⛪️ Why Mormons are selling machines
GM, this is Podup #13. Congrats, you saved 5 hours 3 mins listening time
What you need to know
⛪️ Why Mormons are selling machines
💵 a16z’s latest investment thesis
🖥 The drag and drop revolution
❤️🔥 Brutal is the best kind of feedback
Build resilience through sales
My First Million: Lessons From Sam's New Business Venture, High Stakes Gambling, and More on App...
3 min read vs 1 hour 23 mins listening
Ben Wilson is a Mormon. Shaan has always proclaimed Mormons as great sales people. So, this is the episode we’ve been waiting for - Ben opened up about his mission and the sales pitch he used to convert people to Mormonism.
What they say
Ben sets the scene
You get three weeks of training if you’re speaking English.
If you’re learning a language, it depends on the difficulty. I got 6 weeks of training [to learn Spanish].
I converted low 30s on my mission in El Paso, Texas.
How many doors did I knock on during that time? Hundreds of doors a day, every day, for two years.
Ben Wilson
Shaan breaks his public math rule
We’re doing some public math, this deserves it.
If you did 150 doors a day, you knocked on 109K doors.
You did 32 out of 109K. So that’s 0.02%. Fractions of a percent.
Can you give me the speed version of what is a pitch. You physically knock on a door, I open up. What happens?
Shaan Puri
Ben reveals the Mormon playbook
I’d say ‘Hi my name is Elder Wilson, this is my companion with me Elder Lopez. How are you doing today?’
You start off by asking them questions like ‘Do you believe in God? Do you go to church?’. You start by relating to them about their faith.
‘You said you believe in Jesus Christ. We also believe in Jesus Christ.’
‘[Tells story]. If you know that Christ’s church is on Earth, is that something that would be interesting to you?’
Ben Wilson
What I say
Why it matters: Door to door sales builds resiliency. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling encyclopedias or religion. If you can maintain a positive attitude at a 0.02% conversion rate, imagine the energy and enthusiasm you’d have closing deals at 100X the hit rate.
Sales is a numbers game and requires constant momentum to succeed. It’s just as much about ability as it is mental strength, so you need to embrace being told no to be successful over the long term.
Between the lines: Let’s breakdown a couple of reasons why Mormons have grown to 16M members worldwide.
1. The pitch grabs your attention. By immediately asking if you believe in God, you’re momentarily taken aback. Rarely is this the first question you’re asked when meeting someone new. It only takes a few seconds to process what was asked, but that allows the Elder to jump the first hurdle - the possibility of you immediately shutting the door in their face.
2. Rapport is built very quickly between you and the Elder. If you believe in Jesus Christ, then the Elder has an instant connection, because they do as well. Sure, there’s a bunch of differences, but having this one thing in common makes the Elder that bit more relatable so you continue your conversation.
Government is stuck in the Jurassic period
Acquired: American Dynamism (with Katherine Boyle) on Apple Podcasts
Show Acquired, Ep American Dynamism (with Katherine Boyle) - 5 Jun 2022
3 min read vs 1 hour 22 mins listening
What is American dynamism? a16z coined this strategy to reflect their investments in companies that support the national interest - think aerospace, defence, education, housing, manufacturing, supply chain, and transportation. If the US government is your customer, competitor or key stakeholder, then you fit in this bucket.
What they say
What are the counter arguments to American dynamism?
These are hard sectors. The counter argument to investing in the physical world is that it’s not pure software.
The argument against investing in these sectors is they’ve been around a long time, so there’s often a lot of regulatory capture. There’s entrenched interests and large players.
These companies take extraordinary founders [to succeed]. Sometimes they have technical risk, sometimes they require more capital upfront, sometimes they have longer periods of how long they have to stay private.
These companies usually become holding companies very quickly and attract all of the talent. There’s finite talent around things like aerospace and defence.
They’re harder to build at the beginning but toward the middle of the part of these company’s trajectory they’re really just competing against themselves and legacy incumbents.
Katherine Boyle
The opportunity for disruption
Why has the cost of starting a startup gone down tremendously? You don’t have to build everything from scratch anymore. You can buy.
The one place that still [builds everything itself] is government. It’s incredible. They’re using taxpayer dollars to build internally. Technology has not touched these sectors.
Katherine Boyle
What I say
Why it matters: Government officials are so slow to adopt technology, I’m surprised they don’t ride to work on horseback and write with a quill and ink. All Americans would be better off if entrenched institutions were open to reform and their staff were empowered to buy instead of build. Behaviour change is difficult, particularly when things have been done a certain way for decades. Use this as an example of what not to do when building your company culture. Always embrace change, technology and new ways of doing things.
