In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to switch your customer base.They highlight how to identify the right product for the right customer, and what to do if the customer you planned to target didn’t work out for our business. Customers are the heart of any business, but not all customers are created equal. Because your customer base has such a huge impact on your business growth. It is important to ensure that they are of high quality, and that by providing them with the perfect solution to their problem. That they in turn help you to achieve the goals that you have for your business. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn what you can do if you have built your product, but find that the customer that you planned to market to are not responding to your solution. Steli and Hiten, also talk about the gift of flexibility, being open minded and honest with yourself about how things are going. They show how knowing that it isn’t working is a big step towards turning everything around and creating something that will work. Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:39 The first step to identify the problem. 03:17 The importance of customer development. 04:03 What to do if you have your product and no customer to market to. 04:50 How to market a pre built product to a new market. 05:10 Why being flexible in your approach is important. 05:36 Mistakes not to make with your pre build product. 06:19 Tip on going after a new market. 06:45 Don’t operate from fear. 07:00 What can you do when it didn’t work. 07:32 The gift of realising it isn’t working. 3 Key Points: Is your solution a good fit for that problem or is there another solution you can come up with. Don’t think that you are forced to make that product work in a different market. Keep your options open. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat, we want to talk about how do you switch your customer base? Or, how do you find a better customer if the customer you went after didn’t pan out? Right? The reason why I want to talk about this is that a listener sent us an email, I think, a day or so ago, asking us to talk about this and to give some advice. Whenever you listeners are sending us emails, A) we appreciate it, B) we try to get back to you and see whenever you bring up something we haven’t really discussed in too much detail, we’ll record an episode and dedicate it to you. The question that that founder had was, “Hey, we had a thought or an idea who our customer could be. We built a little solution for them. We went out there to try to acquire them, and what we learned was that it took or it takes way too much time and energy and money to acquire these types of customers for the return that we can make with them in terms of their willingness to pay for what we’ve built. So, now we’re thinking, ‘Shit, this is not the right type of customer. We won’t be able to build a successful business here. We have to go and find a different customer to sell our solution to.’ How do we do this?” What are your thoughts on this, Hiten?   [0:01:23] Hiten Shah: Every time I talk to a founder about this problem, which is actually probably a pretty common problem, especially earlier stages of a business within like the first year of a startup, they usually have some intuition. Ideally, though, they have some data and information as to what experiments they can run to find the right customer. The reason I say that is oftentimes, they’re sitting there. They didn’t always deliberately target a certain customer set. In fact, they just sort of put their stuff out there and sort of targeted, but then there’s some pockets of customers that are super useful to learn from. These pockets of customers tend to be like people that are using the product a lot or really love it but are missing a feature. Or, you can’t tell because it’s in the noise of 100 or 200 customers or users, and the founder is unable to tell because they’re looking at the average, average customer and saying, “Oh, it’s not working.” What I like to do first is recommend that you dig in and look at what’s actually going on. Who’s using it? Is there anyone actually getting value from it, or enough value, and why are they getting the value? Oftentimes, it could be because there are certain thing about them, a certain need they have or a certain specific type of job or role or even type of company they are that really makes it a good thing for them. From there, I think that’s one common scenario, that you just need to dig in and figure out can I get more of them? Is that a big enough market? Things like that. Start with the customers you already have is my first piece of advice on this.   [0:02:58] Steli Efti: Beautiful. Well, first, a little bit of criticism from my side, which is that if you discover having built something and having tried to sell it to people … If it takes you a number of months to discover that, oh, shit, this market or this kind of customer is not a good market to go after or a good customer to go after, and now you turn around, you have a product in your hand, and you’re thinking, “Hmm, who else could I sell this to?” you probably didn’t do enough customer development. You didn’t spend enough time talking to these customers before building or while building your solution, right, trying to acquire some early alpha-access customers or some … You should have not built something, and then went out to try to sell, and then realize that it’s so hard to sell to this person. Because the one question that I have is that is the product that you have, and we’ve talked about this before … Is it such a universal value prop that you could easily look for somebody else to sell it to? Oftentimes, it isn’t. Right? If you decide that the product you built and the customer you’re going after … If you decide that that’s not working, you shouldn’t be thinking, “I’m in month six of my startup. Where do I find a new customer, or my ideal customer?” You should be thinking, “All right. We did startup version one six months ago. It didn’t work, and now I’m on day one again.” You should go out and do some customer development and maybe show the product or talk about the product or solution you’ve built and see what people tell you, but make sure, be aware to be open-minded enough that if you go to a different type of customer, a customer that you are now … Hopefully, you wisened up, and you figure out to go after somebody or talk to somebody that you think, “We could acquire this type of customer easier, faster, cheaper, and this kind of customer has a lot of money, who’s willing to pay to solve their problems.” If you find that kind of customer, you should be open-minded and be aware of being open-minded so that if they present to you a problem they have that doesn’t match the solution you’ve built, you just pay attention, learn, and build a new solution versus trying to force your solution on a different market that may work, but it may also not work. It might be a big trap, where you’re now walking around with your half-baked solution and trying to force it down the throat of a customer base. Then, when any type of new customer shows just even the slightest, most lukewarm interest, you go, “Well, we found a new customer base. Let’s focus all our energy on …” whatever. I think they try to sell to restaurants, and now you’re like, “Let’s force all our energies to doctors, doctors’ offices,” and then realize that no, you don’t have product market for them. These doctors, although they might have more money, or it’s easier to reach them, they will not end up paying a lot of money for your solution. Or, your solution, even if they pay you money, is not really solving their problem, so they’ll leave again. My biggest tip there is to … When you go after a new market, be very open-minded and try to understand what are their problems? What are potential opportunities going after that customer? Then, ask yourself, “Is our solution really a good fit for their problem? Is there another solution we could come up with?” Just be more open-minded and don’t force your solution down the throat of a new market, because that might just be another way to waste a ton of time.   [0:06:30] Hiten Shah: Couldn’t agree more. I mean, seriously. It’s funny the amount of fear that comes up when something’s not working in a startup. I think if you want to dig underneath … Because, you know, we love digging underneath, right, Steli?   [0:06:44] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:06:45] Hiten Shah: There’s fear, and you’re operating from fear. I know we’ve talked about that in the past, but I see so many founders operating from fear, like, it didn’t work. Well, it’s like, okay, it didn’t work. There’s two things you can do. One, figure out what you learned. Step back, figure out what you know, what you learned. State the facts. Be objective. Then, number two is exactly what you said, which is don’t be afraid to do whatever needs to be done. It’s that simple.   [0:07:08] Steli Efti: It’s that simple.   [0:07:08] Hiten Shah: I just see fear. I smell the fear when someone’s like, “It’s not working.” I’m like, “Okay, great. It’s not working. Be thankful. Now, figure it out.”   [0:07:19] Steli Efti: Yeah, and you know, and when you … Realizing that is already something I give people props for. Because a lot of people, out of fear of accepting failure or defeat, even if it’s not working out, if this type of customer isn’t giving you enough money, or it takes way too long to acquire them, they just keep going, and they tell themselves a story   [0:07:36] Hiten Shah: Now you know.   [0:07:37] Steli Efti: Right?   [0:07:37] Hiten Shah: It’s like now you know. Right?   [0:07:38] Steli Efti: Now you know. You learned something.   [0:07:40] Hiten Shah: It’s like now you know. It’s good. Yeah.   [0:07:41] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:07:42] Hiten Shah: I agree.   [0:07:42] Steli Efti: All right.   [0:07:43] Hiten Shah: I like that.   [0:07:44] Steli Efti: Now, close that chapter. Take all that experience, and now ask yourself, “What’s next?” Right? And what’s next might be let’s take the product and try to sell it to somebody else, but what’s next might be let’s go and find a really good customer base and learn what their problems are and figure out can we build something new for them? What’s next could be a million different options. Right? Don’t think you-   [0:08:02] Hiten Shah: You’ve got that right.   [0:08:03] Steli Efti: Don’t think you’re forced to make that product work in a different market because that may work, but it may not. So, you should keep all your options open and don’t operate out of fear, just like Hiten said. All right? I think-   [0:08:19] Hiten Shah: No fear.   [0:08:19] Steli Efti: I think that is it for us for this episode. Go out there and get-   [0:08:22] Hiten Shah: Later.   [0:08:23] Steli Efti: By the way, before we wrap up, if you guys are struggling with customer development, customer acquisition, customers don’t want to … Prospects don’t want to pay you enough money, or you’re struggling in negotiation with them, or you’re … Whatever it is, send us an email. Steli@close.io, hn.shah@gmail.com. We’ll give you advice if we have any, and if you ask us … If you have a particular problem that’s so unique that we haven’t talked about it in almost 300 episodes, we’ll record an episode and dedicate it to you like we did today. All right. That’s it from us for today.   [0:08:53] Hiten Shah: Absolutely. Bye.   [0:08:55] Steli Efti: All right. Bye-bye. [0:08:56] The post 299: Finding Your Ideal Customer (Or Switching Who You Sell To) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about product expansion for your business.They highlight the next steps to product development and how to expand or diversify. They also review other businesses and the effects that product expansion decisions have made to their business. Product expansion strategies, can create new opportunities, which can help to build up your business brand image, increase sales and grow your business. Being clear about your product strategy, can help your business to understand if you should diversify or modify your product range. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to understand how to structure product expansion within your company. Steli and Hiten, consider 2 main factors, the product and the market, while looking at the decisions that sit behind different product strategies. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:32 Questions around the idea of expansion. 01:03 Different strategies around product expansion. 02:23 Reasons behind product expansion. 02:48 Case study of how other businesses have used product development. 04:20 The benefits of multiple products. 06:43 The power of one brand. 07:41 The down sides of multiple products. 08:10 Building your strategy based  on your market. 08:26 What the market dictates. 11:45 A success story case study. 3 Key Points: Being able to consolidate into 1 brand name is so much more powerful. Do you want to create features that are strongly branded or do you want to create a strong brand. You can take the idea for that first product and repeat the process for other products. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody, this is Steli Efti.  [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and today, on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about after you have a successful sort of product that’s growing, what do you do next? How do you think about expansion? Do you create more features? Do you create a new product? Do you do what? I think, Steli, this comes from a question that kind of you had about multiple products and creating those. I think really the important piece here is like, “What do you do, how do you expand when you,” I think a lot of people have the impulse that they want to create something else, something new, right?   [0:00:39] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:00:40] Hiten Shah: How do you expand is really the question.   [0:00:42] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that especially in SAS, there’s been both playbooks, right? There’s been the playbook of, “You build one product and you just expand that, and you make it more and more kind of a little complete suite, any maybe you expand it to become a platform, right, and then eventually an ecosystem,” right. You start with one very specific thing you’re doing, and just adding more and more and more features and you’re making it a bigger and bigger thing, or, slash, and, there have been companies or have been strategies where a SAS company will come up with product A for market A, and then see some success in it, and then launch product B to sell to market A, and then product C, and these products might be somewhat related, but they’re distinct products that people can purchase individually. They might have different names, they have different landing pages, they have different teams working on them, and so I’ve always been curious to hear like what decision making goes into that. There’s famously some companies in the past few years, might be one of the most prominent ones, that went from a, starting with a single product, expanding to a product suite, and then going back to killing off a ton of these products and going back to like the original product or the biggest, the flagship product, and just dedicating themselves to one product again. I see some new startups popping up that are launching many different products they’re selling, instead of just maybe expanding a feature set on a product. I’m curious, I know that one part, which is what you mention, one part can be very founder driven. Founders just getting bored with working on just one product and wanting to launch something new, something cool, something exciting, also fulfill their kind of entrepreneurial needs. I want to talk about the, how do you make that strategic decision, “Should this be an extension of your existing product? Or should you just launch separate products and try to sell to the same market?” Famously, or relevantly, I think 37signals had like shutdown a ton of products and they rebrand it to their core ship product, they’re being called Basecamp, but they’d also I think, what was the, was their CRN product, right. Highrise, they actually found a team to run independently, but then last week, I don’t know if this is public knowledge yet or not, this is actually a good point, but anyways, I know from rumors, I might or might not be wrong, but I think I’m pretty right, that they’re going to be shutting down Highrise and letting go of all the people that work there. You are such a historian of SAS, and such as a practitioner of products, you’ve launched a ton of products in your life, but I don’t think you’ve ever had like one brand that launched multiple products, or one company that launched multiple products within that one single corporate entity.   [0:03:25] Hiten Shah: We have. We have.   [0:03:26] Steli Efti: Okay.   [0:03:26] Hiten Shah: At Kissmetrics we launched a thing called KISSinsights, and then we ended up selling it. Then we sold it to a gentleman named Sean Ellis, and he turned it into Qualaroo, and then ran it for a few years. He runs GrowthHackers as well, and then he sold it last year. Here’s the deal, if we’re talking about SAS, because we’re talking about SAS, when 37signals was launching multiple products, it made SAS. They had a popular blog, a popular brand, they were a agency before they launched Basecamp, and then they turned into a software business. It was just a time when if you had an audience, multiple products was really helpful, because you could market it to this audience that was really rampant and really into you and your brand, the brand 37signals, right. They didn’t think of 37signals as a software company in the same way that they thought of 37signals as the folks who created Ruby on Rails. They were the, they really ushered in modern sort of SAS product development, and helped really that movement of like building fast, iteratively focused on design as well as user experience, and having a backbone of tech that was good enough. They built the brand not for their software, but for themselves. Launching multiple products where the markets weren’t that crowded, and ideas were much easier to come up with, to be honest, and they already had the platform and tooling with Rails to build stuff fast, made sense. What they I think learned overtime, is the brand gets diluted when you do that, and when in a world where things start looking more of the same and things look more and more commoditized, being able to consolidate into one brand name is so much more powerful, which also usually means one product, one unit. I actually feel like they’re just going with the sign of the times, and they’ve always been very good at doing that. They had a blog, they had an agency, they had a blog, then they built this sort of, the technology as they were building their first product, which actually designed to help them at their agency, because it felt like everything else was too bulky for project management, so they build Basecamp. Then they started building Ta-da List, and then they built Campfire, and they built Highrise eventually, and they built probably two or three other things, I barely remember the name of right now, and then they started shutting these things down many years later. Some of them, like Highrise were making very good revenue, and then they figured out how to either sell them off, shut them down or whatever it is that made sense. They even popped out another one called Know Your Company, that’s a separate entity run by a lady over there, who has taken it over as CEO from the last time I checked and was working on that. These folks are very creative, and they have ideas, and they have the technology and the team that’s, because they’re not venture funded or anything, self-funded, and they have the teams to do that. Really, I think the power today comes in them having one brand and consolidating it, to the point where 37signals, I still call them that, so do you. They are called Basecamp, my friend. They’re called Basecamp, and that shows you the brand equity they had with 37signals that they were willing to lose in order to go all in on one product. One of the reasons is, that product competes with so many other things now, but when they came out it was fresh. It was brand new, there was nothing like it, and their positioning didn’t have to include Slack. Now if you look on their site, they talk about Slack. What the heck does Basecamp have to do with Slack? Oh, yeah. They had that thing, Campfire, that came before Slack, and they merged it into Basecamp. If you look at Basecamp, it’s a merging of a lot of the things that they learned from the other products they built. You can consider those experiments. Sorry for the rant, but like they’re just going with the sign of the times. There might be a world again where doing multiple products makes sense again. Another thing I’ll say is, in SAS, multiple products is harder than ever, because then you’re not consolidating your brand equity, and brand’s more important than ever because most markets you enter in SAS are super fucking crowded. Like I can’t even say that enough, to enough people. Brand and your positioning and your marketing, and these things on how you get out there and what your brand represents, are like a 100 times more important than let’s say 15 years ago or 10 years ago. That’s what’s up. Now, if you’re not SAS, or you’re just thinking about this in general, I would say a lot of the rules, that I just said, are the way the world is today of having one brand to focus on that brand and that product, is probably thrown out the door, and you should rethink the strategy based on your market. The market for SAS today dictates that if you’re not focused on a brand, and with a razor sharp like focus on that brand and that product, you could run into some trouble as a single company.   [0:08:22] Steli Efti: One last thing I want to bring up before we wrap this episode up today is, I just, the last three weeks, I had a conversation with a bunch of really senior marketers that were working at very big SAS companies, very successful SAS brands, and one thing they all brought up in different discussions was, one mistake that they felt prior companies they’d worked for had made, was launching even, not even just separate products, but launching features within the product, and giving these features very distinct brands and brand naming, and promoting them very differently or distinctly from everything else, and maybe in a way that is not industry standard. They said that that seemed like such a smart idea in the beginning to create more excitement and to give this more significance, but then they would ultimately run into all these problems, because people didn’t really understand what that meant, people were confused it wasn’t part of the product or a separate thing they would have to pay for or how it related to the plans that it went it. Also, like just maintaining all kinds of documentation from support, to emails, to sales, to webinar videos, to how-to videos, and maintain kind of very distinct language and branding and styling of certain features, so certain big things within the product that they launched. They all seemed to have like regretted that strategic move from a marketing perspective, which is interesting, which is basically like, “How distinct do you want to make, do you want create features that are strongly branded, or do you want to create a strong brand and then just launch features within that?”   [0:10:04] Hiten Shah: Yeah, and there’s always anti-examples to the rule. Like is literally killing it doing a multi brand of single business strategy. They almost treat each brand separately, but yet you still have the Atlassian feel to them, but people can enter from any of them. Now they have Trello, and I’m really curious how they merged Trello into their sort of suite of products and businesses. Because that will be an interesting case, it’s almost an anti-case to what we’re talking about right now. I mean another way to think about it, is if you’re, and I got to give Atlassian some mad props here, because they’re probably one of the most strategically sound companies out there, in terms of how they think about expanding their product suite based on the needs of the one demographic they really have a good foothold with, which is developers, and how they just kept continuously doing that. I would say that what we’re saying holds true in SAS, for sure right now, where one brand, one product, more features, is probably smarter, than having multiple brands, one business, and having to deal with that. You can set up a company that can work on that, where you have all the things you mentioned, like support documentation and everything, but it takes the idea that whatever you created for that one first product you did, you’re able to repeat for other things. The way you would think about your business, if you feel like that’s the right strategy, would be about repetition and repeating the whole brand strategy for another brand that falls into the product suite. Atlassian has been brilliant at that, I think 37signals was great at that for a while, but they always used their blog as the main thing that got them the sort of traction on those new things, and kept getting them that, about getting update about all these products, but now they realize that they have so much heat and competition on their core business, it probably makes the most money and revenue and houses a lot of potential, an almost unlimited potential to be honest, or project management is always going to be a program, right. Now they have Asana, and then even Trello, and then all these other things like competing for attention from the customer, that like they have to do something and change their sort of methodology around what they do. Their idea of focus I think makes a lot of sense, and I’m not surprised that they’re shutting down more things.   [0:12:20] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right. This is it from us for this episode. We will hear you guys very, very soon.   [0:12:27] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:12:27] The post 298: How to Run Multiple Products at Once appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to run a side business and side hustle. They highlight how to get started and give you some ideas on how to find a skill or hobby, that you can leverage to get started. A side hustle is not about giving up your day job, it is about making a use of your time and skills and putting them to work to achieve some extra income. If you have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur but are worried about the risks of starting from scratch. With a side hustle you don’t have to risk it all, It is a great way to create new career opportunities. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to look at how to plan your side hustle and incorporate it into your schedule. Steli and Hiten, give you some hot and fast tips on the reality of running a side hustle and they tell you what it takes to succeed.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:48 How much time do you need to start. 01:14 Make a commitment to your plan. 02:12 Learning to prioritize. 03:23 Example of what to do next. 04:23 Where to start your side hustle research. 05:19 Defining your idea. 05:56 Important tip for your side hustle. 07:12 Take one step at a time. 07:20 Ideas for what to do. 09:17 Warning of what not to do. 11:07 JFDI – Top tip to start. 3 Key Points: The number one thing that you need is ‘Time’. Do something you can do yourself. Use the skills you have, during the time that you have allocated. Links Recommended Research – https://www.ryrob.com [0:00:00] Steli Efti: All right everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and what are we going to talk about today on the Startup Chat Steli?   [0:00:08] Steli Efti: Today, we’re going to talk about how to run a side business or a side hustle. You either have a full-time job and want to start something on the side. Maybe you run a startup that’s kind of like, not going to grow that much and you’re interested in starting new products and new things on the side. How do you do it? How do you do it well and successfully?   [0:00:26] Hiten Shah: All right. I love it. I’m down. But, the number one thing you need to make sure you have is time. Do not even consider this shit, unless you can allocate at least one hour a week to basically doing it, and one hour is not enough, but one hour is a great start. One hour. Give yourself one hour to start on the side hustle every week or do not even consider it. There’s so many people who think they want a side hustle or start one, but then they can’t commit to 52 hours a year.   [0:00:59] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think the main thing here, the main thing I want to double click on is the 52 hours a year because a lot of people will want to do a side hustle or start a side business or a product, and then they will allocate, you know, maybe eight hours on the first week when they’re like all inspired and in the moment, interest in this. And then, next week they’ll spend half an hour and then they will stop doing things because they’re so busy with other stuff, right? So, instead of spending 15 hours in one week and then nothing, like, can you consistently invest in this for a long period of time?   [0:01:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that’s it. I mean, I think we can talk about what kind of side hustle, and the criteria, and all that stuff, but fundamentally, commit the time. In a year, 52 hours, yeah. I mean, it’s that simple. And here’s the thing, when you start thinking about it like that, I think everything changes Steli because then you’re like, “Okay, I only have an hour this week to work on it.” Exactly.   [0:01:58] Steli Efti: Yes.   [0:01:58] Hiten Shah: You have an hour. What are you going to do?   [0:02:02] Steli Efti: Yes. Now, you have to prioritize. Now, you can’t spend eight hours doing quote-unquote research, browsing blog posts about this that and the other. You know, coming up with a domain name, and doing like, logo shit. No.   [0:02:15] Hiten Shah: No.   [0:02:16] Steli Efti: You have one hour. 60 minutes. How are you going to use it to create something and then to start building that up as a business? Right?   [0:02:24] Hiten Shah: That’s right? That’s it.   [0:02:27] Steli Efti: So, okay. But now, I’m going to play devil’s advocate, right? I have a full-time job. I can allocate an hour, two hours a week.   [0:02:36] Hiten Shah: Awesome.   [0:02:36] Steli Efti: I am committed for the rest of the year to do that. What do I do next? Do I build the product? Do I find the freelancers? Do I start a blog post?   [0:02:44] Hiten Shah: No, no, no.   [0:02:44] Steli Efti: What do I do?   [0:02:45] Hiten Shah: Fuck no. Fuck no. No, no, no. Come up with a plan for that hour for today, this week, or that two hours. Come up with a plan. What are you going to do? Well one, you need to figure out what that side hustle is. So, I’m going to play it up. Let’s say I start from scratch and I’m like, “I want a side hustle.” Right? Well, you might have read about a side hustle. You might need to go like, figure out what that even means, right? And learn more about a side hustle, right? Like, that’s actually legit. There’s a lot of content out there, you know? And so, the first thing I would do, I’m starting from scratch. I have a job. This is an example, I have a job or maybe I’m even a founder, I want to do something else just to like, entertain my time. I think I have an hour a week to dedicate towards it. Great, awesome. Go learn more about side hustles. I mean, seriously. Go learn more about it. Spend one hour first, to learn and get context for yourself on side hustles. What does that look like? And the reason I say that right now is there are some amazing resources for that and so, I would, from scratch, that’s the first thing I would do. And I’m sure there are great resources. I don’t all of them in this category at all, but like, that’s the first thing I’d do. And for me, it just starts with like, googling around, searching in like different systems, and figuring out, or different areas, forums, or like you know, find a podcast on it, or find a blog on it, and really just spend a little time researching what a side hustle is, and how to start one.   [0:04:12] Steli Efti: We’ll give a shout out here to a good friend of the podcast, and a member of the family, Ryan Robinson. He has a whole podcast on how to do side hustles and he’s interviewed amazing people. He’s blogging about this. He’s like the man on that, so if you want to learn more about side hustles, I’ll point you to one direction, which is just go to ryrob.com R-Y-R-O-B.com and check it out. He’s awesome when it comes to that. All right, so now I’ve done a little bit of research.   [0:04:40] Hiten Shah: Wait, I got a shout out. I got a shout out. He has a five-letter domain, R-Y rob.com?   [0:04:46] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:04:48] Hiten Shah: I got a five-letter domain too, hiten.com, so that’s another shout out. Ryrob, how can you forget that, and how can you forget hiten.com either? But, I didn’t know he had that, so I really wish I knew he had that because I’d be pointing more people to it, so it’s ryrob, R-Y-R-O-B.com and there you go. You don’t even need to go do that, we saved you an hour today, right?   [0:05:10] Steli Efti: Yep. So now, I’ve done that, right? What do I do next?   [0:05:14] Hiten Shah: Yep. Figure out what you resonate with and come up with a plan. What is the idea? What is your constraint? See, here’s the thing. People don’t think about the constraint. They think they want to go build a product, or they think they want to go do some freelancing on the side, or they think all these ideas when they get into the side hustle because it’s exciting. You’re dreaming. You’re imagining, but really the reason I told you to go learn a little bit is because you need to figure out what works for you. What’s your skill set? Maybe your side hustle is just freelancing because you have the skillset and you think you can get clients for it, right? That’s an example. Maybe your side hustle is building a little tool or product because you’re an engineer and you can do it. My best piece of advice on this is do something you can do yourself. Period. That’s my number one piece of advice on side hustles, which is do something you can do yourself and that might be countered to what anyone else tells you, but if you’re just starting with a side hustle, that’s the number one thing I would recommend. In fact, I had some designers I have that I work with, they have like, a little side hustle that’s like selling icons on creative market and some of those other sites. They just came up with it on their own, but like, they’re fucking designers, right? They can spend an hour in a week and like come up with a bunch icons and sell them and make a little bit money. And they’re like, I was going to call them husband and wife, but they’re going to get pissed off if I call them that, but like, not really, but like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend, but they’ve been together for a long time. I just want them to get married. And they just work for my different companies, each of them, but like, they made a bunch icons and stuff. Like, and it’s their side hustle, right? They don’t spend a lot of time on it anymore or anything, I don’t think, but it’s so simple. They’re doing it though and they can do it on their own. They can make a website for it. They can go to creative market. They can do all that. They don’t need anyone’s help. It’s the number thing, do something that doesn’t require anyone else to help you. Again, people might disagree with me, but I can tell you that if you want to make progress in a side hustle, that’s the number one way to do it.   [0:07:07] Steli Efti: And the important thing here is that what you’re starting with doesn’t have to be the end vision of what you’re trying to do, right? So, you might be thinking, “Well, you know, I’m not a designer. I’m not a programmer. I’m not even a writer, so what the fuck do I do?” Right? “I mean, I want to build a business and maybe I want to build a tech company, now do I use my skills right now?” Whatever, you’re working at a bank, you have a nine to five job maybe at an office desk. You’re like, “I don’t really … I don’t know what to do.” Well, ask yourself, what is something you can do to serve your ultimate audience already today? And that might even just be to ask yourself, okay, if this product that I’m imaging I might want to build or might want to create, it’s serving a certain type of person, what other services, what other products, what other things do these people need? Maybe I can start off by, I don’t know, just going to being a virtual assistant to this type of customer, right?   [0:08:00] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:08:00] Steli Efti: To build relationships, to learn, to ask questions, to make money. You know, serving that customer that I eventually want to build products for. There’s no excuse. You have skills. You have time, as we said. Now, use the skills you have during the time you’ve allocated to serve the customer, to learn, to grow, to make money, and things will momentum will be built if you do it consistently, long enough. But, I really wanted to highlight that because I know there’s always a group of people that are going to be like, “Yeah, but I don’t have skills.” Right? “Oh, yeah, Hiten, you’re saying like, your designer friends, they did a little, but I’m not designer, I’m not a coder, and I’m not like a great writer, so if I take these three things out, what the fuck do I do?” Well, be a fucking assistant, right? Do research for people, right? Do customer research for people. Be a user on like, some user researching site and test. There’s many things you can do. You have time, you have energy, you have passion, you have intelligence, you have some skills, and somebody needs them. So, there’s no excuse for that. It doesn’t matter what your background is.   [0:09:07] Hiten Shah: There you go, I mean, that’s it.   [0:09:10] Steli Efti: I’ll say one more thing before we wrap this up and this is my tip for the episode before you give yours.   [0:09:16] Hiten Shah: Cool. Sure.   [0:09:16] Steli Efti: My tip is, my tip goes towards answering the question, when has my side hustle … A lot of people start a side hustle and for those that survive the early days, which are very few, some eventually, if they’re not building enough momentum with the side hustle, they’ll get impatient and they’ll come up with the excuse that the reason this thing isn’t working, or I’m not making enough money, or it’s not growing, or people don’t care, is because I’m not doing it full-time. So, what they decide is eventually, out of impatience, to and out of an excuse mindset, is to leave their job and do this side hustle thing full-time to make it work. And I have a recent example of someone that wanted to do that and this is somebody that has family, a wife, children, financial commitments, and he tried something for a very short period of time, and he’s now getting all antsy, and he wants to do the entrepreneur thing full-time, and I told him, “Dude, you have not earned the right to do this full-time. This side hustle has not earned the right to get you full-time. You don’t have enough traction. Prove that it really deserves, you know, 100% of your resources, and time, and energy.” Don’t just do it because you’re impatient, or because you’re not seeing success, so you want to see it has an excuse that you’re doing this full-time. Don’t accept that excuse. It’s only going to go down a . For all of you out there, the side hustle is a beautiful way, if can get a little bit of traction, then it might deserve eventually to become a full-time business, but don’t use the constraints you have as an excuse to say, “Well, I’m not seeing any traction after a year of doing this because I’m not doing it full-time.” That’s usually bullshit.   [0:11:03] Hiten Shah: Love that. For me, I’m going to give my own advice on this. Something that a lot of people say, but it’s JFDI, just fucking do it. If you really keep talking about it, you’re not going to do it. We just gave you the exact way to get started on the side hustle, if you haven’t started one yet. One, make sure you can allocate an hour a week, at least, for a year. 52 hours. Number two, go listen to ryrob.com. His podcast, Ryan Robinson’s podcast and that’ll help you because he’s interviewed people about their side hustles, perfect, right? So, spend your first hour just listening to a bunch of these interviews, a couple of these interviews that resonate with you on ryrob.com. And then, I’m sure he has an email list. You should probably sign up for that. And then, we have a whole myrate of other tips that we just gave you. For me, just fucking do it. That’s it. Like, don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, just fucking start.   [0:11:57] Steli Efti: Just fucking do it. That’s it from us. We’ll talk to you next week.   [0:12:02] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:12:02] The post 297: How to Start a Side Hustle appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Product Prioritization. They highlight how to prioritize what is important for your business and how to get the team on board, working towards the important objectives. Product prioritization is an important metric in the success of your company. You must know what is important for your customer and how your product will deliver that to them. An important part of this, is ensuring the team are engaged in solving the problems and achieving the goals of the company, which allows the product to be optimized effectively. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn about product development and product prioritization. Hiten, shares his expertise on some fatal mistakes of product development and how to fix those problems. Steli and Hiten also discuss how to empower your team to get involved in all parts of the business. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:01 Product development questions. 02:20 The number one challenge in product development. 03:41 It’s important to do your research. 04:39 Figure out what the problem in your business is. 04:50 An example of problem solving in business. 05:52 Changing the way you do business to solve your problems. 06:46 Why is product development so difficult. 07:43 Working together toward the main priorities. 08:43 Why removing silos from your company is good for business. 11:01 For more information on Product Development visit Product Habits 3 Key Points: If you can’t figure out your number one problem, you have no business at all. We are used to our own constructs. All teams should work based on the number one priority of the business. Links Recommended – https://producthabits.com [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: Today on the Startup Chat, I forced my man, Hiten Shah, to talk about product prioritization. He’s been teaching all of you people how to build better products on producthabits.com. For those of you that are not on the email list yet, pause the podcast right now. Type in the URL on your phone, put in your email address, it’s the most valuable email you’ll get to learn how to build better products. So, Hiten you published a bunch of stuff on how to do prioritization of products, that’s probably why Hiten, why I had to strong arm him to do this episode but I know that some people still need to hear it from you in a different format, so let’s quickly bang out an episode on this. People have a product, and MVP, some kind of a version. There is a huge list of ideas they have, of things they want to build. There’s a huge list of things that customers tell them to do. There is the potential to look at should we be improving our current features that are not quite perfect? Or should we be building more new features? Should we be building new features until they’re perfect and really well polished before we release them, or should we just be like launching new features really quickly even if they’re not great? Do we let others tell us what to do? Should we do it internally? What kind of process do we do? Do we vote up features or not? I do think this is a super complicated problem for most teams, deciding how to prioritize, what to build and how to build that. What is your basic framework? What have you learned through all your research? How should companies and teams think about this?   [0:01:34] Hiten Shah: Last year I asked the audience of my email list, right when we were changing the name of it to Product Habit, because it used to be my personal email list and I wanted to do more and help more people, and be very focused. I wanted to do it about product, I really love product and all that kind of stuff. I asked people what their number one challenge with product development is, and everyone, doesn’t matter what size the company, what department in terms of like … Not what department, what category they were in, even sales people, marketing people, everybody chimed in and they said the number one challenge with product development that they see, obviously product people chimed in too mostly, was product prioritization, and figuring out what to build and when to build it. So, I’ve created a whole bunch of emails on that. I actually have some form of a stage of development of a course workshop and have been doing a lot of testing on that product itself, as well as continue to ask people things and learn myself how to do this better, because I resonate with the problem. I think we all do. What do I build next? And how do I know that it’s the right thing? Again, doesn’t matter, I’ve seen Fortune 500 companies respond and tell me they have problems with this. I’ve seen the smallest startup with two founders respond and say, “We don’t know what to build next.” It’s a problem. It’s a problem that’s only getting worse too because there’s more competition and there’s customers that are out there that are fickle, you know? They’ll try another solution on a whim, no matter how invested they are in yours, especially because it has this one feature that you don’t have. This is it, and the dream would be like every single thing you build is built because you know it’s the right thing to build and you also have a very good idea of the impact it’s going to have on your business. So, let’s work backwards from there. The big thing I learned is that people just aren’t doing enough homework, and I don’t mean like just one type of thing like customer development or customer research or user research, whatever the hottest trend is on learning about your customers. I’m talking about everything. I’m talking about looking at your existing customer base. Realizing why they love your product. Looking at them and being like, well what do you want, right? And then looking at everyone who’s signing up today and figuring out what do they want? Mapping those things together, also spending the time to figure out with your own business metrics, the boring stuff, your churn, your new customer growth, your sign ups, your retention. What is the number one problem in your business? Because, honestly if you can’t figure out the number one problem in your business, you have no business at all. You won’t be able to grow it. You won’t be able to figure out what to prioritize. The first lesson that I would give, and the main one, probably the only is go figure out what the problem in your business is. It’s not about your competition or anything like that necessarily. It’s all about, like, what’s the thing that’s hurting you the most right now? I can give an example in your case, Steli. I think in your case, based on talking to you, knowing enough about your business today, right now your biggest push is getting more sign ups. Is that correct?   [0:04:58] Steli Efti: That’s correct.   [0:04:59] Hiten Shah: Right, so we’ve talked about this. You’re looking for marketing help and all that kind of stuff and hiring and all that. So, there’s no surprise here. What if, and this is where it gets super interesting, what if your product initiative for prioritized even on product, in areas where you might not see the relation, but even on product were prioritized around helping you get more new sign ups?   [0:05:24] Steli Efti: I love it, yeah.   [0:05:27] Hiten Shah: That’s what I mean.   [0:05:28] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:05:28] Hiten Shah: Right? That’s the conversation companies don’t have. They’re like, oh, I do product. I work on product. I have nothing to do with getting new sign ups. Wait, bullshit. If that’s the number one thing that’s important in your business, why wouldn’t you have a majority of the product team or all of the product team worried about that?   [0:05:47] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think-   [0:05:48] Hiten Shah: What would happen?   [0:05:49] Steli Efti: Yeah. Well, you all of a sudden have engineering resources to do things that will drive sign ups, which is something that-   [0:05:57] Hiten Shah: You got it.   [0:05:58] Steli Efti: That you wouldn’t because you think of the engineering team as something that only impacts product features, right?   [0:06:04] Hiten Shah: Got it.   [0:06:04] Steli Efti: Love it.   [0:06:05] Hiten Shah: That’s it. That’s it right there, dude. That’s it, like what would you do? And here’s the fucked up thing, if that’s the number one problem you have, why isn’t the whole company like, oh crap. We need to work on that or we are fucked, right? That’s what doesn’t happen. This blows my mind, Steli, like it’s so logical. It’s the hardest thing to do though, I’m not saying this is easy. This is why I’m, like, on it. Oh crap, this is a problem, people don’t realize how much of a problem this is.   [0:06:33] Steli Efti: But why is it … So, you said it’s so important, it’s simple, blows your mind that it’s so difficult. Why is it so difficult? What do you think?   [0:06:42] Hiten Shah: We are used to our constructs. What you just said. Oh, now I’ll have engineering to help with that. But engineering and product don’t think about it like that yet. I’ll give you the easy one, dude. You guys, I don’t know if you have a referral program. I haven’t looked at your product in a while, right? Dude, product needs to build a referral program. Oh, sales, they can’t help with new acquisition. Wait, they know the customer, customer success, they know the customer. Why aren’t those two paired up in getting you referrals, more of them for new customers? Why isn’t product helping with that? That’s just one idea, but it’s the most obvious one when you think, wait, I can have engineering at this? Yeah, dude, create a referral program. Test the crap out of it, right? Done. You want more sign ups Steli? Don’t you have happy customers?   [0:07:31] Steli Efti: Well, the beauty of this is that instead of thinking of different teams within the company in a very, kind of, constrained box, what you’re saying is the entire company has main priorities and anybody in the company, any team in the company, could help with that main priority. Doesn’t matter in which team you are. So, from a product perspective, to bring you back to that team, the product team should work and prioritize based on what the number one priority of the business is. Right, and if that is retention, that shapes that product roadmap differently than if it is acquisition.   [0:08:09] Hiten Shah: Right, you got it. There’s so much more to this in terms of frameworks and structure, but, like, what we just talked about right now, it’s the simplest thing. That’s it. That’s all of it in a nutshell. That’s why I say it’s absurdly simple. The hardest part is systemizing this, and turning it into a process that you’re able to repeatedly do. Because after acquisition Steli, you’re going to have some other problem. My assumption is, like, retention.   [0:08:37] Steli Efti: So, let’s briefly touch on this before we wrap up the episode. This brings up a good point. I’ve read before companies like Intercom, they had some kind of a product framework that was saying our number one focus is getting … Or when it comes to product it’s always getting adoption up for a feature, a new feature.   [0:08:58] Hiten Shah: Yup.   [0:08:58] Steli Efti: Then the second priority is to get, you know, frequency of usage per feature up.   [0:09:04] Hiten Shah: Yup.   [0:09:05] Steli Efti: Then the third priority is to launch new features, right? That’s kind of their three step process.   [0:09:10] Hiten Shah: They’re bullshit. Wait, hold on. They’re bullshit, because they’re treating product as a silo. That’s bullshit. Like, I’ll call them out. Fuck that. They’re talking about a siloed way to think about product teams.   [0:09:23] Steli Efti: Yup.   [0:09:24] Hiten Shah: So, then you’re going to create more silos, so I’m not saying they’re wrong. They’re not wrong. If you treat it like a silo, great, but I’m calling it for bullshit because if your business has a problem that has nothing to do with those things going up, then the product team will be working on things that don’t impact your business. So, they’re right if those things impact your business, for sure. But I’m just going to call bullshit on the fact that that’s all product teams do, because that’s the way they like to preach it too. That’s the way most people would say it. That’s the old way. Are we a whole team as a company or are we a bunch of siloed people working in our own areas? What are we? That would be my challenge to any company who’s thinking of it in that much of a, you know, siloed construct. Because, what ends up happening then is you have so much waste in a company if your product team is working on adoption and feature and things like that, when you actually have a fundamental acquisition problem. What I would rather have the product team work on is a referral program that is deeply rooted, baked into the product and get adoption for that. That’s what I’m saying. They’re bullshit. It only matters if before you worry about adoption and all that stuff, that the product team is working on the correct initiative. This is what nobody talks about. This is why I think it’s so hard. We’re stuck on this construct. You just proved my point, right? Even like a company that, I honestly, I respect them a lot. They’ve built an amazing product, but nobody should get confused, because even them, they know how to prioritize.   [0:10:56] Steli Efti: Boom. Hiten Shah dropping fire people. All right, so for those of you that listened to this and are thinking, oh shit, all right this makes so much sense. We’re going to put this in practice, but how do we put this in a process, all that, how do I learn more about it? Producthabits.com or is there another place? Let’s point people to another place if they need more.   [0:11:16] Hiten Shah: It’s producthabits.com, there’s actually an e-book about five habits for better product and product prioritization that you can check out that I know people love, even though I haven’t made it better in a while because people say they keep loving it, although I should probably make it better. Also, if you really are into this, like just hit me up at Hiten@producthabits.com and I’ll help you out.   [0:11:36] Steli Efti: Boom, boom.   [0:11:38] Hiten Shah: Steli, thank you. Thank you for bringing out my passion on this topic, because we don’t talk about it a lot on here but it’s something, as all of you can hear, I give a big fuck about.   [0:11:49] Steli Efti: You give both a big fuck about and you know what the fuck you’re talking about, which is dope. All right, so I love this-   [0:11:55] Hiten Shah: I appreciate that, thank you.   [0:11:56] Steli Efti: I’m so glad, I’m so glad I’ve been following up on this topic for a number of weeks now and finally got you to crack. Dope, thank you so much for bringing the fire. Everybody, you know what to do next. This is it from us for this episode.   [0:12:10] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:12:11] The post 296: How to Do Product Prioritization appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten define the difference between “must have” and “nice to have” products. They highlight why knowing the difference is important to your business and help you to understand how to redefine your product so it is likely to become a customers “must have”. No matter what stage of your product development, Idea development or research you are in. You must determine how your product will be accepted into the market. A simple question that is often overlooked is the question regarding whether your product is a “must have” or “nice to have” product. Is your product essential to potential customers or just one they’ll simply appreciate. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat, to understand how to identify the pain points that your product solves. This can be a powerful metric in framing your product, as a must have product. Steli and Hiten, also explain that you can not succeed for long in business, if you do not understand if people care about your product. When your product is a must have customers will always make compromises to use it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:06 What are the differences between must have and nice to have. 02:51 Must have product examples. 04:06 How to know how the customer perceives your product. 05:02 The early days of Close.io. 05:53 How do you identify that you are going after a must have product. 07:06 Nice to have product case study. 08:48 The marketing angle to test your product placement. 09:50 The Sales angle to test your product placement. 10:48 Tips on identifying if your product is a must have or nice to have. 11:32 Being honest with yourself is an important step to success. 3 Key Points: If you find out that the thing, you want to build is not their number 1 challenge in life then you do not have a business that is worth building. The amount of money a customer is willing to pay you, can be a huge indicator of if you are a priority product. If through sales and marketing your customers are only reacting in low numbers it means that you don’t have a product must have. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to know that you have a nice-to-have, versus a must-have product. The reason this topic’s important is, you can’t be in business, any kind of business, and not understand whether people actually care about your product and it’s a must-have for them or just a nice-to-have. I think it’s one of the most critical things to figure out when you’re running a business. When you have a product. It doesn’t matter what kind of product it is, whether it’s a service or a software, or even some freelancing you’re doing. Is it a must-have for people, or is it just a nice-to-have?   [0:00:44] Steli Efti: I think that it’s also one of those questions that, I don’t know. Maybe find-   [0:00:47] Hiten Shah: How do we figure it out, Steli?   [0:00:49] Steli Efti: What are the differences? Let’s just go through that. One easy difference between must-have and nice-to-have is, how willing is the customer to deal with a ton of compromises? Are they willing to use your product, although your product is buggy? Although it lacks crucial features? Although it hasn’t been around for a long time? How much pain are they willing to overcome to use your product versus, they are waiting for your product to be perfect and if it’s not, they’re not interested in it? To me, if you have a must-have solution, customers will take a lot of shit and still use it. They’ll jump through a lot of hoops to purchase your product or to use your product, because it addresses such a huge pain and there’s not that many great alternatives to it.   [0:01:41] Hiten Shah: Got it. Shitty product, but the pain is so high it can be a must-have.   [0:01:47] Steli Efti: I don’t know about shitty, but you can be pretty imperfect and still get a lot of traction.   [0:01:52] Hiten Shah: Got it. How do you figure out … That to me, has less to do with the product and more to do with the opportunity.   [0:01:59] Steli Efti: The pain point that you’re solving, I don’t know. The solution you’re offering is addressing something that’s going to be a must-have. Something that’s a real priority to the business. Something that really moves the needle versus, a lot of times companies I find, will entertain nice-to-have products. They will be interested in potentially purchasing something that’s kind of a nice-to-have. On a nice-to-have a company will be a lot slower on purchase. A lot pickier. They’ll be a lot more, “Well, it’s missing this little thing and we’d also like that little thing.” They just take their sweet time versus if it’s a must-have pain. If the house is on fire and you’re offering me a bucket of water I’m not going to be like, “This is not enough water,” or “The temperature of the water’s not … ” I’m not going to have a huge debate.   [0:02:42] Hiten Shah: Just give me the water.   [0:02:43] Steli Efti: Give me the fucking water!   [0:02:43] Hiten Shah: Give me the water. I need it.   [0:02:43] Steli Efti: If I’m out in the desert and I’m dying because of dehydration, I’m not going to debate if this water is clean or not. In another setting, when it’s a nice-to-have because I have plenty of water options, now you have to pitch me really hard why I should purchase your water versus all the other waters that I’ve purchased before and that I already own. To me, that’s really an indicator for, your product is addressing a must-have need that’s so strong that customers are okay making a lot of compromises.   [0:03:15] Hiten Shah: Hmm.   [0:03:15] Steli Efti: You’re not convinced. Let’s move to the next one. We might revisit this.   [0:03:20] Hiten Shah: No, no. I am totally convinced. I’m just thinking through it and thinking, okay. If you say that the customer has a fire and any water you give him, they’ll be happy with. Because that’s what you’re saying, right?   [0:03:33] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:03:34] Hiten Shah: How do you know that? I’m like, “Okay, cool. I get that.” I get that if I have a fire I need the water, but let’s say on a sales call. First sales call, as an example. How do you know the difference between a customer who believes that you have a must-have for them, versus a nice-to-have?   [0:03:51] Steli Efti: Well, here are a few ways. Number one, the customer is adding urgency to the sales process, versus for me having to do that. The customer is like, “How quickly can I use the product?” “Well, we need another week before we could-” “Well, can we do it faster?” Those are really strong signs. The customer can’t wait to use it. Does the customer or the prospect add urgency on their own? Does the customer or prospect, do they show a willingness to purchase, although they have many requirements or requests that I can’t fulfill? The customer says, “Well, I really would want you to do x, y, z.” I’m telling the customer, “Well, there’s a lot of things we’d like to do eventually but we’re not going to have in the next few months.” The customer says, “Cool. These are nice to have. I still want to buy right now. I’m still interested in using this right now.” A good example of this was closer didn’t have much reporting when we launched and the customer still purchased a CRM that was promising them to close more deals without telling them how many more deals they closed. To us, that showed that the productivity gains that we offered them were so strong that they were willing to take a lot of short-term compromises on the reporting side. Eventually as they grew really quickly, they really needed these reporting things so we had to build them not to churn or lose too many customers. Thinking about launching a product that’s missing some very crucial stuff and seeing customers still having the desire to purchase and make quick buying decisions I think, is a very strong sign for that.   [0:05:31] Hiten Shah: That’s incredible. I love the sales angle. I’m going to give the product angle.   [0:05:35] Steli Efti: Nice.   [0:05:36] Hiten Shah: To me, a lot of this has to do with how do you identify that you’re going after a must-have? I’ll make just a very pithy, stupid statement which is, if you’re not solving the customer’s number one challenge it’s not a must-have. Period. In your case, sales number one challenge at the time when you started was productivity. You happened to offer them that water for that hair on fire problem. Is that safe to say?   [0:06:05] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:06:07] Hiten Shah: I think it’s really important to identify what the number one challenge is related to whether it’s what you want to build, or what your customers think. I actually like to just be like, “Okay. I don’t know what their number one challenge is. I don’t know what I want to build. I need to go find out.” If I go find out that the thing I want to build is not their number one challenge in life around let’s say, whatever the problem set is or the industry is or the market is, guess what? I don’t have a business worth building. I don’t have a product that’s gonna be a must-have, and I’m going to have to do so much more work to build the product, sell the product, market the product that it’s not worth it.   [0:06:51] Steli Efti: Beautiful. I love that. I’ll give you another example. Another angle. I had this discussion twice this week. Both with startup founders that I believe, it’s not quite sure yet that they have a must-have solution. Both companies have really big brand name customers. Large Fortune 500 type customers, but both of these startups are not making a lot of money with these customers. One of them was actually telling me, “You know what? We are not making enough revenue, but look at all the amazing logos that we have.” “These customers are incredible, and if we only get a chance to expand and add on and work the relationship over long periods of time, this is so much potential to make so much money.” Although, this is a relationship they’ve already had for a year or two. In my mind, I’m wondering, “Why are we not already making a ton of money?” The other founder brought it up himself. He was saying, “Well, we have all these great customers but we’re not making enough money.” Why? Probably because we don’t yet have a solution that’s worth paying a ton of money. We’re like a nice-to-have that the innovation department is buying, versus being a must-have that a department with much bigger budget, decision making power in the organization is buying. We need to figure out how to get over there, or we need to close up shop. I think the amount of money you can make, the amount of money a customer is willing to pay you percentage wise out of their budget, can also be a very strong indicator are you a nice-to-have? A nice little have? You’re making .001% of their budget or are they willing to pay you real money and allocate a real good chunk of the money they have to spend on this type of product? Because you are a priority product. Because you are something that’s a must-have for them.   [0:08:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah. They’re critical. I’m going to give the marketing angle.   [0:08:39] Steli Efti: Nice.   [0:08:39] Hiten Shah: To me, the marketing angle is that nobody’s resonating with your site. A simple way to think about it is, most people come and they bounce. In Googlenomics if on your home page you have a 80, 90% bounce rate, that’s bad. Real bad. If you have a very single digit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5% conversion rate just to sign up for the first step in your process. Of sign up or lead gen or whatever, you probably have a value proposition problem or even a targeting the right visitor, or something like that. At the end of the day, it’s not a must-have. It’s not pulling them in. It’s not drawing enough people in that are coming to your website. Other part of marketing is if your ads get low clicks or if you treat them off the problem in any decent enough channel and nobody’s responding. I think marketing is one of the easiest places to figure this out. It’s also one of the easiest places to test this, where you can put out different messages and just see how people resonate. Then pick up on the one that people resonate with most. Same with sales, to be honest. If you’re messaging on the sales call, the way you describe it doesn’t really get as close as possible to what you suggested around, they just want to buy. They want it now. They want to use it now, then you need to keep tweaking your messaging and your communication, how you frame it until they say that. Honestly these days, I would say even if you haven’t built it yet, you probably want to say that.   [0:10:11] Steli Efti: I love it.   [0:10:11] Hiten Shah: Whatever the right thing is.   [0:10:13] Steli Efti: That makes so much sense. Marketing and sales, they’re different tactics that you apply but the end result is the same thing. You’re putting something in front of customers, you see how they react. If they’re not reacting, or if they’re reacting and engaging in very low numbers, it just means that what you have is not something that deserves a must-have reaction. Which should typically be a very strong one, right?   [0:10:36] Hiten Shah: Exactly.   [0:10:37] Steli Efti: All right. With that being said, let’s wrap this episode up with some tips. We haven’t done this in a while at the end of episodes. Here’s one tip I’ll give to farmers out there that are not sure. They can’t say definitively that they’ve built a must-have solution or product because of the amount of money, the amount of urgency, and the amount of traction they see and engagement and usage they see with customers. If you are in doubt, instead of thinking about future potential, “Oh well, maybe one day we could grow into becoming a really big business, although right now we’re not seeing customers wanting to give us a lot of money. They’re complaining a lot. They’re not clicking on our ads. We see very low numbers on everything.” My number one advice to you is, if you’re not sure that you- if you don’t have definitive proof that you’ve built a must-have product or solution, then the answer’s most likely that you haven’t yet. Instead of waiting for the future or the market to solve this, and instead of giving yourself the excuse that the reason why the numbers are so low or you’re not getting as much money or all these things are not there is because you’re still young and you’ve only been in the market for two years. If you had just more marketing budget or if you have more developers to build more features, things would change. Instead of buying into that bullshit story to yourself, take a hard look and ask yourself, “Can we go out and really get confirmation that we’ve built something that is must-have? If not, maybe let’s take another round of doing customer interviews and doing customer development to figure out what are their must-have problems right now? Is there maybe, an opportunity for us to pivot or adjust or switch or build something else? Or change the way we’re building to become a must-have for them, versus potentially being somewhere in the nice-to-have category which is just deadly as a startup.   [0:12:30] Hiten Shah: Yep. My tip would just be, make sure you’re solving the most important problem for your customers or don’t work on it.   [0:12:38] Steli Efti: I love it. That’s it from us for this episode.   [0:12:41] Hiten Shah: Seeya.   [0:12:42] Steli Efti: Bye bye. [0:12:42] The post 295: Being a Nice-To-Have vs Must-Have Product. How to Know the Difference? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about our inner energy and how we manage it. They highlight the importance of food in managing your energy levels and they look at other ways that your mental and physical energy, can be optimised to enable constant high energy throughout your day. The body, mind, spirit and emotions work together, and when they are all working optimally, you will experience high quality energy. However, if any of these are affected negatively, the whole system can be affected and you may notice your energy levels draining much faster throughout the course of your day. Making the right targeted changes to your lifestyle, can boost your energy over time and give you the ability to access a better quality of life and productivity. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to review which behaviors or habits have the capacity to drain your battery or boost your energy. Steli and Hiten, share their ideas, for how to review what you are fuelling your body with and they also share how to recognise the difference, between different kinds of energy. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:39 Benefits of managing your energy. 01:01 Food is a major tool in rapid optimisation of your energy. 02:20 Alcohol can not give you energy.    02:42 Researching alternatives to boost your energy. 05:01 What is the quality of your energy. 05:50 Who are you surrounding yourself with. 06:56 The top energy drainers to be aware of. 07:29 The quantity of an activity is also important. 08:24 Top tips for improving your energy. 09:56 Questions to ask yourself. 3 Key Points: Food and drink has more to do with our energy levels than we believe. Look at what you are consuming and how that affects your energy and emotions. Look at your activities and make sure that they are really fueling up your batteries. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: In today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we’ll talk about energy management for founders and startup people. But not energy in terms of, like, the energy that you use for your Tesla, but internal energy, like the energy you feel, the emotions you feel, the energy your body, and your mind, and your soul … Whatever you want to call it. How do you manage your energy? Because we’ve talked about time management before. There’s many things you need to learn how to manage, but there’s almost nothing, I think, that’s more leveraged than figuring out a way to manage your internal energy and being able to live a life where you have really high energy and high-quality energy throughout your day.   [0:00:43] Hiten Shah: I’m going to start with one thing, and I’m just going to say, a lot of this has to do with food.   [0:00:47] Steli Efti: Ooh.   [0:00:49] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think your mental and physical energy is impacted greatly by food and drink, so coffee … You might think it’s good for you. It probably is bad for you. Food … Are you actually eating the right amount? Are you eating the right types of food for you? Are you eating at the right times? And right just means are you eating too much, too? Are you eating all the right food? I’m not saying there’s a diet I suggest, although I probably could recommend a diet or two, whatever. But what I’m suggesting is do you know the exact food requirements that give you the maximum amount of energy? I would argue that most of the time, people have no idea about how what they intake impacts them based on energy, and founders have a horrible time with that. Yeah. I mean, you can probably get on the Soylent diet and hack the problem like many founders probably want to, but I’m going to throw down and say I think food has more to do … Food and drink has more to do with it than we believe. I’ll say one last thing about it before you probably shut me down, but alcohol is a poison. Just look it up.   [0:02:15] Steli Efti: Okay. All right. Well, you feel that … Let’s step back and talk. Alcohol is a poison, but also alcohol … How does it affect your energy? Because I don’t think … I don’t think anybody can disagree with alcohol is not good for you. There’s some people that have learned the whole drinking one glass of wine is really good for you, but I heard conflicting stories on this. Some of the things that are good in that glass of wine, you could get at 10 times the doses if you eat an apple or something like that. So, I’m not sure on any of the science or research on any of this, but-   [0:02:47] Hiten Shah: My point is just that alcohol is a poison. It’s a poison. That’s what it is, you know? By definition, it’s something that your body doesn’t need, basically.   [0:03:01] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:03:01] Hiten Shah: Right? That’s what I mean. If you think about other things like that, and you put that perspective on it and just start realizing what you’re consuming, I think you will figure out what gives you energy and what doesn’t. Alcohol does not give anyone energy. I’m not yet even on caffeine and coffee, and that one, which I cannot argue. It gives you energy, yes.   [0:03:22] Steli Efti: Yes.   [0:03:23] Hiten Shah: Does it give you sustainable energy? Do you get addicted to it? I mean, there’s all kinds of questions, and I don’t want to derail this and talk about food and drink. I just want for everyone listening to think about what they’re consuming and how it impacts their energy and emotion.   [0:03:39] Steli Efti: I love that, and I think it’s indisputable. Right? The things that you fuel your body with will impact the type of energy you give your body. Food is energy, right? It’s translated into energy in your body. If you consume things with low nutrients, if you consume a lot of artificial shit, if you consume things, high level of carbs or sugar or even caffeine, the quality of energy you’re getting out of that food will vary widely. I think one thing that’s kind of a fun experiment to suggest here is for people to actually not track what they’re eating, but to track how they’re feeling an hour later after they’ve consumed something. Right? How do you feel an hour after your lunch? How do you feel an hour after your breakfast? How do you feel an hour after your dinner? That’s a really good indicator to me. Not immediately after what I eat I know how I feel, but an hour later, I can kind of sense of what I consumed was good energy and is fueling me with a sustained, high-quality level of energy, or if was just a quick high, and I’m crashing. Or, if it just was too much, and I’m slowing down. All right, so that’s on the food and drink. I think this leads to another thing, which is an interesting question to consider when it comes to energy, which is quality of energy. Right? You said sustained energy when it came to coffee, because you can’t … It’s undisputable you consume coffee, and usually a normal human body will react with feeling a higher sense of energy and alertness. But the question is is that a jittery energy? Is it a sustaining energy, kind of what I would call high-quality energy? Or, is this the kind of energy that you get … Same when you consume a ton of sugar, like you get the sugar high. That’s also energy. It’s just not good-quality energy. It’s too much energy. It’s too overwhelming. It’s too jittery. Doesn’t allow you really to focus, and it comes with a crash attached, which is really, really bad. Food is a big thing, right? Okay. Next thing that’s really big that I’ll throw out there, and this is something the two of us … This is one of the many reasons why we love each other, because we’re so aligned on this … People.   [0:05:43] Hiten Shah: Yep.   [0:05:43] Steli Efti: People, right? Who are the people in your life that give you energy? Who are the people that cost you energy? If you have to do a lot with people that are draining you of energy, it will impact your day. It will impact your productivity. You can’t have an argument with your significant other, or with some family member, or some friend, or your co-founder, and then afterwards expect to do your best work. Right? Most of the times, these kind of arguments and conflicts and misalignments will drain you of energy. One of the reasons I love to you, Hiton, and why we’ve been doing this for now almost 300 episodes is because when we talk, at the end of us recording the podcast, I feel more energy than at the beginning. Right? It’s one of the-   [0:06:27] Hiten Shah: Same, yeah.   [0:06:28] Steli Efti: It’s one of the main reasons why, for three years, we’ve been having an ongoing conversation every Friday for one hour is because-   [0:06:34] Hiten Shah: That’s right.   [0:06:35] Steli Efti: … At the end, we feel better than at the beginning. Right? That makes a huge difference.   [0:06:38] Hiten Shah: That’s the key.   [0:06:39] Steli Efti: That’s the key. Who gives you energy? Spend more time with the people that give you energy, that supply you energy and passion for life, and cut people out of your life that drain you of energy.   [0:06:52] Hiten Shah: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, look. Between food, drink, and people, what more is there?   [0:06:58] Steli Efti: Well, I’ll throw out … Well, there’s two more things that I can think of.   [0:07:02] Hiten Shah: Bring it.   [0:07:03] Steli Efti: One is the type of activity. Like, there’s activities that doesn’t even really include people. There’s certain activities that drain you of energy, and other activities give me energy. Right? Reading a great book … I love it. It gives me energy, gives me inspiration. Filling out my tax returns drains me of energy, right? Doesn’t really make me that excited or make me feel better afterwards. Even quantity of activity, right? If I work out for an hour, I would usually feel great for the rest of the day. I’ve overdone it at times, where I’ve worked out for two, two and a half hours, and then I felt like shit for the rest of the day. Or, television is a great thing. I love some TV shows. I love watching movies. If I watch an hour of television at the end of the day, and I stop right there, I feel pretty good. I feel rested. But if I get into the binge-watching mode, and I go from one episode to watching three hours of television, I’m a zombie. I feel terrible. I’m exhausted. I think quantity of the activity and what kind of activity you’re involved with, that can also … There are activities that will give you energy, and certain activities that will drain you of energy. Also, those activities … Not all of them you can do in endless quantities. You have to be aware of that as well, I would say.   [0:08:16] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean, it’s just so simple, right, if you start thinking through this, right, and think about what gives you energy and what doesn’t. I’m going to go into the tips and just say that the tip I have, probably stealing yours, Steli, is that start recognizing. I know you said after you eat, an hour. I’m thinking that it’s more … It’s more like right away. What gives you energy? What doesn’t? Right away after it, can you figure it out? After you meet with someone? After you do a certain type of work? After you even text with someone? Just start recognizing it. My number-one tip is just recognize your energy level. Is it higher or lower than when you started an activity, a meeting, even a conversation on text or whatever?   [0:09:10] Steli Efti: I love it. All right. My tip has to do with rest. When you rest, ask yourself are you truly resting? I brought up the television example, where people … At the end of the day, they’re exhausted. They just want to be vegetables on the couch and just Netflix their evening away. Just ask yourself, by the end of that television night, when you are ready to stop with that activity and go to bed, ask yourself how do you feel? Do you really feel rested now? Or, do you feel exhausted or tired or brain-frozen? The same thing goes to really anything. Doesn’t matter if you really enjoy eating sugary shit, watching television, playing online games. Any kind of activity you do during your downtime, pay attention. Did that activity during your downtime … Did it really rest you? Did it give you energy so when you go back to work, you feel rested, and you’re enthusiastic to get back to action? Or, do you feel drained and exhausted? Then, ask yourself, maybe you want to … Maybe you want to take a look at your rest activities and make sure that they truly, truly help you fuel up your batteries again.   [0:10:20] Hiten Shah: Exactly. It’s that simple. I think most people don’t do this.   [0:10:25] Steli Efti: All right. I think that’s it from us for this episode. Make sure to amp up your energy for the next few days. It makes a huge difference in your productivity and the way that you’re able to create value in the world as a founder or the startup member. That’s it for us for this episode. Until next time.   [0:10:42] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:43] The post 294: How to Manage Your Energy as a Founder appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how business equipment and tools can help or hinder your business. They define the difference between when a start-up needs to upgrade to new or more professional software or when what they are using is good enough. They also discuss the pitfalls that founders can avoid as they try to set up their business. A key success point, for all businesses, is to make sure that you have the right equipment. As your company grows, you will need to find solutions to support the running of your business, with a focus on maximum efficiency and success. So it is essential to make sure that you pick the right tools, but when the market is flooded with solutions how can you be sure that you have found the perfect equipment and tools to continue steady growth. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to explore what role software and mindset play in the success of a Startup and why upgrading to the industry standard isn’t always going to aid in the companies success. Steli and Hiten, challenge the idea that there is a “one shoe that fits all” approach and look at alternatives ideas for how you can handle software within your company.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:25 – The start-up case study. 02:05 – An example of bad advice. 03:04 – The disadvantages of investing in the wrong equipment. 05:23 – The issue with investing in complex software. 08:07 – Why experience in buying the right software matters. 08:23 – The advice bias and being well informed. 09:24 – There’s a time for everything, keep it simple. 10:19 – Face the reality of what you need, not what you think you need. 12:22 – Being resourceful will save you money. 12:57 – Free advice for founders. 3 Key Points: If the start-up is too young and they take on these tools, which are meant for larger companies, they will fail. Remember a spreadsheet is often good enough and most of the time the tool that isn’t the high-end tool, will be best for your business early on. Invest your time in solving problems as they exist in your business now and not in solving potential problems for the future. [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, I’m supposed to just go with it, and I’m going to follow Steli off this cliff that he’s going to take us on. So, I hope all of you are ready. What do we got, Steli?   [0:00:15] Steli Efti: So, I don’t even know what this episode will turn into, but hear me out. I get this question fairly frequently, and it’s funny. So, people come to me and they ask me what CRM they should buy, right? Not surprising since I’m in the CRM space and I’m writing a lot about sales. Somewhat surprising to me at times because I’m like, “You know that I have my own CRM system. Wouldn’t you think that I’m biased? How did you come to me with advice?” But, I’m always flattered because I just assume, or my hypothesis is, that people believe that I’m honest enough that I’ll tell them the truth. But, recently, I heard this once and I really just didn’t pay it too much attention, and then I heard it recently again and it really pissed me off. So, I wanted to talk to you about this. I have this founder, and they’re a tiny team. They’re like four people. They have not raised a ton of money yet. They are in the early stages of getting some “early customers”, maybe customers that are paying very little money to test out the first version of their product. This founder was talking to an investor, and was talking about their sales process and how they are trying to get these customers and all that, and then the VC asked, or the investor asked that founder, “Hey, what CRM are you guys going to be using or are you using right now?” And the founder was like, “Yeah, we have not really decided yet. We’re using a spreadsheet at this point.” The investor told him, “You need to buy Salesforce right now. Don’t even look at any other CRM, because sooner or later, if you succeed and you become a big business, you’re going to end up with Salesforce anyways.” When I heard that, it really pissed me off, because it’s really dumb advice. It’s like telling a 20-year-old that got his first job, or her first job, and is making an okay salary and is thinking about buying an apartment, “You know what? Sooner or later, you’re going to get married and then you’re going to have four or five children and you’re going to buy two dogs and you’re going to have a little pony, so might as well buy that house right now. Don’t buy a small apartment that’s the right fit for you right now, just buy the biggest house. Just buy the house you’d want to have when you retire at 60 right now.” That’s very dumb advice for obvious reasons, right? It’s financially not a smart thing to do. It’s the same thing with startups. It’s not just Salesforce and CRM. This is not just about me and my competitors. But, it’s like when you buy a product at the wrong stage, it will actually slow you down and make success harder, not easier. A lot of times I feel like startups want to buy very complicated and sophisticated software, tools and products and instrumentation, ’cause they feel that that will help them succeed at the end of the day, but at the wrong stage, buying something that’s highly complicated will actually just slow you down and cost you a ton of money, not really move the needle. At the stage that that founder is in, a spreadsheet is all they need. They don’t need any CRM, not even my CRM. Once they get to more than 10 customers, and once their volume goes up, and once they do a lot more things and it’s not just one person on the team doing sales, they might want to migrate from that spreadsheet to a simple CRM, and it might be Close or it might be something else. As that works out and they grow to a bigger and bigger team, eventually, once they are hundreds of sales people, they might want to take the next step and eventually end up at Salesforce. But, buying Salesforce today, when they don’t even have two customers and it’s just one of the founders doing sales, and then him having to learn how Salesforce works instead of just doing sales and using a spreadsheet is just ridiculous to me. So, I wanted to rant about it. I wanted to hear your thought. I don’t know if this is a big problem or not a problem at all, and it just appears to be a problem in my mind. But, it’s like people and companies sometimes, the software they buy or the things they purchase that are very expensive and complicated because they think they will help them, and then often times it hinders them, I don’t know, something bugs me about it and I wanted to dissect it with you.   [0:04:36] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It’s like when I was building marketing tools, which I still am to some extent, people would just … Not that I was competing with them, like in your case or anything, so I can be a little less biased than you, not that you were biased.   [0:04:51] Steli Efti: Just because I’m biased, doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Just throwing that out there.   [0:04:56] Hiten Shah: I can quote the shit out of that. That’s great. You’re totally right, yes. I don’t think you’re wrong at all, I just had to nitpick that for a second. People would recommend Marketo to companies, and Marketo’s yet another one of those products that’s really, really great if you have a person who can go get Marketo trained and if you’re willing to spend the effort to use all the little things Marketo has and learn how to use them in their clunky way. No offense to Marketo. It’s a very clunky product, like most products that target upmarket folks. The reason these products turn out that way is because the teams there that are building them are just trying to solve enterprise customer problems, not the problems that are targeted at the startup, not the problems that are targeted at even like a series A or even B startup often. So, I would say that in your category of sales, I’m probably less concerned with an investor saying it, for one specific reason. Because, unfortunately, Salesforce is a de facto standard, and a lot of investors, when they were actually operating, if they were, or based on their limited or not limited experience, they think companies are only successful if they use Salesforce. The company itself, Salesforce, and all the aura around it has basically made people, especially investors, think that. Part of the reason is, many years ago, a lot of the other CRMs were not as good. They just weren’t. They couldn’t do little things that Salesforce had figured out as important for any sales team. I think we’re in a place now where that advice is stale. Same with the Marketo advice. Right now, I would rather use a chat tool that combines email and messaging than use Marketo. Period. Because the paradigm is different. So, if I heard an investor suggesting Marketo, my eyes would roll. If I heard a team member at an early stage startup trying to use Marketo, which I have heard, my eyes roll, and I’m like, “No. You’re going to fail.” It’s not even 9 times out of 10. 100% of the time, if the startup is too young and they take on these tools that are meant for larger companies, they fail. The only caveat is if someone on the team has experience with that tool and is an expert in that tool, maybe it’s okay. But, then, you’re just like taking a hammer and smashing something like a cookie with a hammer, you know what I mean?   [0:07:36] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:07:36] Hiten Shah: Like, you could just smash it with your foot. You don’t need to … Cookies are bad, they have sugar and all this stuff. . I like cookies. So, I think you’re taking a sledgehammer onto something that doesn’t need it, and then you’re going to inevitably break stuff and cause a lot of problems in your company. I think a lot of people that buy software are new to buying software, essentially, or even using this kind of software, ’cause they never had to. They have to build out a sales team or they have to build out a marketing function, and they’re going to go with expertise. So, I think the statement I would say is, even the people who aren’t investors, that are true experts, but if they’re experts and they have a bias towards the tool, just realize that when you’re getting their advice. Just remember that often times a spreadsheet is good enough. Often times, most of the time, a tool that’s not the enterprise tool, not the high end tool, is going to be better for you earlier on than any other tool you can pick. I think it’s very much a mistake for the people giving advice to suggest these heavy tools to people when they don’t need them. But, often times, they don’t know any better. This is one of those where it’s like, I think it’s on the person who’s receiving the advice that needs to really check for themselves.   [0:08:49] Steli Efti: Yeah. But, you know, the flip side of that, that I see, is that sometimes startups … This is inexperience, really. Like, how many times have you purchased business software and had to implement it in a business environment? If you haven’t had to purchase that much, sometimes founders, they tend to overthink what product they should use. There’s so many times that people are like, “Well, I spent the last three weeks researching CRMs. We have this massive matrix, and I’m trying to figure out what is going to be the best tool,” and all that. And I go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Tell me a little bit about your company. How many customers do you have? How many sales people? How many calls, emails do you make? How big of a problem is CRM right now?” If they’re like, “Well, we don’t have any customers yet, and we haven’t launched our product, and I don’t have any sales people,” it breaks my heart because I’m like, “For the love of God. Why are you spending two weeks on this shit right now? This is not the right time to do buying research. You’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist right now. You need to solve the problem that your company doesn’t exist yet because you don’t have any customers. You haven’t launched a product yet. That’s the problem you need to solve, not what CRM will we use a year from now.” Also, equivalently, sometimes people will have maybe a small team of two or three sales people … I always use the CRM example, but this really could be if you’re marketing people, could be if you support people. Doesn’t really matter what the team is, or set up. But, they think, “Well, I need a tool that does these 30 different things,” and then when you ask them, “How are you using these 30 different things? Why are these 30 things really important to you?” … You realize, once they told you, that they’re not using any of these things, they don’t need any of these things, and they don’t know anything about these things. They just read a few blog posts, and they imagine that they’re going to want these things. You know, there’s like … Marketing automation’s a beautiful example, because for a minute … I mean, it’s still a hot term, but for a minute, it was a really hot term. Everybody was like, “Oh, we need marketing automation.” , “All right. Just explain to me what that means and how exactly are you going to use it, and what you are doing right now for that.” People just like, they don’t know. They read a few blog posts and they get the impression … And we all do this. I’ve done this before, myself, I’m not above this, where you read a bunch of stuff and you think, “Well, we need to also fill in the blank buzzword to be successful,” but you really don’t understand that buzzword. You don’t really know what you’re talking about. Lead scoring is such a beautiful example in my space. Oh my God. You know how many times I’ve talked to people in sales teams about lead scoring, and when I ask them to explain to me how they would implement lead scoring in a practical manner at the stage they’re in, they just don’t fucking know. Lead scoring, not that it’s not a great thing, but it’s a solution to a problem that comes up when you have too much noise in the leads that you have and you need to prioritize, ’cause prioritizing is really crucial for profitability. I talk to teams that have too little leads and too much time on their hand, and it’s like lead scoring is not your problem right now, and if you wanted to do a version one of lead scoring, you could do that without purchasing a super expensive lead scoring tool that costs you £1000 a month. You could just do that with some basic, simple logic. What are our top countries? What are countries we want to exclude? Maybe we just take corporate emails versus the gmails and yahoo mails. Maybe there’s an IP thing. Maybe there’s two questions we can ask people on the signup form that helps us prioritize. Maybe there’s a few basic things we could do to score leads internally rather than using super complex enterprise level lead scoring software. It’s like that … What’s that? That inexperienced founder that thinks he or she needs to purchase something super complex in order to succeed. That’s a massive mistake, a distraction, a waste of money, time and energy. I don’t know if I have anything smarter to say than please don’t do that. I don’t know how to say this differently, but please don’t waste time trying to imagine where your company’s going to be three years from now and trying to buy a product today that will get you there. Let me ask you this, Hiten. Have you ever heard … Let’s take marketing as an example. Have you ever seen a team that started with like two co-founders or three co-founders and chose a marketing tool, and they grew to 3,000 or 30,000 people, they [IPO’d 00:13:24], they became like a , a massive organization, and they still use the same marketing tool?   [0:13:30] Hiten Shah: No.   [0:13:31] Steli Efti: No.   [0:13:31] Hiten Shah: Never.   [0:13:32] Steli Efti: Never. Or even the same process or the same marketing language. That doesn’t exist. It’s a beautiful idea that you’re going to choose the “right thing”, and then you’re going to just have that thing work forever as your company goes from one to one million people working at that company. It just doesn’t exist. Just try to solve and buy the tools and products you need for the stage you’re in right now and the next stage you want to get to. Don’t think 20 steps ahead. It breaks my heart when I see people, founders specifically, waste their time and money on this. I don’t know. Yeah. It just breaks my heart. You need the right product for the right stage. Don’t worry about getting the right product forever, for life. That doesn’t exist.   [0:14:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It just doesn’t. Nobody’s successful just because of the tools they use. It’s just that simple, right? So, someone tries to get you to use Salesforce even, and you’re early, don’t just … Think twice. Don’t do it.   [0:14:34] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it for my rant. Thank you for helping a brother out. Part of having this podcast is to talk about these like … ‘Cause this is not like something I would write a blog post about, but it’s something I have seen as a seller, as somebody that’s been selling to companies. As an advisor, as somebody that a lot of people come to advice to, I’ve seen this so many times that I’m like, “What is this? I need to talk with Hiten about this, like startups buying the wrong tool.” So, thanks for-   [0:15:06] Hiten Shah: Well, I mean, what’s more important for us here is that if you’re thinking of using a CRM and you don’t have one, use Close.io. I mean, it’s that simple. Right, Steli?   [0:15:19] Steli Efti: I wish I could disagree with you, but I can’t.   [0:15:21] Hiten Shah: Why wouldn’t they use it? Why wouldn’t they use it, or at least give it a shot? It’s better than a spreadsheet and it does a lot of things around tracking information, such as calls, that you don’t get out of other products yet. They were the first, if not, one of the pioneers, depending on how you want to talk about it, Steli, to do that. So, their product has more longevity around an important piece of your sales process than other products do.   [0:15:46] Steli Efti: You’re not just good looking, Hiten, you’re really wise as well. Thank you for the pitch.   [0:15:53] Hiten Shah: There we go.   [0:15:54] Steli Efti: That’s it from us.   [0:15:55] Hiten Shah: Course.   [0:15:55] Steli Efti: Ending the episode with a Close.io pitch delivered by Hiten Shah. Like, what more can I ask for, people? I’m a happy man. We’ll hear you-   [0:16:04] Hiten Shah: Any time. Not getting paid for it. Just a friend of the company.   [0:16:07] Steli Efti: Not kidding.   [0:16:07] Hiten Shah: All right.   [0:16:08] Steli Efti: All right. We’ll hear you very soon, everybody.   [0:16:11] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:16:11] The post 293: What Tools Should You Use to Run Your Startup? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to develop free tools and use them to market your business. Marketing your business is essential but can be quite expensive. A great way to generate leads for your business is by developing a free tool that solves a problem for your prospects and leads them to want your main product. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how to do this strategically. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – About today’s topic. 00:49 – How HubSpot started with a tool called grader.com. 01:22 – Steli talks about why his company hasn’t developed a free tool yet. 03:24 – How to choose the right app before investing in this strategy. 05:45 – Why the tool has to fit in the customer’s journey. 06:24 – Another way to choose the right tool to invest in. 07:06 – Hiten talks about a company that uses this strategy very well. 08:50 – How do turn free traffic into customers. 12:05 – Build the free tool first and then build the audience. 13:45 – The right amount of time to spend developing and deploying a free app. Quotes: Your tool needs to solve a problem for your prospect. It needs to be a logical step in the buyer’s journey. You have to build something that people actually care about. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And in today’s episode we’re going to talk about something that a lot of companies are starting to do and some companies have actually done and built massive businesses and gone public off of a strategy like this. And the thing we’re going to talk about is how to use free stuff, free tools, free not E-books or anything but actual free software. Things you build with your engineering and product team in order to do marketing. And I’m going to start with the most kind of popularized example of this that people talk about a lot is HubSpot. They started with a took called grader. Grader.com. G-R-A-D-E-R.com. They still have it. And that was one of their biggest sources of leads for the longest time. And that’s how they did lead gen. It helps you your website and it told you that you should use HubSpot basically. And there’s a lot of free marketing for them that they got out of it. So that’s my example to kind of kick off the convo about this sort of really important and ket strategy for doing marketing.   [0:01:05] Steli Efti: Yeah so I’ve always, I’ve seen this being done a lot. I know you guys with your companies have done this quite a bit. This is something I’ve never done. We’ve never done a close out. We’ve never released a free tool, a free piece of software, Chrome extension, anything of that nature as a growth and marketing tool. But we’ve thought about it, we’ve talked about it, and it’s definitely something that’s on the for this year. But one thing that has always stopped us was never a lack of ideas. In our case oftentimes it was just a lack of I think commitment to doing that because we’re looking at our internal engineering resources and saying, well we don’t have enough developers to be deploying resources to a marketing app like that. We want all of our developers to focus on our core product. And well, what about working with a contractor or going to a freelancing website. Well who will project manage that? And then who will maintain the app and the code base? And I think that, that kind of … Maybe being overly critical or overthinking this has always stopped us from investing in it. So maybe from your experience, how do you make sure that you choose the right app or the right thing before you invest in it that could really … Because the app needs to have some kind of a virality or ISO, it needs to be attracting growth without you having to spend marketing and sales resources on promoting the free app or the Chrome extension or anything like that. So how do you pick the right tools or apps as a marketing campaign? And then how do you project manage? How do you allocate resources? How do you think about that? I’m sure you’ve advised companies that were like, “Yeah we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the time.” We don’t know out of these 20 app ideas, which one could really drive growth. I’m curious about your thoughts and what you see work well, versus maybe you’ve seen also examples of companies doing this very unsuccessfully?   [0:03:08] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Alright a bunch of stuff there, it’s awesome. So just like everything else in marketing, it’s an experiment. So first, treat it like an experiment. When you think of it like that, you’re going to be like, wait, I don’t want to put a lot of resources to it. I might not even want to spend a lot of money outsourcing it. So one real good way to pull this off would be … And I’ll get into the other aspects of it, but just getting it done would be like do a hackathon day or two and have the team focus on this problem. And I think the problem here is we want more leads. Or we want more signups. That’s usually why you would do this because it’s a marketing oriented thing. And so you can just time box it. So you could take one engineer one week, or an engineer and a designer one week. Or you could take, do it as a hackathon type thing and a fun little project where people throw in their ideas to come up with some kind of free tools and stuff like that, that you could do. And I’ll get into the idea side and how do you pick and lla that stuff. But to me, it’s like most companies when they think about this, actually most companies when they do this they accidentally figure it out. And end up just building some tool. There’s also a lot of other options like don’t build one tool, but build a bunch of tools and do it for search traffic. So AB testing calculator, a significance tester, things like that in the AD testing market are pretty popular in terms of free tools that every single AB testing tool builds because they want that search traffic when people type that in because it’s highly relevant to their customer. So that leads to my point about the ideas. The point about a free tool, is to solve a customer’s problem that leads them to wanting your product. Or that indicates that they are a high intent lead, or a high potential purchaser or a person that would sign up for your product. That is another key kind of framework or way to think about it. Another way to think about it is with HubSpot. In HubSpot’s case they had grader.com. And the logic that I would use is, well if my site sucks, and HubSpot will help me make my site better, shouldn’t I be able to for free figure out whether my second site sucks or not, right? Or where it sucked or where it could be improved? And so grader was the whole psychological theory that we’re going to analyze your website and then tell you what problems you have and then if you sign up for our product or become a lead, we’ll talk you through how to fix it and sell you something, right?   [0:05:40] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:05:40] Hiten Shah: So for me, it has to fit in some part of the customer journey and the customer mindset. And solve a problem for your customers. And not every product has that opportunity as easily. That being said, if you know your customers really well and you know what problems they have that are bringing them to you, you can start hypothesizing what free tools you could build very easily.   [0:06:05] Steli Efti: Yeah the approach of this might be even to just go and see there’s a tool out there that has significant traction with your customer base at the right point of their buying journey. And either see if you can purchase the tool, Chrome extension, app or copied and improve on it, right, to improve effectively. Just coming up with some random idea that’s never been tested and there’s no point of reference if that would work or not. You just go and find something that already exists.   [0:06:36] Hiten Shah: Yeah and I’m going to call out a certain point here and a certain set of companies just because I find it fascinating and it’s just more of a quick case study. But there’s a company called Loom that creates what they call quick video. And those videos you can sort of … They’re in your browser. You install a Chrome extension. You hit a button and you can just take a video of whatever’s on your screen with your face and then send it to a coworker. And this company has been iterating for a while and they created that sort of new type of behavior or functionality, whatever. Now, there’s two other companies in the space that existed long before Loom did. These companies, one is called and another is called Wistia. And both of those are video hosting platforms. So in theory, you’d be like, wait, they’re a video hosting platform. This other thing is actually an active communications platform through video, right?   [0:07:31] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:07:31] Hiten Shah: Well this start up Loom figured this out and so over time as Loom figured that out and started getting traction, those other two companies I’m going to say got smart so to speak. And use this strategy that you just described, which is they say Loom being successful, so they both have competitors to Loom in their market now. And they’re video hosting companies. But think about it, if you want to increase video creation, or make it easier for people to create video, which neither of those companies were thinking about really in this way. Then something like Loom makes a lot of sense. To be a feeder into your product or something you should just own.   [0:08:08] Steli Efti: I love it. Well how do you make sure that if you launch an app or purchase an app or copy an app with a tool and it gets a lot of free activity, I’m always curious about, you mentioned already that it needs to be at a kind of logical step in the buyer journey. But how do you … What are realistic expectations in terms of turning that free traffic or usage and converting it into real leads or trials or customers for your business?   [0:08:41] Hiten Shah: It’s the equivalent of a blog. Where unless it’s very well done, you can’t really do it. And I think a blog works in stages just like free tools do. First you build it, create the content, launch the blog. Then you get good at making sure the value proposition, the content you’re creating or the product you’ve built has some traction and that you can actually get people to come view it and use it. In the case of a tool, just like a blog post or a blog right? You’ve got to get people to come view it or it’s not even worth blogging at all. And so you have to build something that people actually care about. And if you build something that people care about and that has some spread and you’re getting traffic for it, that’s great. Where people go wrong is they don’t do the homework up front on that buyer and customer journey in figuring out what is the right tool to build and can it spread? So all I’m trying to answer when I think about a strategy for marketers and marketing as the reason you do this is one, will it spread? And that’s not the number one thing, both of these are super important. Will it spread? Is it something that can be popular? Is there some way to build sharing in or inviting in, or anything like that because that helps things spread. Can we get traffic for it? Can we get search traffic for it? Do we think we can win? The search result, that’s another example, right? Or is there some social media component where people want to share this in social media, right? Is there something that we know that will get people to come to it and more and more people over time. You have to assess that. The second thing, and they’re related because every idea has to balance both of these is does it actually connect to our product in some way? Does it make sense for us to build this? Is it even better, does this just turn into the free plan for our product somehow? That’s what I love. And then you’re a freemium business, which we’ve talked about this a lot, right? And someone emailed me I think they might’ve emailed you too, I don’t remember. But one of our listeners, and they said, “Oh I’ve listened to that freemium episode 10 times. And that was one from a while ago. It’s because people don’t talk about this. Yeah, people just don’t talk about it. They just object and say, “Oh, Freemium doesn’t work.” Well that’s not true. Anyway, so I think the free tool thing gets me excited because to me, that’s a way to have a free component in your business that gets you a lot of word of mouth, it helps build your brand. And if you pick it right it will convert. But I treat it like blogging at first. But smarter because you’re building a tool. So you have a lot more ability to get people engaged and get some kind of retention on it too.   [0:11:22] Steli Efti: Yeah and we’ve talked about … For the people that are interested, there’s two Freemium episodes. It’s episode number three, so the very third episode we ever recorded was a Freemium episode. A legendary one by now. And then episode 250 will be kind of revisited the topic. But we talked about the idea of first building an audience and then building a product for that audience, right? Talked about creating a blog first and then building a product or with Kissmetrics you even had a Twitter account first. You curated a lot of stuff and a lot of followers. And then you build a product for that audience. And similarly, your strategy could be to be launching a or multiple free apps and building free user bases for a product that you’re going to build down the line.   [0:12:17] Hiten Shah: Yeah you should do that. If you’re going to launch something and you’re not there yet, and you’re building it, build some small component of it, or build this free tool first and build that audience. Because that audience, if it’s correct and its related to solving a problem in the market, that’s an audience that’s going to use and buy your product eventually. And starting that early is definitely smart while you’re figuring out the rest of the business out.   [0:12:39] Steli Efti: I’d say probably one of the constraints on this is that even with your full fledged product, we talk about MVP’s, mineral products. And moving fast, shipping early, iterating. If you know that what you’re launching is even kind of more of a marketing tool, then their actual final product that you’re trying to build, you should probably be even more concerned about resource constraints and speed. So you can’t be planning this to be developed in a six month cycle to be released for a free app because if it’s wrong or if it’s not doing right, you just invested way too much time and energy in it. Do you have a framework typically? It all depends. But what do you think is the right amount of time from specking it out to building it, let’s put … I don’t know if we should add the research time up front or not. But how much time do you think people should have as a framework on investing in building a free app?   [0:13:38] Hiten Shah: That’s a really good question. I like moving super fast on this stuff. So it can take as quick as a week if you already have the research of knowing what problems your customers have and what kind of free tools either exist in the market. So to me, it’s a research first thing. If you don’t have the research, it takes one to two weeks to get the research together typically, especially if you want to really do it right and actually go interview customers. And interview people and understand what problems they actually have, which you might not know yet. For me, the process of doing research, user research, customer research, customer development, all these other great things that are now buzz words but they’re really useful to you if you use them. They lead to the insights that lead to free tools. So to me, it’s actually a core part of product development that you’re paying attention and as you’re doing product development, you’re learning exactly what kind of free tools you can build. You’re also learning what kind of ways you can grow your business too. Because people are telling you all kinds of things if you’re doing that process correctly. And so I like to bake it in, into the product development process. So I’ve been able to figure these kind of ideas out within a week, all the way up to a month depending on if I have a cold start or if I’ve already got some research and some customers to go talk to or research to go look at.   [0:14:57] Steli Efti: I love it. I wanted you to see some numbers so people had the framework. I wanted people to have a “holy shit” moment where they’re like, “Oh my God, this is the time that I should think in.” Because my biggest fear is people are like, “Yeah, I’m going to build a free app.” And once I speckle it out they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to work on this. In four months it should be done.” No, move faster, right? Move a lot faster on this. Awesome, alright. I think that, that’s it for today’s episode. If you already have a free app that’s really working well for your business, please reach out to me and let us know about it. I’m curious about this so I want to learn more about it in general. Or if you are planning to do one and you need some help and some feedback, everybody knows is the man when it comes to product. Reach out, let us know, we want to know what you know, and we want to teach you what we know to help you succeed with this stuff.   [0:15:47] Hiten Shah: Yeah we love this. Let’s do it.   [0:15:49] Steli Efti: Alright, bye bye. [0:15:50] The post 292: Free Tools as Marketing appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about discipline in startups. Running a startup literally means taking a journey into the unknown and founders need to be comfortable with taking on uncertainty and the multiple challenges that are sure to arise. One thing that can help you achieve your goals on this journey is discipline. In this episode, Steli and Hiten the importance of disciple in and why it’s important for founders to be disciplined if they are going to be successful and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – About today’s topic. 00:33 – Steli talks about why he chose today’s topic. 02:57 – Hiten’s relationship with discipline. 05:39 – Steli points out his challenge with being disciplined. 