Eating Zoom for breakfast 🧈🥞
Why merely ‘niching down’ isn’t enough, the (overlooked) founder labour of being really ready for new hires, and a public invitation to customers.
Welcome to the forty-sixth 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 Butter’s Jakob Knutzen, Referral Rock’s Josh Ho, and ProdPad’s Janna Bastow.
Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches — Taking on Zoom by Targeting a Beachhead Market, Pricing as a PMF Filter, and Other Lessons in Early Traction with Butter’s co-founder, Jakob Knutzen
Heuristics and Hunches — Setting up Finance as an Impact Multiplier, Defining Your Own Metrics for Success, and Other Strategic Lessons from Knak’s Head of Finance, Christopher Chan
#1: “This is the only way we can win against incumbents” — Butter’s co-founder and CEO, Jakob Knutzen, explains how they’re prepping themselves up against the likes of Zoom and Google Meet by ingeniously targeting a beachhead market. (Source: Relay)
This is traditional startup wisdom. If you try to do everything for everyone, you’re going to fail. With Butter, we were trying to take on Zoom. A formidable opponent given their scale and reach. So we knew that we had to focus from the beginning.
A bit of the backstory here is that before we started out with Butter, we were doing online workshops ourselves. Having been in consulting and having run a digital marketing agency, I’ve personally had to do a tonne of workshops over the course of my life.
And I could just feel that doing workshops remotely was very different and way inferior to doing them in-person, because of two primary reasons that we’re addressing with Butter.
Firstly, the technical overload that the facilitator had to bear. Taking their focus away from facilitating the workshop. And secondly, the lack of energy levels among participants in an online setting when compared to physical sessions.
We definitely saw something there.
We knew that workshops presented a decently-sized market and also that it was limited to those in advisory services. Agencies. Consultancies. And the likes.
What we realized after the first 6 months or so of doing user interviews was that there were way more people conducting workshops for many different reasons. In fact, our definition of a workshop had to be revisited.
Aside from client/consultant workshops, there were coaching sessions, internal trainings, product design sprints, and lots of other types of remote sessions. Workshops turned out to be this huge use case that had many different names.
Our research conversations also made it perfectly evident that generalist tools such as Zoom or Teams or Meet, were not fulfilling the needs of people running these workshops. Which really became our original motivation behind founding Butter.
So, again, why was it important to find a beachhead market? Well, if you are trying to attack everything, then the existing, generalist players will win. But these same players won’t really care for smaller markets or niches that have very specific requirements.
That’s the beachhead.
A market you can approach first and then, more importantly, expand further from. Exactly why Butter is so focussed where we are. This is the only way we can win against incumbents.
The way that we think about workshops as a beachhead use case and a market, is that we see three types of synchronous sessions happening in the present and the near future.
First, huddles. Stuff that happens on Slack, Tandem, and similar products. The quick, ‘hey, how are you doing, let’s just hash this thing out,’ sort of conversations. Often taking place in small groups. Often ad hoc.
The second type are status meetings or planned meetings such as stand ups or 1-on-1s.
The third are more collaborative meetings. These are very different. Quite stretched in terms of complexities. On the low-complexity end of the spectrum, you’ve got brief brainstorming sessions where, say, people design something together.
On the most-complex end, you’ve got workshops and deep training sessions, stuff where you are often dealing with larger groups and you’ve planned ahead extensively. These are the ones that make for our beachhead. That’s what we’re targeting first.
The idea, then, for a beachhead is to allow us the leverage to move downwards in the market of collaborative sessions. And over time become the dominant synchronous platform for all kinds of collaborative sessions globally.
If we can solve for the most complex collaborative sessions, we believe that we will be able to solve for all collaborative sessions.
On top of the clarity this gives us on how to approach GTM, the inputs on product direction and the speed and focus with which we can pursue it, is phenomenal.
#2: Dissecting a common early-stage hiring mistake — Referral Rock’s founder and CEO, Josh Ho, recalls the “hard, painful, and expensive” slip of hiring too early (not just as a business, but as a founder). (Source: Indie Hackers)
It’s all hard and painful, but the hardest part has been hiring and building a team. Mistakes in hiring are very expensive. As Referral Rock is self-funded, time and money are both critical resources to manage as there is not much room for error.
My biggest hiring mistakes were when I brought people on too early. (Just to clarify, I don’t mean it was too early for the business because I definitely felt the pain and had the need.) The mistake I made was that it was too early for me as a leader and manager.
I’ve learned that hiring from a position of pain is not a good idea. It’s a lot like going food shopping when you’re hungry — there is a good chance of making a bad decision.
If I were to do it differently, I would tell myself to take pause and do more of the job myself first and make sure there are repeatable processes involved.
I would take the time to get a better understanding of what a successful hire looks like from all angles — not just what they would achieve but how I’d work with them on a day-to-day basis, how they took direction, and the processes and cadences necessary to be effective. You should know the ins and outs before you can effectively hire and manage a role.
It’s tough to figure that out with just a few calls and a project, but we have built a process to help us avoid mistakes and see red flags sooner. I still struggle to find the right fit for some particular roles but I have also been fortunate to find people I feel like I can build the company with.
Note: This May 26th, we’re really looking forward to hosting Josh for a Relay AMA. From founding an Evernote competitor (UberNote) back in 2006 (“which went through all the ups and downs”; once hitting 10K sign-ups in a day from a Lifehacker feature, “funding, various business models, failed attempts at being acquired and finally shutting down”) to running an automotive brick and mortar shop, and to finally starting and scaling a profitable, self-funded, B2B SaaS with Referral Rock, Josh has seen and learned from the wearisome, momentous, ebb-and-flow all of starting up. If you’re keen on joining, please request an invite, here.
#3: “Keeping our product roadmap public is the roux to our secret sauce” — ProdPad’s co-founder and CEO, Janna Bastow, on how they’ve sought nuance and recurring value in a much-debated product practice. (Source: Typeform)
Keeping our product roadmap public is the roux to our secret sauce.
There’s always an up-to-date, high-level version of our roadmap available online that anyone can look at—including customers, leads, and potential partners.
Our public-facing roadmap—which an early customer requested—is an open invitation for customers to share their feature requests and suggestions. It opens up a line conversation that we would never have otherwise.
We use it as an opportunity to find out what they’re looking for and what problem they’re trying to solve.
Sometimes, we can work up a solution within our existing product. Other times, their feedback helps us shape product features in our pipeline.
For example, when we first put Single Sign On (SSO) on our public roadmap, we didn’t know what we were going to build. But customers could see that it was coming, and they let us know how they thought it should work.
From this feedback, we learned that the Google Apps SSO integration would have a much bigger impact than other solutions we were considering. With that kind of intel, we were confident about where to start and the impact we could expect.
Nothing about building a product is straightforward—it’s what you do with customer feedback that makes all the difference. The clues are there, but what should you do with them?
…
There’s always a kernel of truth in something if someone puts the time into saying it.
All feedback is good feedback, even an angry ALL-CAPS RANT!
But not all customer feedback is equal. Some customers are able to give you really strong insights that end up shaping a feature’s future. Maybe they present a compelling use case you hadn’t considered, or perhaps they’re willing to pay upfront for functionality you planned to build anyway.
Like our impromptu Trello integration, sometimes feedback and timing work together to create a golden opportunity.
Keep your eyes open for those gems. There’s nothing wrong with veering a little off course to make a customer happy, especially if it will benefit other customers too.
Until next time,