Founder-led (and limited) sales 🤸♀️🏁🚩
Rethinking refactoring, really knowing the decisive, tricky terrain of startup momentum, and reaching beyond founder-led sales.
Welcome to the 58th edition of The SaaS 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 (curated with 💛 at Chargebee) and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find the following instructive and inspiring pickings:
#1: ProdPad’s co-founder and CEO, Janna Bastow, hammers home the need to revisit beliefs and practices that turn refactoring projects humdrum, daunting, and pointless all at once.
#2: UrbanLeap’s co-founder, Erez Druk, deftly dissects an old, unfaltering startup commandment.
#3: Stytch’s co-founder and CEO, Reed McGinley-Stempel, raises how focussing on founder-led selling for too long, no matter its criticality, can colour a startup’s view of the market.
🗞 Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches — Validating and Selling a Technically-Difficult Idea, Serving 2 Personas, Fundraising in a Tough SaaS Setting, and Working In-Person with Merge’s Co-Founder, Shensi Ding
And it’s been interesting to discover that we get that initial buy from product and engineering teams but the renewals definitely have a heavy hand from the CS team. And it’s not the usual user vs buyer distinction as they’re both very much using us, just across different times.
Heuristics and Hunches — Aiming for a “Won-and-Done” Category, Acquiring a Newsletter before Making the Product Public, and The Merits of Being Async-First with Loops’ Co-Founder, Chris Frantz
Many of our competitors have been around for at least a decade. Their founders are off doing different things today. So most of them are late-stage orgs operating in the “let’s build another vertical” mode. They’re just not aimed at improving the core of their business.
#1: “…look at a refactor project from the outside in”
(From: ProdPad’s co-founder, Janna Bastow) (Source: SimplyProduct)
Have you ever considered how your upcoming rebuild could actually kick your company into a leaner gear? A refactor project can be an opportunity to rethink past assumptions about a mature product, and use experimentation to create a leaner version that solves the same core customer problems in even better ways.
Unfortunately, the refactor of a mature product is often just seen as a way to update code or fix bugs. It assumes that the old product just needs better code and a facelift to bring it up to date.
The resulting product – if it’s ever finished – is often just a replica of the same legacy product, but built on a better tech stack and with a new set of UI elements.
More often than not, reworking all that legacy code ends up clogging up your product development workflow and stalling innovation. Plus, the size of these projects means that they invariably run over budget and are delivered way past their original deadlines.
In the meantime, the market has moved on and your competitors have caught up with you.
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Be ready to disrupt yourself
Try instead to look at a refactor project from the outside in — as a new competitor, ready to disrupt you, the incumbent. A disruptor wouldn’t rebuild the same product as their competitors, so why build the same product again, if you’ve got the opportunity to rebuild? Seize that opportunity!
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Make sure you can answer these questions, as they ultimately drive the refactor’s success:
Why do customers love your product today?
What is driving value for your business today?
What do customers want most?
Start your refactor with one flow
Dive into your customer journey map, and do discovery and validation to pick one flow that can stand alone and be vastly improved.
Your product may have 100 different functions, but your job here is to imagine yourself as a competitor, building a kick-ass version of just one piece of the puzzle to start. What are you going to be the best at? What killer feature would you reproduce and then improve on?
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Don’t stop. Keep iterating.
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Listen to your customers carefully to understand what they /miss/. After all, you just took out a lot of functionality in your new, smoothed-out beta version of this one flow.
If customers come back after a day begging for the ability to edit, or crop, or share and so on, you have an idea of what was important from the old version. Sometimes, it will highlight what might have been missing all along but is more important than all the /other/ junk you had stuffed into that legacy code.
Each iteration will allow you to bring more users over to this beta version and allow you to get a step closer to deprecating old features in the legacy product.
The result?
You’ll find that you don’t end up rebuilding the same product, feature-for-feature, screen-for-screen. Instead you build a better version of a product that solves the most important problems for your customers and your business, with considerably less effort.
#2: “Momentum is a good thing to be a fanatic about”
(From: UrbanLeap’s co-founder, Erez Druk) (Source: Durable Startup Frameworks)
The greatest double-edged sword of startups is momentum. Very little can stop you when you have it. Very little can prevent your death when you lose it.
