#21: Mailchimp doesn’t need to be different 🎭
Some rules of thumb for avoiding product debt (and chaos), battling SaaS' increasing sameness through differentiation, and making meetings more effective and efficient through the written word.
Hi there,
Welcome to the twenty-first edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of ProdPad’s Janna Bastow, Wynter’s Peep Laja, and Clearbit’s Alex MacCaw.
#1: “Building great products does take time. That said, there are things you can do to speed things up” — ProdPad’s co-founder, Janna Bastow, evokes how a product’s progress can get muffled, even curbed without rethinking some givens. (Source: Relay)
Give the team clear direction and autonomy.
They should understand the vision, and the problems on the roadmap, and how the business is being measured, and should be empowered to do their part in pushing the company forward. Sometimes the biggest bottleneck in a company is a founder who gets too in the weeds and has to give directions at every step.
Ditch arbitrary deadlines.
Sometimes it feels like giving something a deadline will help hustle the work along to completion, but it actually has a detrimental effect. First of all, anyone working to a deadline is going to know to add some buffer to their estimates, or else run the risk of not giving themselves enough time. This then leads to the issue that work expands to fill the time allotted.
You rarely see projects come in under, but you often see projects pick up scope creep and go over. If work is rushed through to a deadline, you can be sure one of two things is happening: either the scope is reduced and you end up with less of what you were hoping for, or more often, the quality is reduced. Oftentimes, you won’t even see this reduction in quality. It’s just a little bit of extra tech debt, but that stuff adds up.
Over time, it’ll slow down your team from being able to deliver as fast as they could when the codebase was new and less buggy. Ditching timelines takes an element of trust in your developers, and you’ll need to work with them to have a shared understanding of what ‘done’ is, and how much time is reasonable to spend on any problem, so you don’t end up lost down rabbit holes. But you’ll end up with better quality and faster deliveries as a result of ditching deadlines. I spoke and wrote about this in more detail here.
Make releases less scary.
If your releases take a multi-day song and dance and only happen every few weeks (or god forbid, every few months!) then each release is fraught with stress. It creates a deadline for everyone, as if this release is missed, then the work won’t see the light of day for another long time. It creates stress, as if something isn’t perfect and needs to be iterated, there’s no easy way to do that.
This means that the team spends more time planning and checking their releases, rather than just batting it out the door. A lot of companies think of continuous deployment as a tech exercise, but in reality it has huge value for the bottom line of the business.
A team that can deliver with ease can switch between iterating and delivering and discovering, without the stressful build up of a big-bang launch. Our team here at ProdPad launches twice a week, like clockwork. For a team without deadlines, we sure get a lot done.
#2: “Mailchimp doesn’t need to be different. You need to be different from them.” — Wynter’s founder and CEO, Peep Laja, weaves an astutely-observed, compelling thread on the urgency of differentiation in an increasingly ‘same’ SaaS world and reiterates how carving a meaningful brand remains a startup’s best bet. (Source: Twitter)
What’s sameness?
Sameness is the combined effect of companies being too similar in their offers, poorly differentiated in their branding, and indistinct in their communication.
Most state their value proposition as if they were the only company doing what they’re doing.
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Any mature industry suffers from commoditization
Take for instance A/B testing tools, heat map tools or email marketing tools. They all got pretty much the same features, with minor differences. It’s increasingly harder to say how one tool is different or better than others.
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Differentiation doesn’t matter when you have a well-known brand. Market penetration is much more important.
That’s why Mailchimp doesn’t need to be different. You need to be different from them.
The fact that people know Mailchimp exists is everything.
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How to differentiate?
Your best bet: brand. Investing in building a brand from the get-go.
Functional differences are increasingly getting replaced by values, ideals, and identity.
Who am I if I buy your brand? What does it say about me?
I buy Patagonia because I believe in sustainability, and I care about the earth. When I buy Nike, among other things I champion women’s equality and oppose police brutality.
Your brand is your best defense against commoditization
Functional/attribute differences can matter, and innovation goes a long way, although that’s not a game everyone can play. But anyone can compete on brand.
Things have finite value. The meaning we attach to stuff, the stories we tell ourselves about it have exponential value.
How to be different through branding?
In her excellent book Different, Harvard professor Youngme Moon details three types of brands that stand out in the competitive landscape today.
Reverse Brands (‘in categories where most brands compete by doing more, better, reverse brands go in the opposite direction, they do less’ Ex: IKEA)
Breakaway Brands (‘they create points of reference around their brands, that are so different from what their competitors are doing that you end up comparing them with things outside the category’ Ex: Cirque du Soleil)
Hostile Brands (‘they create barriers to entry, they make it difficult for you to access the brand in some way…they create so much polarization around the brand that it becomes their central call, the antithesis of feel-good brands’ Ex: Red Bull)
Study these.
In his book Bigger Than This, Fabian Geyrhalter discusses eight “brand traits” of successful commodity brands.
Story
Belief
Cause
Heritage
Delight
Transparency
Solidarity
Individuality
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Marketing is a game of attention. If you do what everyone else is doing, it’s hard to get it.
Differentiation is hard, and requires all-in commitment. Do it anyway…
#3: (The how of) decision-making with a sincere emphasis on the written word — Clearbit’s co-founder, Alex MacCaw, on a simple, not easy (writerly) method to gradually imbue meetings with necessary clarity. (Source: The Manager’s Handbook)
When two people are discussing an issue, the need to be efficient is important. When a team is discussing an issue, the need to be efficient is paramount, because each inefficient minute is multiplied by the number of people in the discussion.
If you want the most effective and efficient decision-making process, require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time. The goal of this write-up is to be thorough enough that at the time of the decision meeting, there are few or no questions. This can be achieved in one of two ways:
1. The hard way: Write an extraordinarily thorough analysis from the get-go.
2. The easy way: Write a draft, circulate it to the meeting participants before the meeting, and invite comments and questions. Then write out responses to all of these comments and questions prior to the meeting.
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This method, although time-consuming for the sponsor, yields extraordinarily thoughtful decisions in a very short amount of time. The extra effort and work by one person creates net savings in time and energy across the whole group.
Imposing this process on a group is daunting. Here is a way to ease a group into it.
1. Reserve the first 15 minutes of the meeting for all participants to write out their updates and issues. Then use another 10 minutes of the meeting for all participants to read each other’s updates and issues. Then discuss and decide. Use this method for 2–3 meetings, then …
2. Require that all participants write their updates and issues prior to the meeting. Do not allow people to bring up an issue that they have not already written up. Use the first 10 minutes of the meeting for all participants to read each other’s updates and issues. Use this method for 1–2 meetings, then …
3. Require that all participants write their updates and issues by a certain time prior to the meeting (e.g., 6 p.m. the evening before). Require that all participants read and comment on each other’s updates and issues prior to the meeting. People can prove that they have read the docs by adding their comments in the docs themselves. Do not allow people to make comments in the meeting if they haven’t already commented on the docs themselves. This will make your meetings much more efficient and ensure that meeting time is spent effectively.
Recently on Relay:
What am I missing: How do I invest in brand for my early-stage SaaS?…How to do that without being a “personal brand”? i.e. I’m trying to build a “we”, not an “I”
From the archives:
AMA: With Crossbeam’s co-founder and CEO, Bob Moore. (Featuring: A vivid metaphor for understanding the interplay between PMF and niches, what needs to be true in order for a low-touch model to work, and more!)
Until next time,