🧩 Test your Founder Market Fit
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What you need to know
🧩 Test your Founder Market Fit
🦄 You are your own startup
🤬 Slack’s unintended consequences
2️⃣ Only focus on 2 things to start a startup
Enjoy your customer interactions
The $100 MBA Show: MBA2031 Why Your Audience Is More Important Than Your Product on Apple Podcasts
3 min read vs 13 mins listening
Talk to your customers. I know, I know. You’ve heard it all before. But, I bet you treat talking to customers like a New Years resolution. You hear the advice and the clock strikes midnight. You follow though for a month, maybe two at a push. Then you ignore your customers until the next year.
What they say
Why speak to your customers in the first place
I literally have a list of problems that I can solve for my audience based on all of the different kinds of conversations I’ve had with them over the years
Through email, through social, on webinars, through one on one calls
Guess what? I built products to solve some of those problems
I choose problems that I felt that I can solve best. Those that I can add unique value too
Omar Zenhom
Why Omar closed his clothing business
I started to really resent the business. I didn’t feel like continuing to build new styles or products and to keep it going
I’m not a huge fashion guy. Because I choose the wrong audience unintentionally, that business didn’t do well. Because I was not a good match
I wasn’t the best person to serve those people. Choose your audience wisely
Now I’m serving my people. I can talk about business and help entrepreneurs day and night
Omar Zenhom
What I say
Why it matters: Omar says talking to customers is free R&D. He’s not wrong. Engaged customers will point you in the right direction and help you to prioritise your product roadmap.
Business leaders need to actually talk to their customers and ask the right questions rather than relying on customer service to flag bugs. That doesn’t count.
I’ll leave the cadence and format down to you. The key thing is routine and building up your customer-centric muscle. The more you practice, the better the insights you solicit. The rest can be refined over time.
Between the lines: Omar’s clothing business reiterates the importance of Founder Market Fit. To make a beautiful business and be happy doing so, you should want to talk to your customers. You should share their pain and be just as excited about solving for it.
Speaking of, I feel lucky to have Founder Market Fit with Podup. I enjoy geeking out with subscribers about their favourite podcasts, hosts, and episodes. I caught up with Pat from New York and he shared a big pain point that resonated: he wanted to find the top rated episodes, not just podcasts.
We discussed the ability for you to rate each episode on Podup and filter by category, podcast and rating. So, my question to you: Do you share this pain? Would you value this solution? Reply with your thoughts.
Rethink what a personal brand is
Masters of Scale: 82. Tyra Banks: Personal brand power on Apple Podcasts
Show Masters of Scale, Ep 82. Tyra Banks: Personal brand power - 19 Apr 2022
2 min read vs 48 mins listening
What do you think of when you hear ‘personal brand’? I think of tech bros who tweet more than they work. I think of scammy course sellers with no real expertise. I think of negative associations.
Why? Because I associate personal brand with social media followers, YouTube views and Twitter impressions. This episode made me realise that I’ve been looking at it all wrong.
What they say
Be adaptable
I believe that building your personal brand is as important as your product brand
Branding is a two way conversation. You can still be you and adjust to your audience. That’s just smart selling
Reid Hoffman
Be strategic
The company that’s looking ahead and acting on what they see comes to dominate their category, like Netflix anticipating the shift from DVD mailers to streaming
It’s important to apply strategic thinking to your personal career moves
Reid Hoffman
Be decisive
Part of what it takes to keep a firm handle on your personal brand is knowing when and why to say no
With focus comes clarity of purpose. Try to be everything to everyone? You’ll end up standing for nothing
Reid Hoffman
Be true to yourself
A lot of things I said no to were due to beliefs. I was offered millions of dollars to wear furs. Millions of dollars to sell alcohol. My grandmother died of lung cancer so I said no cigarettes
Those were my 3 main categories of no and also the 3 main categories that paid you the highest
Tyra Banks
What I say
Why it matters: Your personal brand is your behaviours and values. How you solve problems and learn from mistakes. Your personal brand should have positive associations, not negative ones.
Between the lines: Viewing personal brand through this new lens helps you to see that investing in yourself drives outcomes. It’s that simple. Do those outcomes need to be vanity metrics on social? Not at all.
The outcome could be how you’re perceived by friends and family, opportunities that arise because you are being you, or simply being proud of who you are and what you’ve accomplished.
Prevent a culture realignment
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg: E77: Tech work culture, crypto regulation, st...
3 min read vs 1 hour 4 mins listening
Slack - you either love it or hate it. You either check for updates 37 times a day or you get PTSD every time you hear the ding of an incoming message.
Love it or hate it, Slack and Teams have revolutionised workplace communication. And with every revolution, there are always new governance challenges to overcome.
