"Deleting a 1/3rd of our product..." đ€Ż đ
Confronting the opposite of technical debt, a clear-eyed distillation (and commendation) of how outbound works, and learning to love founder-led sales the hard way.
Welcome to the forty-ninth 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!Â
In this edition, youâll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of Arrowsâ Daniel Zarick, Juneâs Ferruccio Balestreri, and Spekitâs Melanie Fellay.
Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches â âHow We Deleted 1/3rd of Our Product and Made it 10x Betterâ with Arrowsâ co-founder, Daniel Zarick
Heuristics and Hunches â Things That Matter During Any Crisis, Developing a Combination of Muscle Memory and Scar Tissue, and Other Earnest Founder Missives to Probe the Current SaaS Moment
#1: âWe deleted a 1/3rd of our product and made it 10x betterâ â Arrowsâ co-founder and CEO, Daniel Zarick, precisely portrays some critical ideas that informed a usually-existential product decision. (Source: Relay)
When going through this process, we had a few critical things on our mind:
1. âRed Herringâ feature requests:
These are features that people ask for which, if you implemented them perfectly, wouldnât actually make someone buy your product or use it with more frequency. Theyâre easy things to point out that are missing, but they arenât core to their need. Be aware of building red herring features!
2. âNobody wants another inboxâ:
A prospect said this to us on a call and it stuck out like a sore thumb in our minds. Sometimes people talk about âsoftware fatigueâ and suggest that people have too many products and donât want anymore.
We believe people actually desire more tooling, they just have âinbox fatigueâ and donât want more products that unnecessarily demand their attention in a new place.
Question if you can push your productâs functionality into a place where your ideal customer is already doing their job day-to-day.
3. Broad innovation vs. Narrow innovation:
Be honest with yourself and figure out if you need to build a broad innovation or a narrow innovation. A broad innovation is something like Figma or Linear, where customers have a high threshold of feature-completeness for any new product in that category.
You can win by adding all those features and making UX+design improvements to that platform, but you canât have missing features. A narrow innovation is one where you need to do one thing superbly well, and actually having features beyond that one thing can add confusion to your product.
We initially thought Arrows was a broad innovation product, and now we realize itâs a narrow innovation.
4. âIf you had to start over today, with everything you now know, what would you do?â:
We asked this question of ourselves and our team regularly. Once we realized we should make a change, we made sure that this was core to the conversation.
Just because weâd built or done something a certain way before⊠that didnât matter anymore.
Our goal was to free ourselves from those constraints so we could find the best answer for the moment. Only then would we burden ourselves with figuring out a plan to actually get there. This framework was critical for helping keep us all in the right mindset.
#2: A founderâs primer on outbound â Juneâs co-founder, Ferruccio Balestreri, sums up (based on their conversations with fellow B2B founders and operators) ways of approaching growth through this much-deployed channel. (Source: June)Â
Outbound means reaching people pro-actively, where they already are.
It works best if you know precisely who your target customers are.
By precisely I mean that you can connect who they are with the problem they have.
The first step to understanding whether outbound is a good channel for you is understanding who has the biggest burning problem and the highest willingness to pay.
This means positioning your product as a solution to an open-ended problem like:
âI want to get more customersâ
âI want to have my engineers spend more time building new features and less time doing undifferentiated workâ
Then you want to map the problem you solve in a very specific way with some easy-to-collect data.
Here are some real-world examples of signals that make people good target customers for some B2B Saas companies:
Healthcare companies with 100-150 employees and no full time security engineers - Great target for Snyk or Sqreen at the early stage.
Operations heavy companies that just raised growth rounds, but have less than 10 engineers - Great target for Retool at the early stage.
Product companies with teams of at least 4 researchers - Great target for Dovetail
Trucking fleets operating less than 10 trucks - Great target for CloudTrucks
Shopify stores with more than 6 paid plugins - Great target for Alloy
Once you know who youâre going after, you can start thinking about how youâll reach these people.
Pro-actively reaching out to people that have a problem can be done through various channels:
Cold email and messaging
Advantages: Proven to scale, works both at very early stage and late stage.
Drawbacks: Only works when the contract value is big enough to have a salesperson ($10.000+ per year). Also, itâs hard for people to have urgency to pay, so this makes deals take a longer time.
Warm introductions
Advantages: Itâs a great way to start out with some friendly first adopters
Drawbacks: Hard to keep doing this as you scale
Ads
Advantages: Easy to start and proven to work at scale
Drawbacks: The cost of acquiring customers keeps increasing over time
Cold calls
Advantages: Works best when your customers are in traditional industries and when the sale is a quick transaction, not a long process. Weâve seen this scale successfully to hundreds of reps across different verticals (hospitality and trucking).
Drawbacks: If your audience doesnât do phone calls like developers it wonât work
Participating in communities
Advantages: Great way for a founder to hustle and start getting the first 100 customers
Drawbacks: Itâs hard to scale this to more than one person
#3: âLearning how to sell was the most humbling experience I ever got throughâ â Spekitâs co-founder and CEO, Melanie Fellay, revisits her early dismissal of the sales discipline. (Source: How We Got There)
I kind of used to sit on my high horse in ops. âIâm working in ops, strategy, like these game-changing things for the company and meanwhile the salespeople are coming in at 9, leaving at 4, kind of having the same conversations and getting paid double.â
I just didnât get it.
And man, now do I have a different level of respect! Just the mental resilience that you need to have, the amount of people that I reached out to get a response was
At first I was like, âeveryone is going to have this problem, everyone is going to respond.â Yeah, thatâs not how the world works today.
âŠ
Really getting clear on who would be the buyers. Like at first, we thought that Salesforce admins would be the buyers because I actually owned budget at my last company.
But the reality is, especially in these bigger companies, thatâs not the case. You have to go through these big procurement processes. They might be reporting up to the Head of Biz Ops.
Just because the Salesforce admin is excitedâŠthey can be a phenomenal champion, they have high influence and their usually pretty terrific people all around, because theyâre so integrated to both the tech side of the business plus the go-to-market side.
But itâs really critical that you identify who the buyer is, and what is the ROI that youâre going to exemplify.
At first, I was so excited about the product that I would show them all the features, âlook, it can do this, and this, and this.â Great. But how do you actually sell the value of the product?
I was talking to a founder recently and pushing them on this. âI get why youâre excited about your product but is it solving an inconvenience or is it solving a real pain?
And that pain needs to either directly, by solving it, drive more revenue or reduce costs. Productivity being part of those two. If you cannot tie back what financial impact this is going to have on the team, youâre just not going to get people to purchase.
That was the biggest lesson for me.
If youâre not able to articulate all of those pieces plus what the implementation would look like etc., youâre going to have slow and painful growth.
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I took out a loan and actually invested in sales coaching because I realized that was the number one thing thatâll hold us back as a company from being successful.
Doesnât matter how great or awesome a product you have, if you donât know how to market it and if you donât know how to sell it.
Until next time,