Between the lines: If you dedicate your life to improving education, housing, and the like, then I take my hat off to you. But, if you intend to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX (aerospace) and Flexport (logistics) by building a company that fundamentally changes the way an industry is run, then I warn you - the chances of succeeding are <1%. These are truly moonshot ideas and change like this rarely comes around twice. If you're a first-time entrepreneur, get your first win under your belt before going head to head with the US government.
Yes or no to no-code?
Startups For the Rest of Us: Episode 605 | Building a SaaS with Little Dev Experience, Using No ...
3 min read vs 42 mins listening
How powerful really is no-code? Some people say it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Others argue that drag and drop apps like Bubble and Softr are still years away from the complexity required to build real SaaS products. Ruben Gamez and Rob Walling share their thoughts on the state of no-code and it’s future capabilities.
What they say
Ruben chooses his side
I was excited about no-code at one point. I was super curious about how it was working and if people were building real businesses with it.
In those cases where I asked people what they were doing with it, the answer was the same. It was interesting but it wasn’t there to where they could build a SaaS.
You can create simple products to prove out an idea, but in many of those situations I question whether you even need to build something and if you can run it with people.
Ruben Gamez
Rob sits in the same camp
No-code is great for being quick to build, easy to maintain, and not needing to code, so build an MVP or some internal tools.
But the scalability makes me nervous. There’s some brittleness because it’s integrated with Zapier and 1 out of 100 of those don’t work, or out of 500, whatever number it is, it’s too much for my comfort zone.
Rob Walling
What I say
Why it matters: Ruben makes a great point - there’s such an emphasis on building an MVP that people often miss an even simpler way to validate an idea. For example, if you’re creating a marketplace, consider using a form + manual matching rather than a self-serve two sided platform.
Where Ruben is wrong, in my opinion, is the power of no-code. Take the Bloom Institute of Technology (you may have heard of it as Lambda School before one of the worst rebrands in history). They raised over $100M as a coding school yet used no-code for their website and automations. Sure, this a rare case, but we're only at the start of the no-code revolution.
Between the lines: Example number two is Podup. I’m building a review and roundup platform for you to be able to create an account, upvote episodes, see all of your favorites in one place, and even submit roundups if you’re a budding writer. This, all with the power of no-code.
I’m using Softr and would recommend it in a heartbeat. No-code platforms are flexible enough to build large businesses and we’ll see plenty more examples emerge over the coming years.
Thanks to Joel, Podup subscriber #110, for recommending this episode. Reply with your favorite episode for a chance to have this featured next week.
Write for a 5 year old
My First Million: MFM Demo Day: 5 Startups Pitch Sam & Shaan and Raise $1.7M on Apple Podcasts
Show My First Million, Ep MFM Demo Day: 5 Startups Pitch Sam & Shaan and Raise $1.7M - 9 Jun 2022
2 min read vs 1 hour 36 mins listening
Sam and Shaan hosted their own version of Shark Tank. Five entrepreneurs pitched their startups on Stonks in the hope of securing investment from the gruelling panel or the live audience. One such entrepreneur had a nightmare pitch. It was confusing and lacked any kind of storytelling. Sam and Shaan shared words of wisdom on how to improve.
What they say
Be layman proof
The simple test here is to say the first 30 or 60 seconds of your pitch to a friend and then be like ‘Can you play that back to me? Based on what I said, what does my company do?’
What you wanna know is, do they get it? First of all, you have to get it. Then are you interested in it? Does this sound compelling?
If they don’t get it and it’s not compelling, don’t move forward with the rest of the pitch.
You need a friend or random people who’re going to do that.
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters: Direct, constructive feedback is often the only way change truly happens. A half hearted approach doesn’t do anyone any favors. It’ll reduce the likelihood of the feedback being taken on board and applied in the future.
Shaan’s feedback was spot on - you need to keep your pitch simple and tell a story. Talk to your audience like you’d talk to a five year old. Tell a story with a protagonist to help them follow along, use language and terminology that lay people will understand, and focus on making people excited.
Between the lines: His advice about being able to repeat your pitch back to you can be applied to a myriad of other things: your website, your cold email, your social media ads, the list goes on.
My wife, Mary Alice, does exactly that for Podup. She’s not interested in business podcasts but that’s a good thing. She copyedits every edition and goes beyond just sentence structure and spelling. She challenges whether something is relevant and asks whether an acronym is known by everyone or just a select few.
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.