#17: "No one uses it to start a company" 🗑️🤕📊
On the futility of a popular SaaS landscape report, the curious challenge of interpreting NPS comments, and a precursor to successful SaaS partnerships.
Hi there,
Welcome to the seventeenth 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 GoSquared’s James Gill, EnjoyHQ’s Sofia Quintero, and Sleeknote’s Mogens Møller.
#1: James Gill, co-founder and CEO of GoSquared, thoughtfully draws us to an important realization, to how little certain industry narratives convey about the real reasons behind why buyers buy and builders build — and offers an operating model (and intention) worth aspiring to. (Source: Relay)
I have always found the “martech landscape” report to be of questionable value.
It’s always thrown up in slides to say “look at how much competition is out there!” but no one uses it to make a buying decision, no one uses it to make a decision on what company to start. It’s like it’s sole function is to be placed in slides and for people to gasp at it. I don’t wish to discredit Scott’s work – I find it interesting, but I don’t find it particularly useful.
The number of “competitors” or “vendors” that exist in the martech world keeps ballooning – is that a bad thing for you as an entrepreneur? I’d argue not – those other companies, being started by other smart people – they’re entering that world because they see opportunity and demand.
It’s better to be a fish in a large pond than be a fish on the land!
In terms of competitive landscape – through GoSquared’s history, we’ve been thrown off course far too much by over analysing competition. In our early days, we found ourselves being compared to other companies thanks to publications like TechCrunch who loved to report on a battle taking place. Investors also seem to love to back “the leader in the space” so they inherently need to define a “space” for you to exist in.
Our thinking has evolved tremendously since we were in our early twenties building GoSquared. We absolutely keep an eye on others in our space – who doesn’t? – but we don’t use that to fuel our decisions, and we don’t use that to make us anxious or fearful. We keep looking at where our customers are going, what they’re asking for, and how their lives are changing.
I believe if you can do that, and plot those trendlines, you can set a path out that’s an exciting trajectory, without paying too much attention to other providers in your space.
#2: Sofia Quintero, co-founder and CEO of EnjoyHQ, on the essential nuance of interpreting commonalities in what customers say in NPS surveys and the whys behind those sayings. (Source: UI Breakfast)
One of the biggest challenge for NPS surveys is that somebody can say, ‘I’m going to give you a score of two,’ which is a detractor, but their comment might say, ‘I gave you two because, you don’t have this feature that I want, but I really really love your service.’
So that’s like, okay, what does that mean, are you happy or not happy? So those are difficult to gather so you cannot guide the analysis only by the score. You have to guide the analysis with ultimately what is the driver of the customer.
So there’s something there, but overall their experience is good, so you can group that request among other requests that might be similar, as opposed to saying, ‘because we don’t have this feature, people are angry at us and they aren’t going to recommend us.’
It is about having a bit of interpretation behind it and when we quantify feedback, all we’re trying to do is to try to understand commonalities of what people say but that doesn’t mean we’re trying to find commonalities behind why people say it. And that’s what I want to emphasise over and over again. You have to do the job of understanding why people say things.
Note: Sofia’s excellent insight was curated as part of a response to a question on “creating satisfying customer feedback loops.” It also includes thoughts from Notejoy’s Sachin Rekhi on building a feedback river, Intercom’s Des Traynor on the when and where of feedback, and more fellow founders. If, as a founder, you’ve come across something helpful while gathering/interpreting customer feedback, we’d love to hear from you!
#3: Mogens Møller, co-founder and CEO of Sleeknote, on discovering a critical precursor to successful SaaS partnerships. (Source: The SaaS Podcast)
In the first year or so we were extremely lucky and everything just happened for us. A challenge for us is to scale our products to new markets. And while we’ve got great success in Denmark and Scandinavia. So web agencies often recommend customers to use Sleeknote, as they can see it generates a lot of value.
About a year ago we thought, now we’re going to the UK, we’ll try and approach this new market because it’s a lot bigger than Denmark and has a lot of potential clients. So we thought that we can just contact all the web agencies in the UK and get them to recommend Sleeknote to their customers and to their clients. But man were we wrong.
That didn’t happen. We traveled over there a couple of times, did some meetups, trying to set up some meetings with these agencies. None of them wanted to just hear about our product. Because we didn’t have any clients in the market. That was really a wake-up call that things just went extremely easy in Denmark but it’s just a whole another game when we enter a new market where nobody has heard about us and we have got no clients…
All these web agencies have so much else to take care of and selling another SaaS product is just not interesting for them. Even though we could provide some kickback or something like that. It was just not interesting. So what we found out is that it works the other way around. We need to have customers in a given market before partners contact us. And sign-up and recommend us to their customers.
Note: Next week, we’re looking forward to host Mogens for a Relay AMA. Beginning in 2013, Mogens and team have continued to turn their great grasp of usability and digital conversions into an elegant, versatile product; trusted by the likes of Toyota Denmark, Campaign Monitor, Oberlo, and others.
You can ask Mogens all about charging beta users from the get-go, bootstrapping, choosing the premium route in a market abundant with cheap products, his love for electronic music pioneers, Kraftwerk, and more!
Liking this fortnightly assemblage of founding heuristics and what-I-know-nows? Forward it to your SaaS friends, and let them know they can sign up here.
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Until next time,