🚨 3 lessons for entrepreneurs
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a week.
Enjoy the 113th Podup, with special thanks to ChatGPT Consulting.
Today, we’ll dive into the best insights and ideas from Lenny’s Podcast.
There's always a new note-taking app on the block. Evernote and Roam are gathering dust while Notion, Obsidian, and Mem are taking the limelight. But why does this circle of life persist?
As Brian Balfour puts it, people don't remember things unless they write them down. The value of note-taking is crystal clear, and it shows why entrepreneurs want to win this market.
To celebrate the importance of note-taking, Brian shares the top 10 lessons from his entrepreneurial journey. To save you time, I've highlighted the best three to help you improve your business.
#1 Tell me what it takes to win
Initiatives and ideas often come from the bottom up within the organization. But they've been filtered by the time they get to you. People think, 'I don't want to propose something that's going to get denied' or 'This might sound a bit too wild.'
I've learned to say, 'Tell me what it takes to win, even if the costs seem really high. We can then collaborate on how we might approach this while keeping costs low.' This prevents my team from wasting time and resources on watered-down projects.
Brian Balfour
#2 Become a systems level thinker
Acquisition. Retention. Monetization. When you change one, you affect them all. People underestimate how interconnected these elements are. Often, retention problems are created because you're acquiring the wrong customers, or monetization issues stem from engagement problems. The actual solution often ends up being in a different part of the system.
Brian Balfour
#3 Define your anti-target market
Solving for everyone is solving for no one. Many product and growth mistakes stem from this. When you define who you're solving for, you start to justify a bunch of adjacent personas or use cases. Instead, you need to be specific about who you aren't solving for. This is a better guardrail for your team.
There's a Harvard Business School case study about exactly this. It focuses on HubSpot's early retention problems. After conducting research, HubSpot realized they were selling into four use cases. On the surface they felt similar but they were actually very different.
They identified one use case to focus on and said, 'We're not going to serve these three other use cases.' They aligned all the sales comp behind it. They aligned all of their marketing around it. Awareness of their anti-target market helped solve their retention issues.
Brian Balfour
Why it matters
It's crucial to capture and organize your learnings. The key is finding what method works for you and sticking to it. Like to write? Select an app you already use daily. Prefer audio? Record voice notes.
By making your lessons easy to reference when you need them, you'll avoid repeating the same mistake twice. You'll become a more efficient problem solver and identify opportunities faster.
Next steps
Start documenting your own learnings, then apply Brian’s lessons to your business:
Foster open dialogue. Encourage your team to share raw, unfiltered ideas on what it takes to win. This will help you identify opportunities you might otherwise miss and avoid investing in projects that don't move the needle.
Think holistically. Don't just focus on one aspect like acquisition or monetization. Understand how changes in one area affect the entire system. This will help you identify the root cause of problems and find effective solutions.
Be selective. Clearly define not just your target market but also your anti-target market. Know who you're not serving to maintain focus and align your team's efforts.
Your thoughts?
Thanks to ChatGPT Consulting for making this post possible…
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Quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast.