#17: "No one uses it to start a company" šļøš¤š
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 onĀ RelayĀ and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!Ā
In this edition, youāll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains ofĀ GoSquaredās James Gill, EnjoyHQās Sofia Quintero, and Sleeknoteās Mogens MĆøller.
#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 buildĀ ā and offers an operating model (and intention) worth aspiring to. (Source: Relay)
I have always found the āmartech landscapeā report to be of questionable value.Ā
Itās always thrown up in slides to say ālook at how much competition is out there!ā but no one uses it to make a buying decision, no one uses it to make a decision on what company to start. Itās like itās sole function is to be placed in slides and for people to gasp at it. I donāt wish to discredit Scottās work ā I find it interesting, but I donāt find it particularly useful.
The number of ācompetitorsā or āvendorsā that exist in the martech world keeps ballooning ā is that a bad thing for you as an entrepreneur? Iād argue not āĀ those other companies, being started by other smart people ā theyāre entering that world because they see opportunity and demand.
Itās better to be a fish in a large pond than be a fish on the land!
In terms of competitive landscape ā through GoSquaredās history, weāve 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 āthe leader in the spaceā so they inherently need to define a āspaceā 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 ā who doesnāt? ā but we donāt use that to fuel our decisions, and we donāt use that to make us anxious or fearful. We keep looking at where our customers are going, what theyāre 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 thatās 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, āIām going to give you a score of two,ā which is a detractor, but their comment might say, āI gave you two because, you donāt have this feature that I want, but I really really love your service.ā
So thatās 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 thereās 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, ābecause we donāt have this feature, people are angry at us and they arenāt going to recommend us.ā
It is about having a bit of interpretation behind it and when we quantify feedback, all weāre trying to do is to try to understand commonalities of what people say but that doesnāt mean weāre trying to find commonalities behind why people say it. And thatās what I want to emphasise over and over again. You have to do the job of understanding why people say things.
Note: Sofiaās excellent insight was curated as part of a response to a question on ācreating satisfying customer feedback loops.ā It also includes thoughts from Notejoyās Sachin Rekhi on building a feedback river, Intercomās Des Traynor on the when and where of feedback, and more fellow founders. If, as a founder, youāve come across something helpful while gathering/interpreting customer feedback, weād love to hear from you!
#3: Mogens MĆøller, co-founder and CEO of Sleeknote,Ā 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 weāve 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 weāre going to the UK, weāll try and approach this new market because itās 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.Ā But man were we wrong.
That didnāt 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 didnāt have any clients in the market.Ā That was really a wake-up callĀ that things just went extremely easy in Denmark but itās just a whole another game when we enter a new market where nobody has heard about us and we have got no clientsā¦
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.Ā So what we found out is that it works the other way around.Ā 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, weāre 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 ofĀ Toyota Denmark, Campaign Monitor, Oberlo, and others.
You can ask Mogens all aboutĀ 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,Ā 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 upĀ here.
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Until next time,