08:46 – Steli talks about what discipline means to him today. 10:49 – The relationship between being disciplined and being emotional. 13:22 – Hiten discusses a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. 13:12 – Why being obsessed with people’s opinion is not a good thing. 17:44 – Steli gives some tips on how and when to be disciplined. 19:33 – How being disciplined can help your mood. Quotes: Discipline has been the single most impactful change that has contributed to my success as a entrepreneur. Discipline is key to success. Always do the things that need to be done. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we wanna talk about discipline in startup, so discipline in general as a personality trait but also in extension as a quality of teams in company cultures and individual contributors. So discipline. Discipline has actually been something that we’ve brought up and has been a consistent theme in many, many of our episodes. For people that have been long time listeners, you’ve heard us talk about it directly or indirectly many, many times, but we realize we have never talked about the subject specifically, and it’s something that I’ve been kind of curious about, it’s something that has become a bigger and bigger theme in my life, and discipline, I’ll lead the discussion with this statement, discipline has been the single most impactful change that I made that contributed the most to my success as an entrepreneur in my companies. Because discipline was the thing that was lacking for most of my entrepreneur career, most of my life, and it’s something I cultivated very late in life, just in the last I don’t know, maybe seven years, six, seven years. So I’ve now become very obsessed about the topic. I’m a huge fan of people like Jocko Willink. I don’t know if you know him with discipline equals freedom, and his books.   [0:01:30] Hiten Shah: I have his latest book. It’s like all black, right?   [0:01:33] Steli Efti: Yes. Yes.   [0:01:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I have it. Yes.   [0:01:36] Steli Efti: And but also people like Jordan Peterson. I don’t know if you know him with like the 12 rules for life or whatever it is, that talks a lot about like a lot of the themes come back to like discipline being the key to having control over yourself, to being able to accomplish the things you really want to accomplish, and discipline is a lot of times the reason when I meet entrepreneurs, especially the ones that are incredibly gifted, that are talented in many ways, it’s the one ingredient that most consistently is the one that stands out to me as the missing piece to their missing success. Like I’m like this person is everything. Why they’re struggling so much, it’s usually discipline is the one thing that I can point to that’s lacking. So first let me ask you because I’m curious, would you call yourself a disciplined person? I’m pretty sure you would, but I’m curious if you would use that term to describe yourself. And did you if you have it today, did you always have it, did you grow up with it? Let’s talk a little personal first here. What’s your relationship with discipline?   [0:02:43] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I find discipline and maturity kind of related, not because I think you have to be mature to be disciplined, or you have to be disciplined, discipline is like a sign of maturity. It’s more so like when you ask me that I would say that for a number of reasons I probably matured really early, and at some point in my life earlier on, like whether it’s in high school, even to some extent in college I’d hang out with people who are older than me, just it just happened, it wasn’t necessarily anything I consciously thought about, and I also get along with people that are older than me, and the reason I mention that is because discipline tends to be something that most people believe comes with age. As you grow older, you kind of get more disciplined, and discipline is also generally a negative word because when I think about discipline I’m like oh, you know, I’ve never been hit in school by a teacher because I wasn’t disciplined, but I’ve definitely been the one that got in trouble a lot for a lack of discipline. In an equivalent of like Sunday school I went to or even in class, like I didn’t mind cracking a joke at the teacher. I wasn’t the class clown or anything by far, but I wouldn’t mind doing that. I would say that I probably had a lack of, in my case, a lack of discipline was not necessarily in my actions but was much more in my words, historically. I can have a lack of discipline with my words much easier than my actions. My actions have been pretty consistent, and I have pretty good discipline with my actions, and I’m very like on top of things when it comes to that, not necessarily with my words. So my relationship with that word and the idea of being disciplined is that in my actions and my behavior I’ve been consistent since a very young age about kind of being disciplined, consistent, having a pattern or structure in a lot of things, but when it comes to my language and my words, I can be sloppy. Meaning I can say one thing … That it depends is definitely something that I know that this podcast gets from me more than you probably, because I’m of the mindset that like there’s multiple points of view out there in the world on anything, and there’s many different ways to do even the same thing like eat a cake, right, or whatever. And some people will do it with their hands, some people will use spoons, some people prefer a fork, and yeah there might be a popular way, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it that way. To me like I think with the words I’m definitely much less disciplined, and have been historically, where I need to work more to be disciplined with my words than I do with my behavior.   [0:05:26] Steli Efti: That’s interesting. For me, I think that my challenge with being disciplined growing up is, A, I grew up in a household where my mom was a single mom with three boys, having a factory worker job, and she’s just an incredibly sweet person, so she was never the type of person to be very hard on us or to enforce rules, and to one degree we obviously as children were using that softness of my mom to basically not take responsibility for almost anything. But at the same time we respected her enough because of the way she lived her life to never really get into any serious, serious trouble. She was always at the edge of it, but never really got into big trouble. I personally like a lot of things came easy to me when I was young, and so very … And then I got a lot of positive reinforcement growing up from my, especially from my family, my mother and my grandfather and bunch of people that it was like so smart and like smart was a word that was thrown around a lot in relation to me, so I think very early on I kind of developed this mind frame of when something doesn’t come easy to me I’m not interested, so I would pick up things, and if I wasn’t instantly obviously gifted in that thing I’d just drop it instantly. I’d be like up, not interested, I’m obviously not gonna be like the best in this, so then I don’t wanna participate at all. That led to me living life or growing up in a way where I would just always choose the thing I was interested, really good at, and that came easy to me, and kind of avoid all the things I didn’t want to do. Because I was, you know, I had a natural ability to problem solve, when I went back the habit got me into any kind of trouble, and because I was always very charming especially as a young kid, I always found my way out of problems, I always knew, and that developed a certain level of self confidence, but then again it reinforced me not having to be disciplined because I kind of like I was living in a framework of I’m not gonna do this because I don’t wanna do it, and even if there’s trouble in sight, I kind of know that I’ll find a way around it, I’ll find a way out of it, it’s not gonna be that bad. That really informed most of my decision making all the way til me being 23 and deciding to sell everything I had and come to San Francisco to build a startup. And the first five years of that startup and all the failures involved with it with very much in form with me always siding on the doing what I feel like doing right now, but not doing necessarily in a lot of times the things that needed to get done, and thinking I can get away with it. But it also comes with a feeling of dissatisfaction, and a feeling of knowing that I’m not living up to my full potential, so that’s kind of my history of like growing up, and so discipline really I was always hardworking, I was always very ambitious, but I always tended towards looking for ways to do the things I liked doing and I was good at doing, and always avoided everything, no matter how small it was … If I didn’t wanna like small things like paying a fine for parking, a parking fine would always escalate to like instead of paying the 25 bucks right now, it would escalate to becoming a $500 bill after the thirtieth warning because I didn’t enjoy having to white a check and pay for this. Like little things would escalate to big, unnecessary problems because I never really cared, I didn’t wanna do it. And to me learning to become consistent and discipline was really the big key that allowed me to take control over myself. And so discipline I think is a really negative word because it always sounds like externally enforced, right, being disciplined somebody is forcing you to do things, it sounds very rigid, it sounds very like bleak, it’s very military, it’s very old school, it’s not creative, it’s not colorful, it’s not inspirational, it’s not fun, but I think that discipline is the personality trait that really empowers personal freedom in the sense of like if you want to do something or if you think something needs to get done you know you’re going to do it because you have control over your own emotions. To me discipline today really just means the control you have over your own emotional household and over your own mental household. Your willpower and your will is dictating what you’re working on and what you’re doing next, and not your mood. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs that I meet, they always they don’t do what needs to get done. A lot of times the reason why they get in trouble because they skew towards wanting to work on the things that are a little bit more fun.   [0:10:29] Hiten Shah: I really like that. I think that that’s a really good way to think about discipline, and it actually makes sense even in my world where I can talk very emotionally but my behavior is unemotional. And that’s where the discipline kind of comes in, right? If I’m more thoughtful before I speak, I tend to have better results, and my discipline, everything just gets better that way. So I like that. I think you know that being disciplined, you’re almost implying this, and I’m curious what you think, but you might even just have said it, but it’s like what you’re telling me is that being disciplined means being unemotional. Is that correct?   [0:11:18] Steli Efti: That is a good question. So I haven’t said that. I’m emotional. I’m not, no. I actually, no, I will actually completely disagree with this because being disciplined to me means actually being very emotional, but being able to override emotions because if I don’t feel anything, maybe if I have a regimen and I just do things everyday, and there’s not a question of if I feel like it or not, maybe that’s the type of discipline that a lot of people, that some people have. To me, discipline means to me discipline is the most valuable, it is the most valuable at times where when I am emotional, at times where I am in a mood that doesn’t lend itself to … Like when I don’t wanna do something, when I feel lethargic or depressed, or tired or moody, or angry, when my emotions with led me to do things that are self destructing or not productive, and my mind in this case, and my commitment to certain things is overriding that emotion, and I go well, I know I feel like not doing anything right now, but I’m gonna go over and fill out this paperwork and get it done because it needs to get done and I said I would do it. It’s overriding that emotion, to me. Discipline is most useful and valuable when I’m the most irrational and emotional, or when I’m in the most moody sense. When I don’t feel any emotion, when I just go through like habitual things that I do every single day because I’m committed to it, I mean it’s valuable there as well, but the most valuable to me is when I am emotional. That’s when discipline is the most valuable tool in my toolbox.   [0:13:06] Hiten Shah: Okay. I’m gonna read something I wrote based on a quote, and how I was feeling about a week ago. So I wrote this on a Saturday, I think.   [0:13:14] Steli Efti: Okay.   [0:13:15] Hiten Shah: And it was on Instagram, and I put it on Facebook too. So the quote is from Mahatma Gandhi, and the quote is a man is but a product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes. I rephrased that a little bit and said a person is but a product of their thoughts, what they think they become, just because I actually believe we should be more gender neutral in our quotes. Mahatma Gandhi didn’t know any better at the time, but I feel that is just that’s how I would rephrase it, so I did that. Then I said I was pondering this quote today as I reflect on my own thoughts over the past week, and realize how much of at impact they have on me and those who are around me. My thoughts this week were coming from a place of anxiety and doubt, not typical of my mindset, so I took some time and went for a walk. Then I meditated in silence for an hour. I actually did this because I just had to, because again, my thoughts were full of anxiety and doubt and that’s not me. Then what I wrote after that was what came to me was a reminder to respect my own thoughts, and countless memories and feelings of what happens when I take thoughts full of anxiety and doubt and turn them into actions for positive change. So for me, the reason I shared that is because when you were talking I was like oh, yeah, so what Steli is saying is no, discipline is actually about emotion, but discipline is more about getting through emotion in a productive way, and making sure you’re able to do that consistently. Because that’s the problem I had that week. The whole week was full of this doubt that I didn’t really recognize, and I had to go spend time with it by going for a walk and then coming back, and still not feeling the best but better, and realizing I just needed to be quiet, and just meditate, and it helps me because I actually don’t have a hard time shutting off my brain when I’m meditating, unlike I think a lot of people I’ve met. I can also sit here and think about nothing and not really like … You know, it’s just okay. But when I’m not in that mode, that’s not my best self. So I think this discipline, this idea of discipline being able to move through emotion that are holding you back, it seems to be kind of what I think you’re getting at. So it’s not that like being disciplined means you’re unemotional. It’s that being disciplined means you’re working through your emotions in a disciplined way. Right? You’re recognizing them and you’re working through them, and I think that this has something a lot to do with our mindfulness episode as well where we talk a lot about things like this. So to me it comes full circle, where we did this episode because you and I talk about discipline and things like that a lot. We’ve also done a lot of episodes like it, like 286. Episode 286 was a mindfulness one, and it really just boils down to how are you able to control your emotion and be disciplined about it, because everything starts and ends there because what I noticed is I was impacting the people around me with this doubt and anxiety that I normally don’t feel, and I haven’t felt like that in a long time in that way for such a prolonged period of time, and it was just a good reminder and recognition that like I know how to manage that. I can be disciplined about my emotions because for me, again, as I said before when you asked the question, I can spill that emotion into my words and my language really easily. Most people who know me know this like really well. But people who don’t know me very well probably can’t guess that, and that’s because I’m able to manage my emotions very well even in times of crisis, partly because of just childhood upbringing as well as like starting so many companies. It’s like eh, you know, like whatever. Like bring the next thing, it’s okay. Whatever it is, good, bad, ugly, we get through it all every time, right? So it really, really inspired me to share that because I think that’s what you’re trying to say. I wouldn’t want anyone to leave this podcast today and think that we’re telling you to be unemotional. We’re actually probably telling you the opposite. Be more emotional, but figure out what the emotions are and get through them in a disciplined way.   [0:17:34] Steli Efti: Yeah, using like whenever your emotions are, you know, whenever your emotions are pointing you in a productive place, in a positive place, you use them as fuel, but when they are not you don’t use them as excuse, you don’t use them as a wall, or as a prison just because you don’t feel like doing something you’re not doing it, or just because you’re insecure you’re lashing out, or just because you’re angry you’re acting irrational, or just because you’re feeling a little depressed and sad you just let yourself go and don’t do the work and don’t show up, and don’t honor your word or your commitments to your team mates, your company, your customers, whatever it is. I think that the message really is that discipline can be a way to again not be like some kind of a robotic soldier archetype that doesn’t feel anything, and just existing with everyday in and out regardless of what the world looks like. No, the idea is to be a passionate emotional creative human being, but use like be in control of your emotions in a sense that when you have inevitable human negative emotions, these are not, your emotions don’t become a tyrant that are pushing you around and get the worst out of you, but you can overcome or control or push through your emotions to always be your best self, and always do the things that you know are important to do, and that’s gonna make you feel amazing, like that’s gonna instantly take a negative emotion and turn it into a massive positive one. There’s nothing, there’s very few things in life that make me feel as proud and as excited as when I really didn’t feel like doing something and I did it and still kept my word, and then instantly the emotion changes and that negativity turns around to feeling proud of myself and feeling happy that I went through it, and although I didn’t want to, I’m at a much better place when I take an action although I didn’t feel like it than when I take an action when I feel like it, right?   [0:19:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:19:41] Steli Efti: This sounds bizarre, but you know I know that I overcame that inner tyrant of emotion, I know that I pushed through it, and that makes me feel a little better about myself. And then I think what else can I do that I didn’t feel like doing recently, what else is difficult. Like I’m on a roll here, let’s go. Let’s go at it.   [0:19:58] Hiten Shah: Get to it, yeah.   [0:19:58] Steli Efti: Yeah, let’s get to it. And so some of my best days where I create the most value start not in a positive place emotionally but in a negative place emotionally, funny enough, and that was something that was completely lacking in my life for most of it. So I think many startup teams, many founders, many entrepreneurs because the trade, you have to be creative, but because you do a lot of creative problem solving, because you are tackling and creating new solutions, new products and new services, a lot of the creativity, a lot of that ingenuity is an incredibly powerful thing. And a lot of startups are born out of positive emotions, an emotion of inspiration, having big goals and visions, and being motivated and wanting to accomplish things, and all that stuff is fucking beautiful, but the one that if you have all of that and you’re consistently struggling, maybe you’ve gone many, many years as an entrepreneurial career, I would take a hard look today in the mirror and ask myself could it be that I’m lacking discipline. Could it be that discipline is the missing piece of the puzzle that if I could push through my emotions especially when I don’t feel like doing things or when I am afraid of doing things, could if I just changed that, if I worked on that personal habit, could that make all the difference, or is that the thing that’s holding me back? And in many cases, not all, but in many cases, that’s something I point to entrepreneurs, I push that button, I have them look at that, and then when they start working with it, it makes a massive difference.   [0:21:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.   [0:21:32] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it from us for this episode.   [0:21:35] Hiten Shah: Get discipline.   [0:21:37] Steli Efti: Get discipline. We’ll hear you soon. Bye bye. [0:21:39] The post 291: Discipline in Startups appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about a very interesting topic, and that is “what people really think about you”. As human beings, it’s natural for us to be curious about other people’s opinion about us, and knowing this can be quite beneficial to us, especially in a working environment. One way you can find out this information is by actually asking for feedback from others. However, this can be very challenging for some of us. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about self-awareness and the importance of feedback and why it’s important to provide it and seek it and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28  Steli talks about why he chose today’s topic. 04:37  Hiten shares an experience he had with a co-founder and his opinions on the subject. 07:07  Steli points out that people who tend to have strong personality tend to be the sweetest people. 08:46  Steli give an example of how our lives can be impacted by people’s opinions of us. 11:35  How to find a balance between caring and not caring what people think about you. 12:22  How you can get feedback about yourself. 13:12  Why being obsessed with people’s opinion is not a good thing. 14:37  One of the reasons people might not give you their honest opinions about you. 14:50  Why listening to people’s opinion is sometimes necessary. 15:26  Ask them because you want to understand their perception of yourself. Quotes: The way people perceive us impacts our life whether we know it or not. People tend to assume that everyone thinks like they do. It’s unhealthy to imagine a perception of yourself that’s not true.   [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and on today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about this kind of loose topic, that I’m sure we’ll get into an interesting discussion, but it’s something we all deal with, which is what people really think about you. And I’m going to call you out Steli first by asking you why you picked this topic for today because you picked it.   [0:00:26] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:00:26] Hiten Shah: I just get to announce it, I guess.   [0:00:28] Steli Efti: Yes. So, here’s the background story. A good friend of mine, he recently had this experience where he was given some very kind of honest and harsh feedback about himself. So, he joined a startup with a bunch of other friends of mine that he was friendly with before and then he decided they recruited him and they decided to join them and work with them. And at some point, they had like a feedback round and they told him that at times, he can be very very harsh and very hard to people. And that to him, was like an earth-shattering … At first, he didn’t believe it. All right, so at first he was like, “You know, I’ve lived my entire life. I’ve gathered a lifetime of perception of who I am or what people think of me.” And this thing, apparently, that him very hard harsh and hard on people, that was something that was completely outside his worldview about himself, and everything that he let through his filter. So, he went to his roommate and one of these best friends and told them about the feedback that he just got and was like, “Is this really true?” And his roommate friend was like, “Abso-fucking-lutely. Are you crazy? Of course, this is true.” And that blew his mind. And he was talking to me just recently about this, was telling me he was like, “This is like … This is really fucking with my self-perception, like and my self-awareness and my like thinking maybe I don’t know who I am and what people really think about me because this is something I was completely unaware of.” And we were talking about this a little bit and I told him, “Listen.” And he had done a bunch of stuff he … We can get into this a little bit later, but he actually he went through the trouble of creating this really elaborate like survey about himself, right? And sending it to tons of people like ex-co-workers, bosses, friends, family members in a quest to learn more about himself. But, one of the things that I told him, you know, once a year myself and bunch of friends go on a sailing trip for a few days in the Mediterranean and they’re all entrepreneurs and he’s been on that trip from year one. And I told him, “Listen you’re not unique in this, like think about … Let me ask you this, think about all these like the group of ten good friends where we go sailing for a whole week and we have all these really deep discussions, and we’re so honest, and we’re so open about each other, and about our ideas in businesses, and all that. Let me ask you, do you have certain opinions about certain people on this boat that they would be surprised or shocked if they learned that you had those kind of judgments, or opinions about them?” And he started laughing. He was like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “It’s exactly the same thing about you, and about me, and about everybody.” There’s things people think about us that they might be telling us. Now, it’s different and we’re going to get into this in the discussion, that’s why I wanted to talk about you with this. It’s different with him more interesting in his case because he heard something about himself that I think is pretty obvious that he was so shocked about, so there’s something interesting there. Why did he, you know, live 35 years of his life not learning this about himself? But, it made me think about all the people I interact with, even friends at times, that you know, some of them I’m brutally honest with about everything. Some of them I’m editing myself at times, you know, for various reasons, and it made me think of like people don’t really know what the perception of them is that other people have, and what people really think about them. And I thought it’d be a … It’s one of these interesting topics you never read about, you never hear about a lot, so I thought it’s the perfect topic of the two of us to work with and to brainstorm a little bit around. So, yeah. That’s the genius of why I wanted to talk to you about this.   [0:04:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean, on one hand I’m like, super interesting story. I had an experience very similar with a close friend of mine and his co-founder. The co-founder was the one who kind of was this person who didn’t realize how they are, and how they’re previewed by other people, so what do people really think about me is such a great question to ask yourself. At the same time, I almost want to say like, “Who cares.” You know? And what’s interesting is that this person never thought about that question, it seems like, and they were in the full-on camp of, who cares. Right, whether they knew it or not. They were in the camp of like, “Well, I’m just this way.” And what I’ve seen and heard from people who have this sort of realization or either shaken up or like can’t actually grok it, which is actually more commonly the case that I’ve seen, is that they assume that everyone else thinks like they do. So, your friend likely isn’t trying to be abrasive. He’s just like, “Oh, yeah you know, when I talk. I’m just direct because everyone likes it direct.” Because if you talk to me you should be direct with me and things like that. That’s like the most common thing I hear. And like, this is like probably one … There’s an ambulance coming by, great. This is a … Well there you go, someone’s dying. Their ego’s dying. So, I think that there are … The people that I meet that are like this are just not conscious to the fact that we all, as humans, are different. There’s another one. That ones a firetruck.   [0:06:13] Steli Efti: Now, there’s really something going down in your neighborhood, right?   [0:06:16] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. And so, I don’t know. I mean for me, I feel like that type of person is actually not the majority. It’s probably like 20, 30% of people that somehow have found a way to just live their lives and no one’s been willing to tell them how they make them feel, and it’s almost like we accept … You know, in general, we either accept people for who they are, sort of speak, or we’re just not willing to tell people when they’re being assholes or something.   [0:06:51] Steli Efti: I think with him the interesting case is that he is not just harsh and abrasive all the time, right? He’s actually an incredibly sweet and caring guy as well, and I think that what one hypothesis …   [0:07:04] Hiten Shah: By the way Steli, that’s usually the case.   [0:07:06] Steli Efti: That is usually the case, or many times the case. But, the thing with him is that I think that he’s gotten throughout his life, such strong feedback on the sweet side, right? And on his caring side. He’s got like this overexposure to positive reinforcement, positive feedback, verbal feedback, and highlighting of that personality trait of his, that kind of informed his opinion, and his self-imagined, and I assume that whenever he was super harsh or hard on people, because he was also so sweet to them and because people are not as confrontational. That’s just something he heard a lot less feedback about, right? That’s something that people were not … You know, obviously they didn’t compliment him, but also obviously they didn’t confront him on that at all, right? So, he was completely unaware. It’s like a blind spot about his personality. I think that … I’ve observed this many times in startups in general, and in teams as well, there’s certain people … We’ve talked about this is prior episodes, self-awareness, right? How well do you know who you are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are? And also, within social constraints and startup, a team, company, economies, like we all live as human social animals. We all interact with others, and live within that, and function within that. And so, the way people perceive us is impacting, you know, is impacting us if know it or not, directly or indirectly, right? It will … And I’ll give you an example. I know plenty of personalities in the startup world that are incredibly smart. Some of them, you know, geniuses even. People that are really hard working. People that are fun to be around and cool, but at times, like in your face delusional about certain things, right? Either about who they … Kind of like thinking of themselves way too highly or thinking that they’ve done something way better than they really have done it, or thinking that their personality is way more magnetic or way more funny than they are. Personalities are like overstate certain things And you can tell sometimes when groups interact with them and they tell a story, or they tell about some milestone that was hit, or some project that was worked on, that people like go through the mental exercise of like dividing everything by half because it comes from this source. “Oh, if you know Bob is saying, you know, they did X million in revenue, they probably did half of it. Oh, if Bob says, you know, the party was crazy, and here’s all the amazing things that happened, probably half of the stuff really happened.” And nobody really tells this mythical, obviously hypothetical, quote-unquote Bob. Nobody tells these people that or calls them out, not typically. But, they make the mental math and it affects how they perceive them. They perceive them as maybe smart, hard-working, maybe even successful to a certain degree, but they also perceive them as somebody that you can’t really believe, or somebody that doesn’t have that much credibility, or somebody that’s probably not going to … Just exaggerates what happened and they don’t know it, obviously they don’t know it, right? They don’t pick up on any of the subtle clues that are in the room in their interactions with people. And then there’s even the … You know, and those are the nice cases, but there’s even the worse cases where people get feedback and they just filter it out. And there’s a fine balance. You said something previous with like, “Who cares.” Don’t let outside perceptions of what people really think of you. I mean, there’s all these motivational quotes of like, you know, “You shouldn’t care as much about what people think about you.” Right? And to a certain degree, I agree with this, but on the other side I also disagree with it because I am like when you’re completely blind to what people think about you, it can have an impact of why you don’t get certain opportunities, or why don’t certain people don’t respond to your requests, or why certain things are not working out, and you’re not succeeding because you’re just completely unaware that people are judging you in a way, and discrediting you, or don’t want to work with you, or don’t want to give you certain opportunities. And if you’re not aware of it, you cannot fix it. You know, you cannot attack the problem, so how do you find the balance between knowing like, not giving a fuck what people care about you, and knowing what people care about you at times where it’s useful and valuable?   [0:11:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think it’s in a way it’s a balancing act, so you’re not surprised like your friend was and like I’ve seen people get surprised of like just having some kind of gauge. I think what’s most important is like there are always people whose opinion we value. Just period, right?   [0:11:42] Steli Efti: Yep.   [0:11:43] Hiten Shah: We just value their opinion about anything, right? It’s not like a blanket like, “Oh, I value his opinion on marketing or sales.” It’s like I value that person’s opinion, she tells me what I need to hear when I need to hear it. And there’s at least one person in your life, maybe more than one, hopefully more than one that you feel that about. I think you should ask those people. You don’t need to ask everyone.   [0:12:03] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:12:04] Hiten Shah: Ask those people. You know? And ask those people, you know, what the good, bad, and ugly about you is. And just say, “I’m going to shut up now, and you’re going to talk, and I’ll just listen.” Take some notes, you know? And you’ll learn something, but I think when people try to do like this blanket ask everyone they know and things like that, it can be a little challenging to get signal from all that noise. And it can actually make it counterproductive where you tend to ignore the things that you don’t believe about yourself just because so many people are saying random stuff, right? And you might not value their opinion. So, to me, it starts with like well, who are the people, what are the relationships I value? And sometimes, it’s just people you interact with a lot, so it could be your family members, or you know, even your colleagues are work, and just get their gauge. And you know, I think it’s healthy to hear feedback. I think it’s also healthy to understand how you are perceived by other people. It’s unhealthy to imagine a perception that’s not true.   [0:13:10] Steli Efti: Yep. It’s unhealthy to measure perception that’s not true, and it’s even unhealthy at times to be obsessed about what you think your imaginative version of what people are thinking about you at all times, right? So, you walk into a room and you’re just thinking, “What is everybody thinking about me? How are people judging me?”   [0:13:35] Hiten Shah: Right.   [0:13:35] Steli Efti: Like if you’re obsessed about other people’s opinions of you and run like a mental calculation all the time, usually it’s one that’s very critical, right? Of like how people are criticizing you in their own heads or judging you, that’s a lot of times what crushes people and makes them very insecure, and makes them shell up, and not be able to enjoy themselves, not be able to be, you know, living their full potential. At the same time, you know, I think asking the question to the right people. This is the killer I think a piece of advice here. Ask the right people about what their judgments and opinions are about you, the good, bad, and the ugly, and then listen. This is the thing. We’ve talked about feedback, and how to receive it, and how to give it. This is one of the big reasons why people don’t give you their honest opinion about you. It’s because it’s a very unbalanced risk-reward ratio for the person giving the feedback, all right, because many people cannot deal well when they’re criticized, or when they hear sometimes very critical about themselves. So, if you want to truly understand what people think about you, then you need to ask, but also listen, right? Because if you listen, and if you’re open-minded, if you’re ready, you should always be ready to hear them. It doesn’t mean that you need to agree with them, but it does also mean that you need to want to instantly change their mind about things. You should just ask the questions, show that you’re open-minded, that you truly honestly honor their honesty if they tell you something critical. And if you demonstrate that, they’re going to give you even more honest feedback, right? They’re going to see, “Oh, this person’s really ready to hear me, you know, maybe I should repay them with honesty.” And then your job shouldn’t be to try to change their mind, or to excuse yourself, or explain yourself, or be like, “Oh, really think I’m super harsh and abrasive? Well, it’s not really that I’m harsh, it’s that … ” Shut the fuck up. Like, that’s not the time when you ask for feedback to be trying to change people’s minds. It’s more about you understanding what people truly think about you. And then, you don’t need to instantly act on it. You don’t need to believe it even, or buy into it instantly, but you meditate on it. You sit on it for a little bit, and then you ask yourself, “All right, what do I do with this knowledge?” Is there something I want to improve? Is there something I want to change? Or is there something that I think is just part of the overall package and now it’s good to know that some people think this way about me, but I won’t necessarily act on it. But, I think finding the right people to ask is the first piece that you highlighted that I think is crucial. And my double-click on this, on my follow-up on this is ask them the right way. Ask them because you really want to hear their opinion about you, not the truth. You know, but just their truth about you. And not asking them because you want to change their mind, or because you want them to think a certain about you but ask them because you want to understand their point of view about you, and their perception. And then taking the time to actually meditate, analyze, and then potentially take action or not take action. But, having an instant increase self-awareness in terms of what the perception are of some people that are close to you and whose opinion you value.   [0:16:59] Hiten Shah: Couldn’t agree more.   [0:17:00] Steli Efti: All right.   [0:17:00] Hiten Shah: That’s that, right?   [0:17:00] Steli Efti: I think that’s it for this episode. Yes, what do people really think about us?   [0:17:05] Hiten Shah: That’s right.   [0:17:06] Steli Efti: An interesting question to ask once in a while. All right, that’s it from us, we’ll hear you very soon. [0:17:10] The post 290: What People Really Think About You appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.