For the love of God, please tell me what your company does
Back after a long summer break. The focus for this issue is growth and scaling. But let’s start with the basics first:
As the saying goes “If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough.” And if you don’t understand your business well enough, you’ve got work to do.
This article nails it when it comes to the need to be completely clear with your customers as to what your company does.
More and more often, upon discovering a new company or product, I visit their website hoping to find out what it is they do, but instead get fed a mash of buzzwords about their “team” and “values”. And this isn’t a side dish—this is the main entrée of these sites, with a coherent explanation of the company’s products or services rarely occupying more than a footnote on the menu.
Case Study: AirbnB
You may have seen this post as it got a lot of shares over the summer. But just in case you didn’t I’m including it as it’s one you shouldn’t miss.
Wait too long to automate, though, and problems grow so enormous they’re harder to fix. And if you don’t have your basic processes well in hand when you take the next big plunge — a next-generation product, for example — the complexity could be defeating. In the early days of a marketplace, there’s always a struggle between growth plans and mundane maintenance. Keep an eye on your edge cases so you’ll know when it’s time to pull resources away from expansion to clean things up closer to home.
An existing feature, which we finally decided to pay attention to, generated more growth than any other feature to date! Building something isn’t always enough — you need to understand the emotional and operational needs of your users to get the most out of a feature. Indeed, sometimes the heaviest lifting in product development is telling a story for your users, showing them a better path forward.
From Zero to $100 Million: Growth Lessons from Brian Balfour
A useful framework for scaling up a company that avoids the dangers of being product-centric. Balfour’s framework takes you through four stages of fit:
Market-Product Fit
Product-Channel Fit
Channel-Model Fit
Model-Market Fit
The biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs make is they think they can build an amazing product in isolation, and once they have a few customers loving it, they can Frankenstein channels onto it afterwards. But it’s actually the exact opposite — you have to build your product to fit the channels. You control what your product is, but you don’t control the rules of the channel.
3 Questions That Can Help Save Your Business, Before It’s Too Late
Great advice on how to avoid being disrupted if you’re an established business. Which also therefore includes some gems on how to disrupt an established business.
Disruptive startups go after high retention, low satisfaction products.
Disruptive startups will unbundle your products
A product is merely the current state of which you deliver value. With some creativity and guidance, you can deliver even more value in a different form while building on your strengths and vision.
The Simple Lovable Product
Lean Startup is great as philosophy, but people often struggle to implement it successfully. This article identifies why, and suggests a better alternative which customers will more readily accept, the Simple Lovable Complete Product:
In order for the product to be small and delivered quickly, it has to be simple. Customers accept simple products every day. Even if it doesn’t do everything needed, as long as the product never claimed to do more than it does, customers are forgiving. For example, it was okay that early versions Google Docs had only 3% of the features of Microsoft Word, because Docs did a great job at what it was primarily designed for, which is simplicity and real-time collaboration.
Docs was simple, but also complete. This is decidedly different from the classic MVP, which by definition isn’t complete (and in fact is embarrassing). “Simple” is good, “incomplete” is not. The customer should have a genuine desire to use the product, as-is. Not because it’s version 0.1 of something complex, but because it’s version 1.0 of something simple.
Runway | The cash planning tool for startups
Most startups die from running out of cash. Runway helps founders manage this precious resource and preserve and extend their runway. It’s free, provided as a public service.
Before you go…
Thanks for reading this far.
Conventional wisdom about newsletters says that you are supposed to publish them on a strictly regular schedule. I can see the logic in that, but it doesn’t feel right. I don’t want to send out a weekly issue if I haven’t come across content that is good enough just because there is a deadline. Your email is full enough of mediocre content as it is.
So for the moment, I am going to send it out as often as I have five solid articles to share. I suspect that is going to end up meaning that I send a newsletter out every 2-4 weeks on average.
As always, my aim is to give you practical tools that you can use, so please let me know what’s working for you and what isn’t, either by “liking” it or commenting below, or just hit reply if you’re a subscriber.
And if you like it, please forward it to a friend.
Thanks,
Paul