The rocks-pebbles-sand quicksand đ©đ§
How not to choose the obvious interpretation of a widespread product framework, notes on the unique misses of B2B product marketing, and doing a whole lot more with earned media.
Welcome to the fifty-second 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!Â
In this edition, youâll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of WP Engineâs Jason Cohen, Intercomâs Des Traynor, and Lately AIâs Kate Bradley Chernis.
Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches â Bringing Early Adopters on to the Cap Table, Being COOs of Potential Users, and Other Community-First Ways of Building with Passionfrootâs Co-Founder, Jennifer Phan
Heuristics and Hunches â Ignoring MRR for the Self-Serve Switch, âDogfood upon Dogfood upon Dogfood,â and other Lessons in Breaking out of Constraints with Lately AIâs Co-Founder, Kate Bradley Chernis
#1: The practical applications of âRocks, Pebbles, Sandâ â WP Engineâs founder, Jason Cohen, buckles founders in for a long, nuanced ride on how this popular, startup prioritization framework really works (or fails). (Source: A Smart Bear)
You know the geology-in-a-jar lesson from Stephen Covey: Schedule big things first, otherwise you run out of time. If you schedule little things first, you run out of time for the big things. If you schedule the big things first, then you can fill in with smaller things.
A common mistake is to think this applies only to the size of the work. That is, âRocksâ means âstuff that takes a few quarters,â âPebblesâ means âa few sprints,â and âSandâ means âless than a sprint.â
This misses the most important point of work-ordering: Itâs about maximizing impact by not allowing the easy nor even the urgent things to crowd out the strategic things that take years to unfold but are more important than everything else combined. A thousand âquick winsâ do not add up to creating durable advantages or fulfilling a long-term vision.
Another mistake is to think that the previous paragraph is the end of the story. âSchedule revenue-growth stuff, then maintenance updates, got it.â No. Each type of work requires different prioritization frameworks, has different goals, and hide different traps that make you unwittingly ineffective.
If you pretend these differences donât exist, your team will be working hard and delivering lots of code-commitsâthe appearance of âproductivityââbut theyâll feel like theyâre not making progress fast enough, competition will start catching up, and theyâll (correctly) complain that they canât see how their work is connected to the strategy.
The good news is: It does not take additional time to do it right. This is an instance of âsmarter, not harder.â You just need the right frameworks.
Three mindsets
A tabular summary is trite, but itâs handy as a reference:
Rocks maximize impact
A Rock must deliver dramatic, measurable impact, not merely âincremental improvement.â It must be strategic, meaning that it must attack the most important challenges you face, materially advancing the company down its unique path for winning its corner of the market, leveraging existing advantages to reduce risk and to forge a path that others cannot easily follow, and build new durable advantages. This is where teams most often fall short: Not delivering enough impact to justify their investment of time.
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Sand maximizes throughput
Because Pebbles are the Goldilocks of work-items, itâs instructive to leap over them and solve for the smallest items, establishing bookends around the middle-child.
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Pebbles maximize ROI
Pebbles are not a âbalanceâ between Rocks and Sand; they are their own creatures. Their timeframe is definitionally constrained between that of Sand and Rocks; the more important difference is that while Rocks are strategic, with a view towards winning over the next few years, Pebbles are tactical wins that have an impact in the next few months, attacking the challenges youâre facing right now, or a great feature idea you can surprise customers with sooner than they expect.
#2: Product marketing beyond, âhereâs a big screenshot and hereâs a one-linerâ â Intercomâs co-founder and CSO, Des Traynor, having seen both sides of the discipline, assesses some of its persistent challenges. (Source: 20VC)
We donât take enough of a user-centric or buyer-centric approach with product marketing.
Oftentimes we confuse something like AirPodsâ marketing, which is glorious â but what we mean by glorious is that the buyer equals the user, thereâs no buying committee, thereâs no proof points, no oneâs shopping based on data or competitive feature set â itâs entirely a brand play.
So itâs very different from saying Asana launching a new way of doing Gantt charts or something like that. You have to think about from the point of view of, not all products can go to market the same wayâŠ
Thatâs one problem. We always forget that.
Then, specifically, startup product marketing, generally, it is always defaulted to, âhereâs a big screenshot and hereâs a one-liner.â I think thatâs totally fine in a world where the screenshot is really self-evident of whatâs going on.
So if I posted a screenshot of Riverside.fm, on which weâre chatting on right now. I think itâll be pretty obvious whatâs happening. The product is self-evident. Thatâs not the case for a load of B2B SaaS where itâs just a lot of text input boxes and a graph.
And youâre wondering, âwhat is this?â It could be anything from payroll software to Amplitude or anything in between.
You have to bear in mind that a lot of people think that their product sells itself, therefore, âletâs just put a big, dopey screenshot that says Data, Reinventedâ or something like that. No one has a clue whatâs happeningâŠ
I think a challenge for product marketing is 1) you have to work out what your users and buyers want to know, and theyâre not always the same things. And 2) whatâs the best way to show that youâre the best at it.
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The challenge here is what is a typical adoption path for a product. If we take IntercomâŠwe have a beautiful inbox, we released it a couple of weeks ago. Next generation. Fanciest piece of customer support product on the market. But the person whose buying it, they arenât actually the frontline users of the product.
They are a VP of Support in a 2000-person company. They actually donât even see the inbox half the time. They might see the reports that come out of it. But honestly, even in those cases theyâre looking at those in Snowflake or somethingâŠ.
When the buyer doesnât equal the user, the buyerâs questions are, basically, this is going to sound quite reductive, but it is, âI have two numbers to worry about, are you going to make me money or save me money? If so, how and why should I believe you?â
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The user has a different set of concerns. âIâm trying to do my job and get promoted, I need to believe that your product is going to make me more effective, more performativeâŠhow can you support me in my life?â
As to which goes first, you absolutely have to do both. If you are billboarding in Times Square, the actual answer is who is most likely to be standing there and looking at that billboard? Your buyers or your users? If itâs the users, go with that.
Go for the bottom-up, product-led adoption sort of model, where everyoneâs like, âoh I wish we could use IntercomâŠ.â
And you hope that enough of that groundswell pressure reaches a VP of Customer Support and theyâll hit you with the real questions: What are your proof points? Where are your enterprise case studies?
#3: âNot one day has passed where somebody hasnât said something nice about [us] publiclyâ â Lately AIâs co-founder and CEO, Kate Bradley Chernis, on establishing enviable reach without a marketing team. (Source: Relay)
With marketing, for instance, there is no marketing team, per se, at Lately.
Instead, weâve pieced it together with interns, contractors, sales and even engineering. Everyone plays a part. Iâm where the buck stops, obviously. But Iâve got all these other jobs as CEO. Hence, thereâs no true marketing lead. Thereâs no one who has the bandwidth to really run the show, to always have the ball. So we do it together.
Again, the thought has been, what can we do with the resources we have? That will have the biggest bang for the buck? Writing, for example, even for me, is hard and time-consuming. To sit down and write a blog or newsletter, I need four uninterrupted hours â nearly impossible. And Iâd essentially need to crank that kind of content out daily â wildly impossible.
But Iâm great on-air. Itâs easy for me. No sweat. I donât have to prepare for anything, I donât even have to think about it. My biggest concern before I hop on an interview or a podcast is my hair (which is always a hopeless disaster).
Right around the beginning of COVID, I had done a few interviews, here and there. But the requests started coming in more often â Iâm a great guest, Iâm a woman, Iâve got a background as a rock ânâ roll deejay and Iâve got my hands in AI. I am in demand.
That was the aha. I recognized that I could use this âearned mediaâ the same way I was thinking about âowned mediaâ and repurpose it through our own AI. I created a self-fueling marketing machine that costs zero dollars and almost no effort.
This was my answer to the resource question on marketing: I can certainly spend half an hour, or an hour a day, almost once a day, every day, giving a workshop, having an introspective conversation, and reaching shared audiences.
To take it a step further, we not only broadcast what comes out of the AI on our own brand channels but also then syndicate it across all of our employeesâ own social channels. Because I built that feature into Lately. Double dog food!
This is the thing that so many entrepreneurs forget. If you donât have a huge network, glom on to the others in your network. This is why the culture we have internally at Lately is so essential â not just a team, a fandom. I built a team thatâs willing to promote the teamâs work. Because I canât possibly do it by myself. Together, weâre stronger.
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In addition, our social media contractor keeps an eye out, like a hawk, on every new customer coming in on Stripe, and she finds them on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever platform theyâre on, and starts to reshare their content. We also try to participate in whatever they publish.
We take links that they post, put them through Lately, and then share them with the team and ask, âhey guys, our friend, Jen McFarland was featured in an amazing book this week. Hop on. Letâs congratulate her.â We ensure theyâre aware of who we are and that weâre on their team. Again⊠Together, weâre stronger.
Itâs dogfood upon dogfood upon dogfood.
All the way through.
All of that together is how we get that 98% sales conversion on the enterprise side. Once we kick off promotions, we watch to see who likes, comments, and shares â as these people are warm leads, because thereâs some recognition or social proof around that activity they did.
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I also constantly think about how to put other people on the cover. And itâs hard. I try to get interviews for all our co-founders and senior leaders. We also try to put Latelyâs customers on the cover of that magazine as often as we can, too. So letting them run our weekly live webinars, for example. After all, weâre all in this together. Sound familiar?
Think of it like this: when youâre in a room and youâre networking, the way to get the most bang out of the buck from that, is to not be the person who is the brightest light. Instead, you want to be the person that makes other people feel like theyâre the light.
Lift them up. Thatâs how you create evangelists. Itâs subtle but very powerful. It is also the Long Tail, which Iâm a huge fan of, again thanks to my former career in radio. Back then the idea was: âDonât play a song, create a vibe.â At Lately, itâs: âDonât make a sale, make a fan.â
One of the unexpected results has been that in the last three years, not one day has passed where somebody hasnât said something nice about Lately publicly on social media. We even enjoy regular public praise from those whoâve churned.
We also drive a thousand leads to our website every week with this method. The FREE method. Itâs a lot of work. I know that. But the residual, exponential bang-for-the-buck will carry us forever.
Until next time,