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Sparking Momentum
One small win is just one small win. Same for two and three. But just like a snowball, at some point momentum takes a life of its own. That’s what we want.
When UrbanLeap pivoted, we were suddenly starting again from scratch. Zero momentum with a full team and a shrinking runway is the worst state you can be in, so we needed momentum and fast.
How did we create it?
Define the direction - Is it getting customers? Improving retention? Increasing revenues? Building an MVP? Make momentum tangible and measurable. For us, it was getting design partners to build our MVP with us.
Break it down - Whatever the direction is, break it down into small steps so that progress can be made and felt every day. In our example: getting a design partner was broken down into getting a lead, running a sales pitch (and seeing excitement), getting a second meeting, and inked commitment.
Put 200% energy into it - Momentum is stored energy. Until you have momentum, put everything into creating it.
Celebrate every small win - Many founders (this one included) are terrible at celebrating small wins. It helps to understand that celebration isn’t just to make your employees feel good, it is a necessary ingredient in sparking momentum.
As momentum begins building up, things get easier and easier. Getting the 2nd design partner is easier than the 1st, and the next is even easier.
Maintaining Momentum
Momentum either increases or decreases. Hence the only way to maintain momentum is by increasing it. Aim for more, elevate goals, and amp up the intensity.
Shortly after the pivot , we noticed that our momentum was at risk. We were bringing customers and they were satisfied, but their usage was steadily dropping. A big strategic change saved our precious momentum and armed us with 3 important lessons:
Be alert - Look for early indicators of momentum decrease. Don’t explain away any small or early indications of decreasing momentum, they are likely real and very dangerous. In our case, we could and should have responded earlier.
Focus - What saved our momentum was that both our CEO and head of product took charge of the challenge. It became the #1 objective for the entire company. Leave shiny new ideas for later.
Be paranoid - It is easy to translate early success into complacency, but you should translate it into paranoia instead. Have at least one paranoid person on your team and listen to them.
Unintuitively, maintaining momentum is harder than creating it. We could’ve been more alert, focused much earlier, and been less complacent about our success. Next time we will be.
#3: The inherent limitations of founder-led sales
(From: Stytch’s co-founder, Reed McGinley-Stempel) (Source: Not Boring)
We started getting design partners when we had a very surface-level proof of concept. And so that was back when we were raising a year ago.
We weren’t trying to get them to pay for it yet. We just wanted to validate that this will solve a need and then as we ramped up the building on the product and started exposing it publicly…
What we were doing there [in private beta] before we opened the floodgates and went to public beta and self-serve sign-ups, is that we did Zoom call with every single developer who was integrating the product.
And we’d just have them voice over every piece of information as they’re walking through the doc, developer guides etc. Where they’d say, ‘this is actually a piece of friction, I don’t know what to do right here.’ Or, ‘this is really delightful, I really like that piece.’ And invest more on the delightful pieces, abstract away the friction.
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Definitely we’ve gotten to a more scalable model now where we have a self-serve flow where anyone on the internet can now sign up for the product.
I think one of the things I recommend others in the B2B space who’re trying to get mass-market appeal, is that it’s helpful to have design partners as you’re iterating and are clearly in private beta, you’re going to make breaking API changes, or breaking product changes.
The thing where this becomes much more compelling is the second when you can publicly expose this online. Where everyone who has a problem can find you to solve their pain point.
Because no matter how large my network is if I boil it down to the design partners I know that I’m going to sell to, I’m always going to be trying to shoehorn it a little bit to like ‘is the time right, or the product right, for what they need?’
But then you’d be really surprised when you go open on the internet.
I remember one of the first shocks we had was that two weeks after we launched self-serve, a Fortune 100 financial institution signed up through self-serve and created a proof of concept in 30 minutes. And then we were on a call with 5 of their execs next week.
And that’s just never a customer we would have ever encountered if we were trying to just do only founder-led sales…I think the founder-led sales piece is really helpful for the private beta experience and getting people to get you a lot of feedback.
And I think about it mostly as an assist motion, so you should have some other funnel that is more scalable. Because that’s where you’d get more interesting feedback on what the mass-market appeal of the product is.
🤝 Founder social:
Until next time,