find Product Market Fit appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the importance of testimonials. They break down the kind of testimonials that start ups must have and they explain how to get them to present your best face to a new audience. Testimonials are important and powerful tools to build credibility. We rely on testimonials everyday, from friends who recommend the best place to get a good meal, or the best book to finish that project. We even read testimonials from strangers which helps us to navigate our buying decisions online and offline. Testimonials are useful to us because they help us to lower the risk of investing our time and money, in an incorrect decision. Testimonials are very important for startups, as when they are done correctly, they communicate powerfully the voices of satisfied clients to the masses. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn about the powerful tools to building trust with customer testimonials, increasing web conversions and lowering the risk to entry for your audience. As well as Steli and Hiten’s top tips for doing it the right way for maximum impact. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:36 Testimonials are important. 01:01 Top accomplishments of testimonials. 02:03 Key places to use testimonials. 02:27 Steps to creating testimonials effectively. 05:27 Where can you find happy customers. 06:03 One mistake of creating testimonials. 06:16 Steps to making your testimonials great. 07:13 Mistakes that kill the power of testimonials. 08:59 What should you address in your testimonials.   10:30 Top secret tip for powerful testimonials. 12:02 Easy tip for creating testimonials. 3 Key Points: Testimonials are important, they are the way to help people understand if a business or product is right for them. Your sales team should be a source of creating new customer testimonials. If you have customers who are happy with you every one of them should be a case study or testimonial. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on the start-up chat, we’re going to talk about how to create great testimonials. And I think, today we’re probably going to have a good sales lens, marketing lens, product lens on this, considering both of us are here, as always. And I’ll just start by saying testimonials are super important. And this is like case studies, testimonials … They are the way to help people understand whether a business, a product, signing up for it is right for them or not. And so, that I think, testimonials can be some of the most powerful tools that you have to get other people to sign up and use your product.   [0:00:43] Steli Efti: Yeah. Because, they’re accomplishing a number of things all at the same time. A testimonial is ultimate social proof. So instead of just you saying, “Our product is great and it solves problem X”, you have a customer of yours say, “Their product is great and it solves problem X for us”. It solves it better than others. So that’s a much better … Obviously, we all know this in our lives when, it’s one thing for a company come in a tell you that you should buy that product. It’s a totally different thing when a customer of a company comes and says, “Hey. Dude. I’ve used this. This tool is really awesome. I would highly recommend it. Check it out. We use it religiously internally.” That’s a much more powerful statement, because you know its not biased. And because you associate with the messenger. The messenger hopefully is somebody just like you, with same problems, same challenges. So when they tell you that they’ve used it and are successful and happy with it, that’s a much, something you can associate and relate to much more so than if a service provider or a company comes and says, “We think our product could be good for you as a customer”. Now you mentioned, you can use testimonials in all different, there’s different places to do that. Obviously, your website is a prominent place. You could publish case studies, either as PDFs or as blog posts or as videos or as whatever else form factor you could imagine. You can use these in marketing and in sales. You can use them in all kinds of different factors, but let’s really zero in on the, “How do you do that well?” I think my number one thing that I’ll throw out there, which is I think the most challenging thing, is that, I think most companies don’t put a process in place where they are consistently creating new, fresh, up-to-date customer testimonials. They might do it in the beginning when they launch their website. They might do it at some point when they are forced to it, but it’s very rare to see a company be super consistent in creating these customer testimonial asset and asset database that’s growing, that marketing and sales and support can utilize in order to communicate more effectively with customers. Would you agree with that?   [0:02:51] Hiten Shah: Yeah, absolutely. There is no better way.   [0:02:56] Steli Efti: So, a way of thinking about creating customer testimonials in a way that’s not just stop gap or a one-off, is to think of different teams in your company that have easy access to these customer stories that have the highest degree of customer intimacy that they can translate into helping to create consistent amount of new customer testimonials. Very obvious cases. Your sales team should be a source of generating customer testimonials. Your sales people are talking to prospects and they know the prospects that just became customers. So they know the people that are probably at the height of their excitement and enthusiasm, because they maybe trialed your product for 30 days, 60 days, whatever it was. They had all their questions answered, they had trial, a test run, and they are now so convinced that your product also solves their problem, that they’ve put in their credit card or they sent the money or wired the money and they’ve now turned into to a customer, that is gold. Knowing that, especially the unique or really useful type of customers that could be a great kind of testimonial, because lots of other companies that you want to sell to would look up to that type of customer, the sales team can be a great source of feeding, let’s say the marketing team, customer names and saying, “Hey. This is a new customer we just closed. They are really awesome. Here’s why they’re excited. Here’s the value they’re generating. They’re really charismatic. I think their brand is really great. I think the team in marketing or the person in marketing responsible for testimonials should get in touch. I can make an intro to get a customer testimonial running.” So sales team is a great source of that. The success and support teams are great sources of that. Your support team is so intimately involved with your customers, especially your long term customers. They will know and they, every week, every month, they’ll discover or have these interactions that are really powerful and valuable where they recognize, “Here’s a customer that’s so successful that we’ve helped so much, they would be a great testimonial, a great case study, a great champion of our brand. Let me put them in touch with the marketing department to create a story around this.” So, think about these different teams in your company as ways of doing lead gen for customer testimonials for your marketing team.   [0:05:19] Hiten Shah: Oh man. It’s like this. If you have, to me, if you have customers that are happy with you, every single one of them should be a case study and a testimonial. Right?   [0:05:31] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:05:32] Hiten Shah: And I don’t think people think of it like that. And there’s so many signals for that. If you have account managers or sales reps. They usually know if a customer is happy or not. If you have a customer support team, they know if a customer is happy or not. Your product team, if they’re actually talking to your customers, they know which customers are happy or not. The marketing team, that’s the team that usually writes the case studies and testimonials, but might not know who’s happy and who’s not. So I think the biggest mistake I see here is there’s a disconnect between the people that might know their customers are happy and the people that are usually tasked with getting these testimonials.   [0:06:06] Steli Efti: Now, let’s shift to how to make these testimonials great. Because, I’ve definitely seen customer testimonials that were underwhelming. Or so generic or so uncompelling, that I didn’t want to read through it. I think that one thing that’s important to highlight is that, a customer testimonial or case study is still a piece of content that needs to be compelling. It needs to be compelling. It needs to be written in a way that I want to read it. That I want to consume it. If it is just a quote on a website, why does that quote stand out? Why is that quote placed at the right place? Is it a quote about … If get a pricing objection, often because people think your price is too expensive, do you have a quote on the pricing page with a customer that says, “In the beginning, we thought the price was too high. But now after being customers for three years, we know this is actually cheap.” Something along those lines. Something that addresses an objection that a person would have at that point of scrolling through your website. Or you have disconnected quotes. I’m on the pricing page and the quote says, “We really like the API integrations. This is a great company.” This has nothing to do with what I’m looking at right now. So this really doesn’t do much for me as the consumer of the content. Do you have a compelling image of the customer that, the customer image that you have that goes along with the quote, does that look like a low quality, low resolution picture? Does that look like a person that’s depressed and potentially a fake photo stock from some website? Or does it look like a compelling, energetic person? Somebody that I want to take advice from? Somebody that I believed when they tell me this is an awesome service? So, the images that you use, the words you use and the context that you put that stuff in, needs to be great. If you do a customer case study and it’s a blog post, why is this a blog post worth reading? Other than them telling me 600 words or 1,000 words how great your product is. Why is this … Are they sharing a tactic? Are they sharing some secret? Are they sharing a compelling story of their challenges and how they almost failed and how using your product in a very creative way made they raise a ton of money or succeed with their customers? The content needs to be compelling. And I think a lot of times when it comes to testimonials, companies don’t care as much. They don’t just put enough work in. And then they have these super generic testimonials, case studies or quotes that don’t do anything. I look at that, I’m like, “I don’t want to read this. Or it doesn’t really convince me or sell me on what you’re trying to convey.”   [0:08:44] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I really like that. I mean, let me give some thoughts on how to actually get those objections or figure out what exactly do you need to address in those testimonials. Because that’s what people fail at, as you said. And so, to me, it’s really like, figuring out and understanding why people are actually buying from you and what makes your service unique. And then getting those people to give you a quote that’s related to that. Because one aspect of it is, what makes your service unique? And why do people keep buying it? Or want to buy it. Why do those people actually love it? And I don’t mean like, “Oh I love it. It’s great. It’s got an awesome user interface.” I mean more like, “They reduced the amount of steps it takes me to do my job.” That’s way more specific. So you want to get to that specificity in your quotes, or they won’t help you. Another thing you want to figure out is, if you have people who are not buying from you, you want to figure out why they didn’t buy from you. And when you figure out why people didn’t buy from you and then can marry that with the reasoning around why people bought from you, you’ll be able to figure out, “Okay. These people that didn’t buy have these objections. These people that bought don’t have those objections and here’s how they frame why they bought us.” And that can help you really address the objections of people that are not buying. Because often times, people are not buying, not because your product sucks or it can’t do anything good for them, it’s because they haven’t been convinced that your product is right for them. And these testimonials, when framed correctly, they can convince people who are not buying to actually buy. Because it has everything to do with how they get convinced and less to do with, Oh, your product doesn’t have the right features, or something like that.   [0:10:29] Steli Efti: I love it. All right. So let’s round this episode up with a tip. From my side, the tip is very simple. We just recorded an episode earlier. So if you go back probably just a few episodes, you’ll get the episode where we talk about video and the importance of video and humanizing your brand and your company and your product through video. So I would say that today, one big advantage is that you can now use video really easily and cheaply to create customer testimonials, customer case studies, where you don’t just write about what your customer is telling, or take a quote of what your customer is saying about you and your service and your product, but you have them say it themselves. So prospects can watch your customers, connect on a human level with your customers. Hearing them, listening to them, seeing them speak about your product and service. And yes, you can send a crew and do a case study of like, doing a whole day of recording video in their office and interview them there, but you can also use cheaper tools like Skype or Zoom to do a video call or have them just record on an iPhone, a little 10 second, “Hey. We use , we use this tool, that tool, the other. Here’s why love it. Here’s why the team is excited about it.” Even, do a selfie where you see the team is waving and everybody is saying yeah, they’re using your product. You can do something really powerful utilizing video, so that would be my big tip. Try to use video for your testimonials and case studies, because it’s going to be so much more impactful in order to market it and convince new prospects to purchase.   [0:12:02] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I love that. So my tip would just be like, talk to customers. They’ll tell you exactly why they love your product. And when you get to some goal, as them if they’ll give you a testimonial around that quote. Or if you have quotes or people saying nice things in customer support or sales, just email them back and say, “May I use this as a quote as a testimonial? And would you be willing to do a bigger case study?” But what’s not happening in most companies is that, those great moments, those great quotes, that great language from your customer is not getting translated into something that you can use for your market.   [0:12:36] Steli Efti: Boom. That’s it. That’s it from us for this episode. Talk to your customers, create consistent customer testimonials, use video. Make that content great and you’ll see a huge difference in terms of conversions you’re able to accomplish with your prospects out there. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you soon.   [0:12:56] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:12:56] The post 305: How to Create Customer Testimonials That Sell appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about user testing. They lay out the steps for how to do user testing for your product, your startup and your market.   The purpose of user testing is to collect data to show ease of use, user satisfaction and highlight any issues on your interface. With the results of these tests you can optimize your interface to  deliver an exceptional experience to your audience. It is difficult to predict the success of your designs if you don’t test them. If your product can help people achieve their goals easily then you will find yourself on the road to success. They will interact with it and share it with others. Testing is not just an important step in the creation process, it is an imperative one. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn about user testing and why it is a required step in your creation process. They also share how to get started with user testing and offer you support to get you started. As well as Steli and Hiten’s gold nuggets for how to use user testing to get a head start over your competitors. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:50 Introducing User Testing. 01:46 Services you can use for user testing. 02:18 How to get a free full guide on user testing. 02:48 How to use user testing on your competitors. 04:25  Learn about the setup process. 05:28 What are the weaknesses of user testing?. 06:01 Top reasons to do user testing. 07:22 Launching vs Testing. 08:00 How to get a headstart. 10:20 Make a commitment to your success. 3 Key Points: Within an hour we had videos with people spending 6-10 minutes telling us about their experience. The barrier to people doing user testing is that they don’t want to spend the time. These are people getting paid to tell you where you suck, it’s like having a trainer.   [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, based on Steli’s request-   [0:00:08] Steli Efti: Yes.   [0:00:08] Hiten Shah: What are we going to talk about Steli?   [0:00:10] Steli Efti: We are going to talk to the master of user testing. You know? Recent black belt, if I’m correctly informed, in use testing on how the fuck to do user testing for your startup your product and your market. So Hiten, I know that there was a time where you probably didn’t do a lot of user testing, like actually paying strangers, or taking strangers, putting them in front of your product, having them click around and try to use the product, and then express their opinions, their confusions, and their experience so you have more data on what works and what doesn’t work with your product. There was a time you probably didn’t do much of that. Recently, you have done a shit ton of that. Like, you’ve done a tremendous amount of user testing. So, I just wanna tap into that black level mastery of yours, and take some of those golden nuggets that you’ve acquired in terms of your learnings, share it with everybody that’s listening to us.   [0:01:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Absolutely. I could write a lot on this, and I already have. I could say a lot on this, but what I really believe is that there’s basic building blocks to everything, no matter how complicated or daunting it seems at first. Through practice, you find those basic building blocks, and then it’s just on and you build from there. So basically, with user testing, we use usertesting.com all the time. It is the tool to use. We also use UsabilityHub.com for certain types of user tests. So there’s these two tools. Everyone asks me what the fuck do I use to do user testing if I’m gonna do it. I also get a lot of people who ask me, “I can’t do this myself. Can someone else do this for me?” Here’s the deal. I don’t know anyone that can do this for you, unfortunately. I have written up instructions that are shared on my email list that I haven’t written into a guide or blog post yet, but if you email me at Hiten H-I-T-E-N at producthabits.com, make sure you sign up for the email list first, but I will … If you’re already on it, great. I will send you those emails personally if you’re really into this after you hear what I have to say about it. Okay, I had to get that out of the way, Steli, ’cause the amount of emails I get about this is pretty high, especially when we were doing these. So we user tested a bunch of sites Duolingo, Mixmax, and Grammarly, to understand onboarding. Onboarding, meaning that process people use to sign up for a product. We user tested those three products because we thought they had fantastic onboarding, and we learned a ton about them. We did this about late last year, or actually, early this year. I don’t remember anymore. I think it was late last year. We learned a ton about user testing. In the beginning, I thought it was for experts. I have people at my company, different companies actually, that do user testing all the time; but that’s part of their kinda holistic job, and they do a bunch of other stuff. And so, I really wanna learn it myself because I realize that it’s actually easier than I thought. The key to user testing is whether it’s your own website, prototypes before you actually build them, but you’ve already designed them, or someone else’s website or app or mobile app or whatever. You can user test it. I’ll give an example. The other day, a company launched in my space, one of the spaces I work on in terms of product and one of my businesses. Within 10 minutes of knowing they launched, I had a user test running on their home page, because that’s all they had. It was like some early access page they launched.   [0:03:52] Steli Efti: Nice.   [0:03:53] Hiten Shah: It was like really thorough. What I wanted to know was, how is their message resonating with people? Period. Does it make sense? Is it clear? They had a bunch of messages different than ours, or our proposed messaging in the future. We’ve done a lot of user testing on this business already, and we wanted to learn that. So literally, I set the test up in 10 minutes, while my team and I were actually just looking at that competitor just for fun. It was later in the evening, and we realized that they had something new. Within an hour, we had videos with people spending six to 10 minutes talking about that home page to us, and telling us everything that confuses them, what they understand about it and what they don’t. The amount of information we got in just that one user test with five people looking at it, is probably more information than they have about their home page. You know how I know that? We learned a lot of things that they’re doing wrong just by that user test. For me, it’s like this come to Jesus, so to speak, moment, once I realized that this is a tool in my tool belt that’s really powerful for many different things. Now here’s the weakness, I just said that there’s five videos that are six to 10 minutes long. Holy crap. I have to watch them. I don’t just have to watch them, I have to watch them and transcribe them, and then I have to … Literally, I would watch them, I would transcribe them, then I’d analyze them. It takes time. You can pile these up and do it. It’s easy to set up the test actually, but the harder part and why I believe people don’t do it, is the amount of time it takes to analyze these results. You know, you can outsource it or you can try to and all that. But at the end of the day, I believe the barrier to people doing it is the fact that they don’t wanna spend the time. Think about it. If a competitor launches something, don’t you wanna know what’s up?   [0:05:50] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:05:51] Hiten Shah: Don’t you wanna know what people think about it? Isn’t that important to you? Especially if it’s a core feature that you’re building, or it’s a direct competitor? So, that’s one aspect. I’m not saying that’s the only reason you do user testing. Another reason you do user testing is if you are building something, and you don’t know what you’re building. Like, you don’t know. You’re just building something and you design it, how do you know that it’s the right thing? How do you know what’s wrong with it? Most people would be like, “Oh, yeah. I just build it, and then launch it, and then a bunch of people use it, and then I got find out.” I think that’s backwards. I’ll be crass a little bit. I think it’s ass backwards, because if you go all the way to building it and wasting all the engineering and design resources and time to go implement it, and then it’s not right, wouldn’t you wanna know that earlier if you could? So what user testing does is lets you put things in front of people and really figure out, and this is the key, what’s screwed up about it? What’s not working? What’s confusing? So the way I think of user testing is to understand where this experience, this home page, this design, this onboarding experience, this app, is failing people, where people get confused, where they understand what’s going on. Those insights are pure gold. I could iterate a whole product in probably a month, however expansive as you want, with just a designer and user testing, and nail it, and I still haven’t launched anything. Some people would be like, “Wait. Aren’t you supposed to launch fast?” Yeah. I’ve been launching it every freaking day to find people who could see it and tell me what’s crappy about it. Yes, I’ve been launching it. For sure. And then, I have months of learning that I got in a month, just because I didn’t waste time having to build it. I didn’t waste time. I focused on figuring out what’s the problem. ‘Cause here’s the thing, when you’re designing something or developing something, you don’t always know where the problems are until you launch it. Even then, when you launch it, you don’t get to ask the same type of questions to people. These are people getting paid to tell you where you suck. It’s like a trainer. I look at these user testers like training me to figure out where I need to double down and spend more effort, ’cause I missed the mark. This experience sucks, or this home page copy sucks. You keep iterating it without having to do it in public. You keep iterating it without having to launch something and waste all those precious resources on things that are not working. There’s my long rant on user testing. What else you got?   [0:08:23] Steli Efti: I fucking love it. All right. So let me ask you one question, Hiten. If you had to guess, how many of these user test videos in total, I want the total number, have you watched in the past three to six months?   [0:08:40] Hiten Shah: Damn. Probably easily a few hundred. Easily a few hundred.   [0:08:51] Steli Efti: Easily a few hundred, huh?   [0:08:52] Hiten Shah: Easily. Like, easily. We do a divide and conquer them sometimes, and like split them up and do half and half or three to two or whatever, but yeah, easily a few hundred.   [0:09:02] Steli Efti: All right. So listen, even if we … To simplify this, let’s say it’s 300, right? Let’s say you’ve watched 300 user testing videos in the past three to six months. For those who are listening to use, that’s the reason why Hiten stays ahead of the fucking curve. When you’re like, “Huh. I wonder why is Hiten so knowledgeable?” It’s because, even after decades of being an entrepreneur and hundreds of products launched and all the success he had, he puts in the fucking work. He puts in the fucking work. Right? Let me translate that to you. Your competitors are not … I would bet money that there’s a 900% chance that your direct competitor hasn’t watched a single user testing video in the last three to six months. Right?   [0:09:48] Hiten Shah: Easy. Easy to say that.   [0:09:49] Steli Efti: Easy.   [0:09:49] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:09:49] Steli Efti: Easy to say that, right? You know, people know we don’t make these types of generalizations often. It depends is one of our favorite things to say. But this is easily true. So here’s the challenge for everybody out there. You don’t have to be Hiten Shah to outrun your competitor. Right? Because most of us are in the pleasant position to not have to compete with Hiten directly in our lives. So all you have to do in the next two weeks is to commit to watching … What do we want to say, Hiten? What’s an easy number that’s still meaningful? Next two weeks, how many user test videos should somebody put in commission, and then watch?   [0:10:28] Hiten Shah: You know what? Just run one user test.   [0:10:29] Steli Efti: One user.   [0:10:30] Hiten Shah: Just do me a favor. Watch five videos, and do it on your home page or your competitor’s. Literally, just ask people to explore the home page and for each section, explain it in their own words, and then ask them what’s confusing about this home page, and ask them if there’s anything missing on it. Those are like three or four questions. You go to usertesting.com, sign up, and just try it out. That’s it. Just a home page. You know, like a nice, little, long home page, or even a short one. Whatever. Make sure you run a five second test as the first sort of task. That’s it. It’s pretty simple. Do that, ’cause that’ll be more than what 99% of people are doing each week.   [0:11:10] Steli Efti: If you do that, if you’re one of the people that take action and do this, send us an email, steli@close.io, gmail.com. Tell us you’ve done the testing, tell us what you’ve learned, tell us what you’ve accomplished. I will personally, and Hiten, you’re welcome to join in or not, but I’m happy to fund the next two or three user tests you make as a little price to pay.   [0:11:37] Hiten Shah: Sure.   [0:11:37] Steli Efti: Right? We’ll fund your next two user tests, and we will free consult you on the results. We’ll give you feedback on the results of what to do with it. How about that?   [0:11:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Why not?   [0:11:50] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it from us when it comes to user testing. Just do one, watch five videos in the next 14 days, and the chances of you gaining killer insights, and gaining an advantage towards everybody else who’s competing to serve that type of customer that you’re trying to serve, is gonna skyrocket. So let’s go and make something happen, and we’ll support you as much as we can. That’s it from us for this episode.   [0:12:16] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:12:16] The post 304: How to Do User Testing for Your Product appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to use video to market your company and acquire customers. They break down how to do it, to get the best results and share examples and success stories to help you decide if this could add to the success of your startup. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd these days, but when using video marketing as a tool, a startup can not only stand out from the crowd, but also compete with much larger organisations. Video is an important medium to use despite the size of your business. A key tool in the progression towards increased visibility and reach. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn how to incorporate video marketing into your overall marketing strategy. As well as Steli and Hiten’s top tips for getting started, optimising your results and examples of how you can overcome some of the challenges that might present themselves as you get started. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:44 Introduction to Video Marketing. 01:31 The psychology of Video. 02:17 How to create impactful videos. 03:10 Where can you post videos aside from YouTube. 04:07 One tip for what you can do right now. 04:22 Pitfalls to avoid. 05:36 The most powerful video advantage. 09:30  An easy solution to get started. 10:25  How to integrate your products with video. 12:20 Steli and Hiten’s hacks to great video. 3 Key Points: The most impactful video is when you see someones face and they are talking to you. The biggest thing to make you look good is great lighting. When you have recorded your video ask yourself if you would watch it. [0:00:00] Steli: Hey, everybody. This is Steli.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah on today on the Startup Chat. What are we going to talk about, Steli? I think it might be one of your favorite topics.   [0:00:09] Steli: It’s one of my favorite topics. We’re going to talk about video and how to use video to market your company and to acquire customers. Using video in your content and in the way that you’re trying to market and sell your product today. First of all, let’s just say it, it sounds so cliché, but I actually believe this in this case, video is a fucking huge deal today when it comes to marketing and sales. It’s always been big, but it’s getting bigger and bigger. There’s some unique things that make video really powerful and we’re not going to waste any time talking about big trends and covering some of the super basic stuff, I want to get into the nitty gritty of if you have a startup today, and you want to use video, how do you do that? What are some good examples? How to utilize that? How do you overcome some of the challenges that people have with video. Maybe what we’ll do is touch on some of the challenges. Why some startups are not using it or not using it enough and then shift to talk about ways to use video to really crush it.   [0:01:10] Hiten: Awesome. One thing I want to say about video is that it really hits on literally, for all of us humans, the first thing that we saw when we were born, which is someone else’s face.   [0:01:28] Steli: Ooh.   [0:01:28] Hiten: Someone is looking at you when you are born. It’s your … It’s the doctor, the nurse, whoever helped you come out of the womb. And then right away, as soon as possible, your father, your mother, whomever, right? You see faces all your life. Video … Again, we can talk about trends, we’re not going to talk about trends. Lets just talk about humans. Video is such a human to human thing. I want to be specific and say the kind of video that’s most impactful is when you see someones face and they’re talking to you.   [0:02:04] Steli: Yes.   [0:02:04] Hiten: So to you, not at you, which is a nuance we can get into. But to you, as if you are in the room with them and they are speaking to you personally. This is one of the ways that I think about it … If you’re doing video, put your face on it as much as you can. This is why selfies are such a big deal when it comes to photo. This is why there is video everywhere around us now. This is why, on Instagram Stories, we’re not going to talk about Snapchat, but on Instagram Stories there’s video and a majority of the video in their Stories product is faces, people speaking, talking as if you are there in front if them and they are in front of you and they are talking to you personally. I can not stress how important that is. To the point where my co-founder Neil … One of my co-founders, Neil, he has his face on Facebook everywhere. It is on so many different videos, all about marketing. They’re quick videos, and literally, it’s his face. He’s just speaking at you about marketing and telling you what’s up. He is arguable, probably not arguably, the most recognizable face in marketing because he got on video, he put his face everywhere. Even before he got on video, his face was all over his blogs. In fact, we learned that putting his face on the blogs was a good thing. They really associated with him and his brand, now that it’s a brand, Neil Patel. The videos have been helping a lot. He’s one to not do something repeatedly, unless it’s working for him. So, I can’t stress the importance of faces in video and I have one example. Which is my co-founder, Neil, and the fact that his face is everywhere and on video and he’s giving you tips and my big idea for anybody here … That’s not that big of an idea is just start telling people … Speaking to them, not at them, about whatever problem you’re trying to solve and how you can help them and put it on video. The pitfall I see most people do is they try to make a high production value and all kinds of stuff, but even if you just use your camera and you start. Put it on YouTube. Share it with a bunch of people. You’ll start getting feedback. Things like that. You’ll start understanding whether it’s working or not. People think of it as this whole high production thing when really, it’s about the content. It’s about seeing your face. Just having the proper lighting and that’s it.   [0:04:27] Steli: That is it. Yeah. I want to highlight the human to human thing because for a minute, there was a big trend going on in the web with these explainer videos, the animated videos that explains what your service or product does, right?   [0:04:40] Hiten: Yeah.   [0:04:41] Steli: That was really cool, when the first few companies did that and really novel. People were like, “Wow. This is such a cool concept. I can’t believe nobody thought about that.” Then there was a million companies selling explainer videos to you, so explainer videos exploded. I think that very quickly got a little saturated. Today, I think some of the best brands I know. They don’t use animated explainer videos anymore. I was never that hot on it. Not to hate on it. But the … When we talk about video, we’re talking about streaming or recording you or people in your company talking with your customers or potential customers, the market. The humanizing part of it is such a powerful proposition. You’re making yourself stand out because you put actual humans in contact with your customers. You put a face on the brand that you’re trying to build. So, people can make a connection with that. It’s much harder to fake shit with video, than it is with other channels. I’ll give you an example. I could … a company could easily say, “We want to start a blog. Nobody here likes to write. We don’t have any unique ideas. We don’t know anything of note to say or any stories that we want to share, but let’s do this. Let’s start a blog anyways. Lets just hire some freelance writers. Tell them: here’s the five topics we want you to write.” These freelance writers will do a bunch of Google searches and write some very generic stuff about this and we’ll publish it on our blog. Voila. We have a thing that’s called a blog and there’s blog posts on there. It’s very hard for somebody who just visited our site to know who wrote this. If this is ghostwritten or not. You can have ghostwriters. Lots of CEO’s and founders have ghostwriters that write the articles for them.   [0:06:29] Hiten: Yup.   [0:06:31] Steli: It’s hard to tell who stands behind all this writing. It’s easy to fake. It’s very, very hard to fake anything in a video. Blog posts, I can write, “We’re very excited about this announcement.” You don’t know how excited I really am. In a video, you can watch me say, “I’m so excited.” And you can call bullshit in a second. You can just watch me and go, “Don’t buy it. Bullshit. Don’t believe it.” We actually just had this discussion internally. A very big company, not big company, but very prominent startup just launched up a very big feature and they made a video about it. It was shared in our company chat. Instantly, a bunch of people in our company said, “Well, I just watched 10 seconds and I could tell this founder is insincere.” Or, “I didn’t like the energy of the founder.” It’s hard to fake that, right? It’s hard to outsource. You can’t just say, “Hey, freelancer, create a video and say you’re the founder of this company announcing a new feature.” That’s hard to do. You can not fake sincerity. You can’t fake charisma. You can’t fake enthusiasm. You are … Video is going to share a raw light on the humanity that represents your company. That can be … That’s hard to fake. I would say that is the biggest advantage of video, because if you are authentic in your company, if you have real stories to tell, real enthusiasm, then you’re going to stand out from the competition. Your competitors are not going to be able to quickly copy whatever video you created to “compete” with you. Were, it might be very easy for them to compete with some large article that you have that ranks highly in Google. They could just say, “Lets copy this and make it even better.” And outsource that work. But if you have a really powerful video, where you share a tactic or a strategy or you announce something in a very charismatic way or a powerful, intimate human way, it’s going to be much harder for your competitor to say, “Lets just create a better video.” I think the challenge of faking it in video is its biggest advantage. It’s one of the most powerful things, competitively, of video, if you truly embrace it and make it your own.   [0:08:39] Hiten: I couldn’t agree more. Even the voice, even a voice can … You can detect so much in a voice, whether it’s genuine or not. Authentic. If someone is super excited or not. Even though I ranted on faces, voice and video are such a big deal too. You talking through your inner face, even if your face isn’t there, is such a powerful thing. I do want to give a quick shout out on this, because I’m sure people are wondering, “Okay, great. You’re saying it’s easy. You’re saying I should do it.” If you are struggling with figuring this out, go download Loom. It’s at, I think, useloom.com, and it’s a browser extension and they invented this concept of quick video. Where you can record a video really quickly and then use it for many different purposes. So, today, I would say, you have no excuse. The coolest thing about Loom is you get your face in the corner and you can show your screen. It’s a really powerful way to record things when it come to like … You want to demonstrate what’s going on with your product and put it on your website and embed it in and let people see it. It’s used for customer support as well as you can use it on a homepage and things like that. You can use it in your marketing. I would highly recommend just finding a simple way, and Loom is one of the simplest ways to do that. In addition to that, I think it’s super powerful today, partly because what I’m noticing, and this is just a data point really quickly, is that when I go show people a home page, or user test a homepage, or do research a home page, people aren’t usually wanting to see an anime. They want to see the screenshots and then move around. Usually that’s video. Imagine that video plus voice. People really want to see that. They want to basically see what this product is going to do for them before they sign up for it. I would say that that’s always been the case, but the sentiment I’m hearing these days, is if they like the copy, that’s great. But they really want to see what it can do for them and how it works, right on a home page, before they sign up for something.   [0:10:47] Steli: Beautiful. Alright, so I’m going to give one more shout out and then I’m going to give a tip and you can close the show with your tip for this episode today.   [0:10:54] Hiten: Great.   [0:10:55] Steli: One more shout out to our friends at firstcut.io. These guys … Hiten gave you a powerful tool if you want to do quick video in a really, really beautiful way. You see the screen. You can show people how to use the product. You’re nice … They see your face as well and you as well, in the corner. If you want to do something more high level production, either doing customer testimonials or any kind of other thing that’s higher quality of production, without having to buy cameras and hire sound equipment guys full-time and all that stuff. You go to firstcut.io, it’s a startup from a friend of ours. They actually recorded us with a bunch of episodes online and on YouTube where we did a live, the Startup Chat video recording that firstcut did. Theses guys are basically trying to democratize high quality video production. They will bring the videographer and the audio guys and all of that for a fraction of the cost. And take all of that pain away from your hands. Big shout out to our friends at fistcut.io. With that being said, let me give you a simple tip when it comes to video. I recorded myself … I don’t know … getting close to 1,000 videos on our YouTube channel. Right? So, we’ve recorded a shit ton of video. Probably out of those 900 and something, probably 700, 800 are just me talking. My face speaking to you for like 10 minutes, telling you some strategy or story. I get emails every week asking me, “Steli, can you tell me your video/audio setup? The quality seems so amazing.” My video/audio setup is so fucking basic. It’s a Logitech webcam. It’s the Logitech HD 1080p. It was like a $200 webcam. It’s an expensive webcam, but it cheap and small. I can take it anywhere with me. And it’s just, fucking, my Apple laptop. The biggest thing in video, to make you look good, when you don’t want to have to do with high production costs, is good lighting. My simple hack, when it comes to good lighting is to find a setup where you are in front of a big window. So you have lots of natural light hitting your face. You put the laptop up and you record it there. People will be amazed by the quality of your video. If you have somewhat of a good webcam … Your Apple headphones are good enough in terms of audio, and then you were in front of a big window, with lots of light, you’re going to look great. People are going to be impressed by your video quality, although you spent zero amount of money and time, really setting something complicated up. There’s my secret of how I do videos today.   [0:13:46] Hiten: I’m going to double down on that one and say, “Don’t be stupid.” Record 10 seconds of the video and see if you like it. Not what you’re saying or anything, focus on does it look good. Do I look good in this video. What I mean is, would I watch myself? I know it sucks to watch yourself, but would you watch yourself? Is the lighting right? Keep adjusting until you get it right. It’s not that hard. I think Steli’s tip is killer. Make sure your face is getting light. That’s the whole key to lighting. That’s it. The sun is some of the best light. Find a window. Sit down. Make sure the sun’s shining on you. Record for three to five, 10 seconds, and play it back. See if it looks good. If it looks good, keep going. If it doesn’t look good, try again.   [0:14:33] Steli: Boom. That’s it from us. Video, it’s huge, people. Use it. Alright.   [0:14:37] Hiten: Your face is bigger. See ya.   [0:14:40] Steli: See ya. [0:14:41] The post 303: Using Video in Marketing Today appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about start up to start up business sales and explore how to market to startups. They also discuss the viability of if it can be a long term and sustainable strategy. A startup is a fast paced business that develops its business model around innovative services or products. They are modern, public, online and often uniquely approachable. This low resistance and interactive approach makes the startup to startup sales strategy one that can be challenging but also very beneficial. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn about the good and the bad of startup to startup sales. Steli and Hiten’s share their top tips for how to get started and identify new opportunities with startups, for your business. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:34 Startup to startup evolution. 01:03 The common step in the startup sales strategy. 02:48 Using funding to fund other startups. 03:26 Key factors to account for. 05:46 The startup to startup sales trend. 06:35 The benefits of selling to startups. 08:33 The positives of startup to startup sales. 09:11  How to reach out to the founder of a startup. 10:15  The negatives of startup to startup sales. 12:40  Things to be aware of in startup to startup sales. 3 Key Points: Go after the right customer from the beginning. You should be emailing other startups to use your startup. It is much easier to market to startups, as startups are very public also they are using all of the new tools. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this Hiten Shah, and today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about something that Steli and I have seen evolve, whether we are conscious to that evolution or not. And the idea is when startups are your customers. This is the idea of there’s B to B, business to business, there’s B to C, business to consumer, and then there’s … There’s other ones two, but the one we want to talk about is this new concept. I think Steli, you might have just invented it, like literally 30 seconds ago.   [0:00:33] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:00:33] Hiten Shah: Which is startup to startup. And what we mean by that is when you’re a startup and your primary customer is another startup. Right?   [0:00:43] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. Which is very often the case, right? I mean I would say if we look at startups that try to sell to other businesses, independently if those other businesses, eventually if the aspiration is to sell to a large enterprise or small local businesses, often times the first type of business that a startup will try to go and pitch and acquire as a customer, are other startups. I think we should talk a little bit about that in terms of the evolution of it, but also how do you sell and how do you market to startups? What’s good, bad, what’s working, what’s not working? But also I’m a little curious to touch on the idea of, is that just a stop gap solution, is that just like a first step, similar to saying you’re going to raise a family and friends round? But if you really want to build a big business, eventually you’re going to have to go to venture capitalists to raise money. You won’t be able to raise $100 million from friends and family, at least not most people. Is selling to other startups, doing startup to startup sales, is that just something to get things started and not really a sustainable strategy long-term? I’m curious to explore that idea as well, but let’s start with the question of, was that always the case? Were startups always tending to go and try to get their first kind of customers being other startups, or is this something that just happened recently over the last 10 or 5 years, or so? What’s your observation of that?   [0:02:20] Hiten Shah: There’s more startups than ever. Historically, I think a lot of people would poo-poo the idea of making a successful business based on you being a startup and selling to other startups. A lot of people have said historically that because there’s so much funding going into startups, that some markets are fake. Because if a startup is your sort of customer-set, and its other startups, they’re getting funding. They’re using that funding to pay you. You might have some funding too, right? So there’s this cycle of like, well when the funding dries up in a category, do all your customers go away, or do you have high turn? Also, startups don’t … There’s all kinds of stats about this, but not all startups succeed. So then you have a customer for maybe a few years, but then they’re gone because they failed at what they were trying to do. I think there’s these factors that you have to account for. So startups and small/medium businesses have a lot of parallels when it comes to how does that translate into your business metrics. And what I mean by that is, startups will have a higher turn rate. Startups will have a lower price point that they’re willing to pay. There are these core factors that you should keep in mind. Startups, because they have a high turn rate, they pay less money. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means you need to know that. And I think historically, venture capitalists and other folks in business, knew that and would not focus on startups that funded other startups, unless those startups could get beyond just selling to startups. To me, startups and selling to them as a business, as a B to B business, isn’t a bad thing. It is something that you have to be really conscious of, whether those startups are going to be your long-term sort of customer, whether you’re just using them to start out so you can learn really fast, because startups tend to provide more feedback, they tend to be easier to onboard onto a product and things like that. Just as sort generic general terms, these things are true. And then you learn faster because of startups, about whether your product sucks or not. Then you could either shed the startups or move forward and keep them, and make sure that you’re able to support them as they grow, and then you start getting customers that are not just startups, as you move upmarket. If you have that strategy of going upmarket, startups can be a great start. But if you have a strategy where you think long-term or even medium-term, maybe even short-term, your customer isn’t a startup for whatever reason, then you should go after the right customer from the beginning. That would be the kind of way, that if someone was sitting in front of me and dealing with this, it’s kind of the way I’d describe it. And often times, people don’t think about that when they’re running these businesses. They don’t realize that startups have similar characteristics to SMBs, small medium businesses.   [0:05:14] Steli Efti: Yeah. So I love your perspective, and I couldn’t agree more. I think that back in the day when there were a lot less startups around, I think that selling to another startup was really seen as just a very, very, very short-term approach to getting started. But I think a few trends have happened. A, there’s more startups than ever before, and I don’t think that trend will end. I do think that if I had to place a bet over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, long-term trends, I do think that more and more companies will be startups or will mimic startup characteristics. I do think that today it’s much more viable, and it’s not just like the first two or three customers could be a startup but then you really have to go and find another business, you could actually get really millions in revenue, and the first few years grow to thousands of customers, and all you serve is other startups. I think that that’s one big thing that has changed, is that now I think it’s much more … Well it could be a mid or even a longer term approach, and that didn’t use to be the case. The other thing is I think that startups today, not all of them obviously, there’s a lot of them that fail, but some of them grow much faster to become legit or not legit, but at least really large scale businesses. 20-30 years ago, there were not many startups that would start and within 12 months be billion dollar businesses. That was just much more rare. You have these unique cases now, where if you get the right startup customer early on, and you’re able to grow with them, their growth could really be fuel to the fire to your growth. There’s companies out there like Twilio that became really massive businesses and IPO’d, probably to a large degree because they had customers like UBER and Airbnb that really exploded and became massives amount of revenue for them, and real fuel to scale. So you have that dynamic going on, that didn’t use to be around. The other thing is that I think even disconnected from that, is that startups … I do think that the future of small and medium sized businesses around the world, will mimic many characteristics that are unique to startups today. I mean, the Lean Startup is one of those things where even large corporations try to think and act and break things down more in smaller startup-like acting teams. So I think that’s definitely a long-term trend to be betting on that didn’t use to be that way, 10, 20, 30 years ago. I think that what I love what you said earlier, is that you need to just realize what are the characteristics of selling to other startups as a startup? What is the good, the bad and the ugly, and just being fully aware of all of it. You need economics and other things of that nature. Let’s maybe run through some of them, we can ping-pong, you go, I go, on things that you should know as a startup when you’re trying to acquire other startups as customers, that are important to know.   [0:08:19] Hiten Shah: Cool. Go, you first.   [0:08:20] Steli Efti: Well the first one is, on the positive side, it’s usually much easier for you to market to them and to reach them because startups are very public usually, there’s lot of places with accurate and up-to-date information on the startup’s URL, contact information, phone numbers. They are using social media, they’re using all the new tools. They are online, so it’s fairly easy to reach a startup and get in front of somebody that’s a decision-maker, than it might be even in another small or medium sized business, like a restaurant. It’s much harder for you to market and sell to a restaurant usually, then to another startup. So that’s a really big benefit, and a big reason why I think startups even go to sell to other startups in the first place.   [0:09:02] Hiten Shah: If you’re a startup, this is kind of like a tip, you should be emailing other startups to use your startup. Just email them and tell the founders. You can go founder to founder when you’re going startup to startup. That’s huge.   [0:09:16] Steli Efti: Yes, yes. I think that’s , a double click on the founder to founder thing. It’s such a powerful connection, when you as a founder reach out to another founder and you say, “Hey, I’ve built something, I think you’d like it. I want to have a founder to founder chat and get your honest feedback.” It’s very hard for most founders to reject that. It’s also very hard for many founders to lie to you, or not be honest to you, because they received help from other founders in the early days so they want to pay it forward, and that’s a really powerful connection that you can utilize that many other small and medium sized business people can’t as easily utilize. So the founder to founder aspect is huge.   [0:09:53] Hiten Shah: Speaking of which, I have something I’m about to text you that I want your feedback on.   [0:09:57] Steli Efti: all right. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. There you go. Okay, so next tip or next aspect that people have to think of, on the negative side from my side, you mentioned this. I do think that when you sell to other startups, they might have less budget, they might be much more cashflow constrained, so they might be very open to paying you on a month-to-month basis, but not open at all to upfront pay you for a whole year. But that’s not the only thing, the other thing that you need to realize is that when you sell to startups, you are selling to a fast changing organization, to a fast changing business. When they describe to you what their needs are, when they describe to you what they want from your product, all these needs might instantly change in a very short period of time. So it’s much harder for you to serve them, it is much harder to have like a constant that you’re working against. Because you acquired this customer because they told you they had a specific need, you built this feature to service that need, and then they don’t need that anymore because now they are a totally different type of business, or they have a totally different type of need. You need to be aware that the environment, the needs of that type of a customer is going to change so erratically. It’s going to be really hard to service them, or you’re going to have to be very disciplined and not zigzagging based on purely what they’re telling you today that they want.   [0:11:17] Hiten Shah: Yep. I think that that’s super critical. Another tip I’ll give on this sort of startup to startup idea, is that you want to be conscious of the dynamics of a startup versus the dynamics of a larger organization, and not get confused. You might start seeing that adoption is really quick at a startup, like people in the startup use your product really fast, from person to person. That is probably not going to repeat inside of larger organizations. So don’t expect a startup to behave the same as companies that you sell to, or might want to sell to later upmarket. And even the excitement level and objections and things like that, can be much different. For example, larger companies tend to have more security-oriented and compliance-oriented concerns compared to a startup. A startup will likely just use your product and ignore a lot of those things, because they’re just trying to move fast, and they don’t have IT, so to speak, involved in anything. So I’ve seen founders get confused about, “Oh, now I’m going to larger companies. Crap, I have all these issues that I didn’t have with startups, and I thought it wouldn’t be like that.”   [0:12:29] Steli Efti: Yeah, all right. So let’s round this up with one more tip from me and one more tip from you when it comes to startup to startup sales, or acquiring customers that are startups. I think that one big tip that I’ll give is that, and this is kind of bank rolling on something you said very early in the episode, is that you need to figure out a way, a very cost effective way to acquire these startups. You usually, if your customers are startups, you should have a really good portion of your funnel be self-serve. Because no matter how great your business is, no matter how great everything is you do, startups will churn at a higher rate than large organizations typically, because startups are going to pivot really hard and become a totally different business, or fail at a much higher rate than other small businesses, or other types of businesses and organizations on this planet. So you’re selling to a customer that might have just a shorter life cycle in general, so you need to account for that shorter life cycle in having fast acquisition models and cheaper acquisition models so you can acquire customers profitably. The customer lifetime value if you have more startup, needs to be profitable. You can’t accord to be giving in-person demos over six to nine months to acquire a startup. Usually that’s not going to really work well, because they’re not going to stick around long enough in the average case, to repay that investment and give you a profit on top of it.   [0:13:55] Hiten Shah: Yeah, so my tip would be there’s easy ways to reach startups compared to most markets, where you can do it with local meet ups. Your local meet ups tend to have a lot of startup people coming when it’s about startup oriented stuff, as well accelerators, incubators, and labs, and things like that. And there’s one in every city these days. There’s always a way to reach startups, often times much faster, even if it’s in person.   [0:14:19] Steli Efti: I love it. I think that’s it from us. I’m looking at the little thingy that you sent me to get feedback on.   [0:14:28] Hiten Shah: Uh-huh.   [0:14:29] Steli Efti: And one beautiful thing of it is that without reading a single word of a description, just zooming a little bit into a screenshot on my phone and looking at the naming of it, I instantly was like, “All right, I get it. I have to use this,” and I’m going to give you feedback very soon. But I like instantly got the value proposition, which I love.   [0:14:51] Hiten Shah: Thank you for that first early feedback. I look forward to more.   [0:14:55] Steli Efti: There you go, founder to founder feedback right here, right now. All right, that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you guys very soon. [0:15:02] The post 302: How to Sell to Startups? (Startup To Startup Sales) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to hire interns and the things to consider before you do. They share their advice on the mindset involved in working with interns and how to hire the right people so that they benefit your startup. An internship is a professional development training opportunity, where interns gain experience and exposure to their chosen industry. Because interns tend not to have industry experience, you can offer them a placement within your company for an extremely inexpensive cost. But interns are not just low cost help, your internship should provide structured training and development with defined goals and measurable outcomes. This should be a mutually beneficial agreement for employers, and interns. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn about the benefits of internships for the intern and the employer. As well as hearing about Steli and Hiten’s personal experiences where they talk about the benefits and pitfalls of working with interns. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:47 The secret to the success of The Startup Chat. 02:20 The new format for The Startup Chat. 03:48 Manage the expectations of your intern before hiring them. 05:06 The wrong way to think about interns. 05:12 The right way is to focus on building a relationship. 05:45 Focusing on two way value creation. 07:20 The mistakes startups make when hiring interns. 08:12 The mindset when hiring an intern.   09:07 Considering the benefits on offer. 10:28 The ‘Right’ intern mindset. 3 Key Points: Think about the intern and what they are going to get and start there Don’t lower your standards when it comes to hiring an intern You should only give someone an intern job if you would also hire them full time [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on the startup chat, we’re going to talk about how to hire interns.   [0:00:10] Steli Efti: And how to make that work for a startup particularly. How do you do that in the right way? Well, before I let you talk about this because I cut you off here. I love doing that once in a while.   [0:00:23] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. All good. Go for it. Yeah.   [0:00:25] Steli Efti: I wanted to actually give a shout out to and build a bit of behind the scenes for all our loyal startup chat listeners. Because we got an email recently in our inbox, Hiten and I got. We hear from you guys regularly. We love to hear from you. We love to get email from you. This founder basically just gave us some props. He was asking, he was saying, hey, eventually he wants to launch a podcast himself. He was asking us, “Hey. How the hell do you do it that you put so much knowledge with so little BS in 15 to 30 minute episodes? Are you recording a whole hour and you’re editing it down? Are you having a system with a Google doc with lots of questions with what you’re going to say and what Hiten’s going to say? Is this really well scripted, because I realize” … And this is his words, I don’t like to brag myself, but I’ll do it here. In Eric’s words, “The concise focus of your podcast is unmatched, and I’d love to one day be able to create something similar.” Thank you for the nice words. I posted a screen shot of his email, and I told people the secret to our success is very easy. All you have to do is have a combined 30 plus years of startup and entrepreneurial experience and a daily routine of creating content, videos, podcasts, writing copy, newsletters. And then it’s easy to do. Because in almost 300 episodes, we have never scripted a single thing, we have never really prepared for a single episode, and we’ve never edited a single second out of it. It’s all, one person throws out a topic, we hit record and we just go freestyle. The reason that I bring this up is that just recently Hiten had an even more brilliant idea, because we always try to change. And came up with the idea of saying hey, we’ve been doing these 20 ish minute episode. What if we just say fuck it and we try to do it in 10? What you might have noticed recently is that the episodes has gotten a lot shorter. We’re having fun with the shorter format. We want to hear from you if you like it, if you feel like we’re putting the same amount of value out that we’ve done the 20 minute episodes. It kind of feels like it to me, but I’d love to hear from you out there, but I wanted to share a little behind the scenes baseball. The secret sausage making of podcasting with all the listeners … Before we go back to the topic of internships and how to create internships for your startup and hire interns in a way that really benefits your startup.   [0:02:57] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to plan a lot and do a podcast. Yeah. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I like the way we do it. I think it’s a good question to ask, but I wouldn’t say it’s for everybody. A lot of people like to plan, and that’s their process with everything they do, so being off the cuff can be a little dramatic for them and they don’t want to answer questions and things like that. I think you and I just have a ton of practice around all this stuff, sharing information, writing content, giving people advice, answering people’s questions, and we probably just enjoy it. It’s sort of like answering each others questions in a way and going back and forth. Okay. Interns. The number one thing I would say about interns and hiring interns in a startup is that people forget about what’s in it for the intern. If you start that way and you really with your posting, I think it starts with the posting before you hire them. You tell them what they’re going to get and what they’re going to give up. I think it’s something really powerful. For example, I’ve been entertaining either an intern or just hiring someone relatively junior that really fits a certain criteria. I was talking to my business partner Maria about it. I was like, I just want to tell them at the top of this description, you probably don’t want this. You probably just don’t want this. The reason for that is the demands that her and I would put on somebody would be pretty hard from an intellectual thinking, processing, writing standpoint. When her and I combine, the amount of rigor we put on things, we’re looking for someone that can match that, so say you probably don’t want to do this. That’s what I mean by think about them. I’m not thinking about ourselves even though it might sound like that. I’m thinking about them. If someone’s not prepared to read that and still continue reading, then they really shouldn’t be doing this. When you think about interns you’re usually thinking about, how do I get cheap labor. How do I just get work done? It’s like no, that’s not it. You’re building a relationship, and you want to find people who want to learn from you and want to learn how to do it the way that you do things. You as in the company, you as in the manager, whatever it may be. You. That’s really the piece … If I were to give one tip, think about the intern and think about what they’re going to get and start there. What they’re going to get is why they’re signing up for you, not what they’re going to do for you.   [0:05:28] Steli Efti: I love it. All right. I’m going to flip this around a little bit. And I’m going to now-   [0:05:33] Hiten Shah: Bring it.   [0:05:34] Steli Efti: Now bring up the what should be in it for you. A few tips on my end. First of all, just even before we started recording the episode, I realized that some of my … I have a lot of very good friends today or that I have very strong relationships with that started as my interns. I have a pretty amazing track record when it comes to hiring interns. A lot of these people are founders and CEOs of their own companies today are good friends of mine, have become peers and friends. But they started five, seven, eight years ago as interns in some random startup that I was running back then. The number one thing that I’ll throw out there is don’t lower your standards when it comes to people when hiring an intern. Obviously, you have to lower your standard when it comes to experience. You can’t hire an intern and expect them to have 50 years of industry experience. That’s dumb. But you can absolutely have the same expectations when hiring an intern and you need to have the same expectations on them when it comes to them from a character perspective, from a cultural fit perspective, and from a intelligence and work ethic perspective. You should hire interns, but you should only give somebody an intern job if you would also hire them full time, if you can see yourself hiring them full time in a year or two. This is brilliant because you brought up the, hey, you probably don’t want to work here because we’re going to set incredibly high standards. Right? I think that too many times when I see companies, or startups especially, hire interns, they have much lower standards to those interns, and I think that’s a really terrible idea.   [0:07:19] Hiten Shah: I agree.   [0:07:20] Steli Efti: Right. They go, well, let’s just get cheap labor or they think, well, yeah this person’s not perfect but they could do just the basic dumb stuff we have to do like, I don’t know update our blog post or do some tweeting, some dumb stuff that’s not that important but that we don’t get around to, we don’t have the time. Let’s just hire an intern to do all the dumb things. Well, fuck no. There should be no dumb things done in a startup. You’re in the early days. Everything that everybody does should be super crucial and important. The dumb things should just not get done. When you hire an intern, it should be people that you think, this is somebody I could see become incredibly successful person. This is somebody I could see offering a job. This is somebody I like. This is somebody that is smart, that will challenge me. This is somebody I can give meaningful work to. It doesn’t have to be mission critical if they mess a little bit something up, the whole company is bankrupt, not that. You have to give them proper amount of responsibility and you can’t just overload them, give them the responsibility to run the entire company obviously, but you should think they could one day. You should trust in them and believe in them. You can’t make compromises on anybody in your company. It doesn’t matter who it is or what position they have. Too many times, startups they’ll accept an intern they would never accept as a full time member. They think, oh, this persons a little slow or sloppy or I don’t like their personality. I don’t think they’re a culture fit. But they’re like, well, but they don’t want a lot of money or in some cases they will work for free. That’s even worse, which may be my next tip and we can riff on that. I would not hire an intern that works for me for free. I would always pay. I want to pay everybody. I want to hire an intern if I can pay them. Obviously not market rate if they were 10 experience veteran, but I want to pay them money for their work. I don’t want to just get their work for free.   [0:09:24] Hiten Shah: I totally agree. I think paying them money is good or paying them in some other way. There’s a lot of other ways you can pay them as long as you have a deal. But paying them money is good because they should get paid something. I’ve seen a lot of scenarios where you don’t have to pay them money, but there’s something that they’re really looking for that’s more valuable to them than money, and they’re willing to do it because they want to. It should be more of a decision they make not necessarily you make. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more with you about … I think this thing that really struck out to me is when you say this should be someone you’re willing to hire full time. That’s really powerful, because then you will respect them in a different way. You will treat them with respect, and I think you will really focus on treating them as more of a team member. I think that’s super important. A lot of people just think of interns as cheap labor. Obviously you haven’t done that or you wouldn’t have found these folks that went on to build their own businesses. Right? I think the right intern is someone who wants to learn and is that hungry that you know that they’re capable or could be capable one day of doing what you just said, which is over time building their own businesses. That’s huge. I think it’s just so undervalued the way that most early stage companies think about interns.   [0:10:39] Steli Efti: The other thing is you should think about a relationship with an intern like a relationship with anybody else in your life and in your business, which in my mind is a 10, 20, 30 year timeline. Whenever we hire an intern, I’m thinking, is this somebody I want to have a relationship with for the rest of my life? You got to help them, they help me, we work together on projects. Is this somebody I want to spend time with and invest in, so the internship is the beginning of the relationship. Again, it’s not just some kind of a quick hookup. Well, this person is just going to do a lot of shitty work nobody wants to do and nobody enjoys and is meaningless, but we will feel like it’s accomplishing something because we’re getting this person for cheap or for free or whatever. No, you should think about this person as an investment in a long term relationship and then spending time helping them, train them. It’s not going to feel like a loss if they don’t turn out to become an instant employee or team member of your company because in two years, three years, four years maybe there’s going to be another opportunity to work together or to invest in a startup or become and advisor or whatever. Thinking really long term even with short term interns I think is the right framework to use. Again, too many times I think startups they think very short term with these people. That leads to meaningless relationships with ultimately are just a waste of time.   [0:12:02] Hiten Shah: I’d say more but we’ve said things that I haven’t read anywhere about interns. That’s what we like to do. Right?   [0:12:08] Steli Efti: That’s what we like to do.   [0:12:09] Hiten Shah: Tell people things they can’t hear anywhere else. Think about the interns as humans and you can go read in some blog posts about all the logistics of interns. But I think one of the biggest things is how to hire them and how to make sure that they’re supported, and I think we got there.   [0:12:24] Steli Efti: All right. Hire great interns and take it really seriously. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.   [0:12:31] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:12:31] The post 301: How to Hire Interns for Your Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about casually starting businesses and riding the wave of circumstance, when you are not emotionally invested in the idea. They highlight the difference, between having fun and enjoying your startup. Defining that a successful startup is focused on sustainability, focus and hard work. Running a startup is not easy, and a successful startup cannot be quickly achieved. So when investing your time into a new idea, you should be passionate about it and willing to commit to it fully. With full awareness of all of the effort, highs, lows and challenges that running a business brings. The difference between investing your time wisely and successfully running a startup often is about managing your startup psychology, from the beginning. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat, to look at how to avoid falling into the trap of starting something that is fun but doesn’t have your full commitment. As well as Steli and Hiten’s top tips for running a successful startup that you enjoy. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 What is the Start up Bus fallacy?. 04:57 Start up advice. 05:29 Why the idea of fun and Startup do not mix. 06:41 The good reasons to create a Startup.   07:42  An example of the seriousness of your decision to begin. 08:11 The false momentum. 10:53 The danger of casual commitment. 11:14 The definition of a casual commitment. 11:35  Tips for Startup mindset. 12:14  The benefits of the right mindset. 3 Key Points: If you want to be involved in a startup for fun; go to work at someone else’s start up, you will have more fun. It should be something that you enjoy, but that is not necessarily fun. To begin, should not be a casual or opportunistic proposition. [0:00:00] Steli: Hey, everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:03] Steli: And in today’s episode of the Sunup Chat, I want to talk about the “startup bus fallacy”.   [0:00:11] Hiten: We like talking about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:12] Steli: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life, and hopefully while we’re doing that, provide a lot of value to people.   [0:00:17] Hiten: The world’s best business podcast.   [0:00:20] Steli: Oh. Shit. Shit, we got it.   [0:00:22] Hiten: For people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:24] Steli: Done, yeah. We don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:27] Hiten: We want you to do your best.   [0:00:28] Steli: This is a term I just came up with just before we took with the call. We might rebrand this, but here’s what I mean and what I want to talk about with you today Hiten. So I’ve had a number of conversations recently, the past week or so, with friends of mine that have been founders of startups that started off as like fun little projects. Things they were not that passionate about, things that seem to be just fun. They were very non-committal in the early days, or they were interested about the project because of certain factors. But they knew when they started, they knew I’m just gonna do this for a little while, but this is not really what I want to do long term. And then “life happened”, that little thing became bigger, and there were investors involved and advisors and a team and commitments, and months passed by, and years passed by, and all of a sudden … They had some highs, they had some lows, and now it’s like, I don’t know, two years, three years, four years later, they’re struggling. They don’t really enjoy it that much, and thinking back, they never really wanted to do this thing, but because they’re now so invested in it, they … It’s a recurring theme that I hear from them, I’m just gonna help this get through this crisis, and then I’m gonna think about something else, or I’m just gonna wait and see what’s gonna happen now that we had this bridge financing or this crisis financing and see what happens. Or, I just want to see this so that hopefully we can get to an acquisition and then I can do something else. And it brought up this idea that how dangerous it is sometimes as an entrepreneur and as a startup founder to work on something, thinking you’re not gonna be that committed to it and you’re just having fun, and you’re just gonna try this out, and you can stop at any time. Because just like anything, once it builds momentum, once you’ve invested, and you feel invested in something, every single day becomes harder and harder to break up, and all of a sudden you’ve wasted potentially, four, five, six, seven years of your life. So I don’t know, I just wanted to talk about this idea of like being careful on choosing fun projects if you’re not really committed to them or figuring out ways exit strategies that are much better than having no exit strategy when you start working on something that you might not really want. And the reason why I called it the Startup Bus Fallacy is because there’s a prominent example. This has nothing to do with the people I talked with in the last week, but a very good friend of mine and somebody that had worked with clothes, had left clothes for many years, and I was trying to recruit him over a really long time to get him back, and then finally came back. He’s a prime example of this because he did a fun like Startup Bus experience where they go from, whatever, New York to Austin and then they present a little idea that a thrown together team on the bus came up with, kind of like a startup weekend but on a bus somewhere to an event. He was on a Startup Bus, and there was this cool little group, and they came up with this cool little idea, and they created all this traction, and it was so much fun, and they win the thing, it’s south by southwest, and they get accepted to tech stars, and all along it’s like, well, shit I didn’t want to do this. I’m having a really awesome job, but I’m gonna leave and do this startup thing, because tech sources are big opportunity. We’re getting all this press, and we might get investment, and I’m just gonna ride this and see what happens. I’m just gonna be opportunistic and have fun with it. And that little fun thing, I don’t really care that much about this idea, but I’m just gonna see what happens. That little thing turned into a three or four year project with many lows, many highs, but even more lows, and at the end it didn’t work out. And so hence why the Startup Bus Fallacy, or startup weekend fallacy … It’s like you’re just starting with this little thing and it gains a bit of momentum and you’re like ah, I’m just gonna see what happens. And all of a sudden, four or five years of your life are over, and you’re still working on something that you truly, you don’t really love, or you’re not that passionate about. So I just wanted to share this, see what your reaction is and see if we can go have some, I don’t know, practical advice to people on how to make sure they don’t fall into that trap of starting something that’s fun and has some natural momentum and end up working on something for way longer than they wanted and often times maybe also not that successfully.   [0:04:53] Hiten: Yeah, if you’re gonna do a startup for fun, then go work at someone else’s startup.   [0:05:02] Steli: Ooh.   [0:05:02] Hiten: You’re gonna have way more fun, and you’re gonna learn a lot more.   [0:05:08] Steli: This the … Let me pause you, because this is the quote of the day. If you want to have fun working at a startup, don’t start your own. Just go work for somebody else, and you’re gonna have way more fun with it. It’s so true, oh my God. This is so true.   [0:05:23] Hiten: I mean that’s just what it boils down to. So anybody that says fun and startup gives me pause in the first place especially if they’re saying oh I’m gonna start it and found it. I totally get Startup Bus. I totally love the idea that people can start companies within hours like that, or not companies, sorry. Create something within hours like that. But really the company is what matters. The business is what matters, and people who even just raise like a few hundred thousand dollars didn’t do Startup Bus, and are doing it for fun, they should just stop. I don’t want to say this is real life, because what is real life, but this is real. This is what you’re doing. If you’re doing it for fun, then there’s way better ways to have fun and make money. Seriously, like buy a club or do something. Don’t go do a business, don’t do a startup, don’t go to Startup Bus and come out with some idea and win and think that you’re having fun. And the thing is, I get the Startup Bus attitude. It started with fun, so now we’re gonna have fun. But no real business was built with fun. I’m sorry, I don’t care what stories people tell or anything like that. This shit ain’t fun. Right? It should be something that you enjoy, but that’s not necessarily fun. And I think you should enjoy the learning. You should enjoy this idea that you can create a business from nothing. All those things are super enjoyable. But if you’re having fun, you’re just gonna do this for fun, it’s probably not gonna end well. And eventually you’re not gonna have fun. And the ups and downs are not manageable if you’re doing it for fun. If you’re doing it because there’s nothing better for you to do, and you really want to do it, and you want to build a business, and you don’t really want to work for anyone else, and all those kinds of things, those are much better aligned reasons why you should be doing this. Not because you’re just having fun. A startup is not fuckin’ fun. Like it’s just not. It shouldn’t even be glorified. It shouldn’t even be something that most people think about doing. So if you want to have fun, go work for someone else.   [0:07:31] Steli: I love it, and as you said, this doesn’t mean that it can’t be fulfilling or enjoyable or exciting or exhilarating or so many great things. But just like you would probably take exception with somebody saying, well I’m just going to start a family to have some fun. I’m gonna have some children because I think it could be a lot of fun. I’m just in it for the fun of it. You’d be like, whoa, slow down, it comes with a lot of responsibility, and comes with a lot of challenge and sacrifice. It comes also with a lot of beautiful things. But it’s not like a fun thing. The fun aspect you nailed. So let’s put a check on that. There’s just one more aspect I want to touch before we wrap this episode up. Which is the, I don’t even know how to call this, the momentum aspect. Some people, they’ll start something, and there are examples of side projects that grow into really large businesses or things that people didn’t do because they thought necessarily they want to commit themselves to this project or this company or this ideal product of their life, but then the thing grew and had tremendous success. Larry Ellison from Oracle famously just wanted to make a little bit of side income without working too hard, and it turned into a massive business market. Zuckerberg did this in the beginning not to rule the world and all the inhabitants of the planet. It’s not that you can’t have a side project that turns into a real business or a fun hobby that turns into something bigger than you expected. That’s not the point. But sometimes, the worst cases that I’ve observed when it comes to this momentum trap of I worked on this, and because it has so much momentum, I’m just gonna keep riding the wave and see where it leads me. The examples that I have that haven’t worked out, that momentum was not customer momentum. That momentum was not virality user explosion and growth, that momentum was not wow, we stumbled over a product that’s really doing something and people respond really strongly to it. That momentum usually was funding momentum. Wow, we got offered … Somebody I knew worked on this project, I wanted to help, and he or she got a million dollar offer from some really great VC fund, were accepted into accelerator or raised a really great angel round and asked me to be a co=founder, and I thought, wow shit, there is all this money, all these investors. That investor momentum, press … The project seemed to have all these positive things associated with it that then made one person commit to becoming a co-founder of it, but that was the only reason. It was not that they were passionate about the project, not even necessarily that they wanted to work with this person, but with the team, saying this team is exceptional. I just want to do shit with those people. No, it was like shit, these people got a huge check offered to them, or just got accepted into this incredible incubator, and I want to experience that incubator, or I want to experience being part of a funded one million dollar startup. So I’m just gonna say yes and join them. It’s that … I don’t know if you call it bad momentum or whatever. It’s these kind of, for me, poor reasons to say, I don’t care that much about what they’re trying to do, but they have so much, whatever, things going on for them that I’m just going to join and commit casually to this. And as I said, this casual commitment, you blink twice, and four years of your life have passed by, and you’re still working on this thing.   [0:11:05] Hiten: I like what you said about how there shouldn’t be a casual commitment. Because even when you have a side hustle or a hobby, it’s not a casual commitment. It’s just not. A casual commitment is like let’s go watch a movie. Right? A casual commitment is let’s order pizza and just watch Netflix or whatever. Those are casual commitments in general. I think that’s probably a good way to put it, which is like you’re looking to avoid these casual commitments where starting a business and when you’re doing a startup. You want to make sure that essentially, you’re all in, even mentally, and you’re not thinking that this is just for fun. And so I think that’s the problem with using the word fun and startup or business as a founder. It’s like you should realize that you’re not doing this for fun. You’re doing this because you want to build a business. And again it’s not just Startup Bus or anything like that. It’s like even founders that the money comes easy just because they know people or they can get angel investment or whatever, or even they have a side project that starts working, and they’re like I’m just gonna keep doing it, but it’s gonna be fun. I don’t want anyone to be deceived when they get into this stuff. It’s not about fun. It’s about the enjoyment you get, the thrill you get out of building the business, heading towards a sustainable, profitable growing business. I think when you put fun into the equation, sometimes you forget that it’s not always fun.   [0:12:32] Steli: I love it. All right, with those last famous words, we’re gonna wrap this episode up. Yeah, have fun, go work at another person’s startup, be casually committed by picking up some really tasty slice of pizza, but when you start working at a startup as a … When you commit yourself as a co-founder or funding member of a company, take a moment to take this seriously and don’t just be opportunistic or casual about it, because it’s not a casual or opportunistic proposition. At least it shouldn’t be. All right, that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll be here very soon.   [0:13:10] Hiten: Later. [0:13:10] The post 300: The Startup Bus Fallacy appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.