What they say
Coinbase's policy change
The policy said that while we’re in the office together on Coinbase time we’re going to engage on Coinbase’s mission and avoid fractious debates that divide us
David Sacks
The root cause of discontent
I think a lot of this [discontent] has to do with Slack, I’ll be totally honest
Employees need to look at Slack not as an AOL chat room or Reddit
Jason Calacanis
Mitigating mob like behaviour
I agree with you. Slack is an amazing tool but it does start to turn into social media once you get more than 500 people in a room
A lot of CEOs that I’ve been talking to still think Slack is a net positive to productivity
But it has a huge negative both in terms of distracting people with lots of things popping up all of the time but also these social media flame wars that emerge and mob like behaviour
Some of the things that we’ve been trying is, for instance, if we get a Slack room that has more than 500 or 1K people, we often try to limit it so you have to be VP level to post in there, otherwise it’s read only
Brian Armstrong
What I say
Why it matters: Discontent is a poison that rots your company from the inside. At first, you’re asymptomatic. As a founder or leader, you’re usually not aware of the private messages being sent on Slack or you dismiss issues as inconsequential. But symptoms start to appear. Productivity slows. Engagement decreases. Someone leaves. Then another. Then all of a sudden you can’t fill vacant positions fast enough.
You’ll likely think ‘this won’t happen at my company’ but it can take years to materialise. Look at Netflix. They lost 200K subscribers in Q1 for the first time in more than 10 years. Sure, there are macro factors at play. But their culture became politicised. Focus switched away from producing provocative content to playing it safe.
Between the lines: It’s much easier to shape company culture with 5 employees than 500. As you scale, you have to work harder to maintain your company values. This is made even harder when you have to navigate the transition from in-office to a hybrid or fully remote workplace.
Behavioural norms become ingrained over time so it becomes much harder to change culture the larger you get. Jason tells all of his startups to delete the #random Slack channel and not to post memes or jokes in public channels. On the face of it, this seems extreme but these types of preventative measures can save you a lot of headaches in the future.
KISS - Keep it simple stupid
My First Million: My First Million's Origin Story, How to Find Winners, and More on Apple Podcasts
4 min read vs 1 hour 1 min listening
There are a million reasons to not do something. I can’t sell to customers until I have features A, B and C. I can’t publish my website until the brand is right. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and host of Masters of Scale, famously said: If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. I tend to agree and so does Shaan. So much so that he uses ‘bully management’ to install his move fast and break things values.
What they say
Only 2 things matter
You first figure out if people want this, you either pre-sell it to them or offer it to them if they sign up to the waitlist
You then find out where am I getting customers repeatedly and you test that marketing channel
Those are the only 2 things you do and you say no to everything else
That sounds so simple and then you go and tell someone to try and build a startup and they’ll do everything else besides those 2 things
You could do a whole bunch of other stuff and it feels like your moving but the reality is you’re not moving forward, you’re moving sideways
Shaan Puri
Bully management - Part 1
If a developer spends more than a day on localhost - which means you’re building your website project but you didn’t ship it to the world - Furqan will start calling you localhost until you ship it
He will stop using your name and just call you localhost as you don’t want people to use your product
That is a style we incubated at our last startup, it’s sort of bully management
It’s not that you’re bullying people, it’s bullying your values
How do I live my values instead of just saying we care about building things fast?
If you don’t build things and get it to customers you will get ridiculed here because that’s not cool in our books
Shaan Puri
Bully management - Part 2
I’ve heard a story about Peter Thiel doing this too
Peter Thiel’s values were all about focus
His thing was everyone at PayPal would have one thing that they’re responsible for, they had one big thing to care about
If you tried to talk to Peter about something else other the one thing you were assigned he would literally leave the room
I think that is a really important way to operate a young company
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters: The best advice is often the most simple. Before you do anything else when launching a business, you need to 1) test demand and 2) test your best channels.
I’m doing exactly that with Podup. I’m talking to you, my earliest subscribers, to see whether or not you like the concept and content and what you’d be willing to pay for.
I’ve also found Twitter to be a great acquisition channel, so I’m testing different strategies to build my audience and turn conversations with entrepreneurs and business leaders into subscribers.
Between the lines: The first segment is widely understood and easy to apply advice. The second segment - ‘bully management’ - is more controversial.
My take? Always set out your redlines. The same way you have redlines for what your business is and what it will never do, you should have redlines for what is and is not acceptable in your workplace.
Others may disagree, but I think the examples Shaan shared are completely fine. They’re fun, light hearted and do a great job of installing desired values within the company. With that said, it’s easy for people to take things too far so make it clear what your redlines are and monitor how people adopt this behaviour in practice.
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