The "Full Build" startup š¢š¢š¢
Competing with email clients and spreadsheets, field notes on bringing in first operators, and cake āeven overā ice cream.
Welcome to the 65th 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 onĀ Relay (curated with š at Chargebee)Ā and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!Ā
In this edition, youāll find the following instructive and inspiring pickings:
#1: Equalsā co-founder and CPO, Ben McRedmond, proposes (and illustrates with lessons from a failed past attempt) a startup type that sits at far-flung contrastĀ to the idea of a minimum viable product.Ā
#2: Ambrookās co-founder and CEO, Mackenzie Burnett, sums up distinctive themes that emerged from her conversations with adept operators (such as Claire Hughes Johnson) on the foundational subject of screening first hires.Ā
#3: Parabolās founder and CEO, Jordan Husney, highlights a thinking tool that makes āhard choices explicitā and injects practical clarity into strategic decisions.
š Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches ā āNo One is Coming to Save Us,ā The āNeed to Reestablish PMF,ā and Other Earnest Founder Commits for 2023
This is a freeing mindset, especially in an environment full of constraints like most companies have in 2023. It means that we double down on investing in the people we have, seeking out intellectual honesty about every facet of the business, and a bias toward action and velocity.
#1: The āFull Buildā startup
(From: Equalsā Ben McRedmond) (Source: Wrap Text)
Nearly all startup advice is for Minimum Viable Product ā or MVP ā driven startups. You start small. Get something real in front of customers ASAP. You learn. You iterate. The idea is to reduce risk. To Build Something People Want. But for a certain type of company ā what weāve ended up calling āFull Buildsā ā you need to start with more.
ā¦
In 2017, I co-founded an email startup called Consider. Consider was a new email client built to compete with Slack. After a few years of building and having gotten little traction we made the decision to shutdown.
Email clients and spreadsheets are difficult in different ways. But there is one important commonality: both of these products require building an awful lot before doing anything new. Theyāre Full Builds.
Planning was a good chunk of Considerās failure. We shouldāve had a map of all the things we needed to build upfront. We knew Consider was a large undertaking. To write that all out ā to put together a 9 month or 12 month plan for building our V1.
It went against everything anyone would tell us about building a company. So we didnāt. I thought building iteratively would let us build less, maybe skip some email features that werenāt too important, get something infront of people sooner.
Yet our even bigger mistake was changing things not core to our thesis. We changed things like how conversations were defined, how the inbox worked, and how emails were presented. Youāve got to spend months building this thing anyway and weāre smart product people? Why wouldnāt we make it better!
ā¦
When starting Equals I started hearing all the same things as before. Youāre building too much. Why donāt you start with a plugin instead? Youāve got to get out there and learn!
What we needed for Equals to work was not a recipe for building less. We knew deep down that we had to do the Full Build. What we needed was a way to reduce the risk in building so much. So we came up with three rules to keep us on track.
First, make a detailed plan. We werenāt going to spend months building this only for it to be missing key features.
Second, change nothing. Equals was going to look and feel exactly like the spreadsheets you already know how to use.
Third, win with a single large bet. Our v1 had a single bet ā data connections. We were pretty confident in this bet but if we were wrong, the situation would be salvageable.
#2: Patterns and proxies for hiring strong operators
(From: Ambrookās Mackenzie Burnett) (Source: Twitter)
After the first few interviews, a clear pattern emerged in both the career paths of these individuals and in the types of operators they liked to hire. I tried to look for these qualities in applicants at the resume screening and phone screening level:
Strong deviation from the path of their peers ā Often manifested in a ārandom walkā of a resume where they showed they were willing to take risks, able to dive into new areas and excel, and/or in founding something even if it was just a club.
Pulled into the important problems ā Was routinely moved to work on the most valuable problems within an organization.
Low ego ā Willingness & excitement to do the work necessary even if it was a grind.
Autodidactic with surprising speed and resourcefulness ā Taught themselves the skills they needed to succeed, often by going out and finding the expertise they needed to learn from via a series of interviews and/or reading voraciously.
Could survive being dropped in a foreign environment ā Track record of the equivalent of ācould drop them in another country and theyād figure it out.ā
ā¦
Maybe equally important, I also developed a series of proxies to screen out applicants:
āFinally want to take the riskā ā Applicants who did not have the history of risk-taking or founding anything, but who expressed that they were finally ready to leave their current job to āget their hands dirtyā or ātake a riskā with Ambrook, seemed risky to hire as one of our first employees.
āWant to have decision making powerā ā It also seemed risky to hire applicants who expressed frustration with a lack of decision making power in their current roles and who wanted to join Ambrook in order to have a lot more influence over strategic direction. This is a bit nuanced, as we wanted people who wanted and are able to have strategic impact, but it seemed clear from my calibration interviews that great operators found ways to have decision making influence within an org no matter their role.
Too junior ā The risk for junior candidates was that it might take a while to enable them to operate autonomously with a high level of quality, especially since weāre remote.
Too senior ā The risk for really senior candidates was that they would want to build teams before we were ready to scale that part of the org.
#3: Strategic prioritization using āeven overā statements
(From: Parabolās Jordan Husney) (Source: Jordan Husney)
āCake even over ice creamā is a compact way of expressing a strategic preference between two good alternatives. While choice among desserts serves as a reasonable introduction, letās see how āeven overā statements might be used by a real organization.
Our company, Parabol, creates team collaboration software suited for a wide variety of teams and purposes. However, to build our company and edge out the competition we must focus. By authoring a group of āeven overā statements we can compactly express a strategy for our entire company. Consider this group of āeven overā statements we might use at Parabol as an example:
* Small organizations even over global enterprises
* User growth even over revenue
* Initial signup retention even over existing user retention
* Desktop experience even over mobile experience
These arenāt Parabolās actual strategies. However, they illustrate how powerful āeven overā statements are when a few are written out together. Imagine how much differently the company would act from the company that has reversed each of these statementsā¦
Itās the same company, but a completely different strategy expressed in only 4 sentences.
Using āeven overā statements to prioritize a backlog
When we meet to discuss what to execute next we generate a list of potential projects. Theyāre messy. Theyāre ill-defined and often written as a single sentence. Theyāre just ideas.
We take these ideas and we rank them according to 3 factors: Strategic Alignment to our āeven overā statements, Time Criticality, and Job Size. Then, we calculate the ideaās priority score like this:
(Strategic Alignment + Time Criticality) Ć· Job Size = Priority Score
This formula is a modification of the Scaled Agile Frameworkās Weighted Shortest Job First prioritization model. When we calculate each of the factors we play a sort of Planning Poker. It sounds a lot like this:
āOk, the next idea weāre ranking is, āimporting project data from Trello.ā Does this align with, āsmall organizations even over global enterprises?ā Please hold up 1 to 5 fingers, where ā5ā means, āthis idea strongly supports this strategy,ā ā3ā is, āitās hard to tell,ā and ā1ā means, āthis idea is strongly the opposite of this strategy.āā
ā¦
Formulating strategy is hard. Applying strategy is harder still. The usage of āeven overā statements is just one tool in a strategistās tool chest for reducing cognitive load when choosing from among a set of possibilities. They are a supplement to research, analysis, and story telling, not a substitute.
However, distilling your strategy down to a list of āeven overā statements can be an incredibly powerful thing. They make hard choices explicit. They are information rich and poetic, almost a thumbnail sketch of a full strategy.
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Until next time,