How to grow a startup | Sidebean

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. If you need a hiring hero, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade Electrolites, Zero Sugar, and Vitamins.

1:01Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolites. Doreen's startup is in a nutshell a game of trial and error. On the product side, you're essentially trying to find the perfect combination of audience, pain point, and solution. Now while marketing or sales are of course essential, you can hire the best marketing team with all the money in the world, and they still wouldn't be able to make a flawed product succeed. We have over 100 forensics episodes to prove it. So a customer hypothesis could be first time startup founders. A problem hypothesis is that they don't know how to navigate fundraising, and a solution hypothesis could be an intensive accelerator program, or maybe a skillshit course, or maybe a suite of SaaS tools that guide you through these steps. So a company's lifetime is how many times they can iterate on these three ideas and these three variables to find product market fit before they run out of money.

2:01That's what building a startup is. So in this video, I want to focus on those three pillars of growing a startup. One, building a good product that people actually need to learn how to sell that product and three being able to iterate fast. So let's talk about product first with a disclaimer. Now, well, I'm the company CEO, and of course, I need to be involved with everything. My focus through all of these years with Slidebean has been around growth. I think that you can find product oriented or ops oriented or growth oriented CEOs, and I am definitely the latter. From the get-go, it's been my co-founders who have led most of our product development with me getting involved mostly on the metrics and the numbers side. Now, with that being said, here are five key thoughts on the product. One, startup succeed if someone lives and breathes the product. Truly great products, products that transform customer behavior are built with a combination

3:02of a great idea and incredible execution. To build a remarkable product, the CTO or the head of product or the product manager, they need to fully immerse themselves in the mind of the customer. And that is something that you are definitely not getting from an agency or a developer that you hire by the hour. Look at every single unicorn tech company today and look at who their CTO was and when they came into the business, they were a co-founder. Number two, products succeed if they're essential, not a nice to have. Ask your customers how upset they'd be if they lost access to the product. I'm not taking any credit for this. This is a pretty standard product market fit survey. But if customers are not extremely disappointed, you haven't really reached product market fit yet. Now, keep changing your hypothesis. Maybe a different kind of customer, maybe a different problem, which would translate into a different reason why they would use your product, which is a different messaging through marketing. This brings me to my third point, which is going niche. You can't make a product for every single customer in the world.

4:03That's going to be useful for everybody, at least not from the get go. You have to divide and conquer, become the perfect product for one specific, very specific, very niche group of customers, find product market fit with them and then move on. This should be an audience so specific that you know everything about them. Our audiences start up founders, majority early stage, usually new to the start of world. They discover our forensics videos and then they move on to more advanced videos about running a business. We are always looking into what other content they watch and why they watch it. If you know them well, you can sell to them. Number four is fast metrics driven iteration, which is absolutely key. Now fast iteration as a company was one of my key pillars before, but I'm referring to the product at the moment. Make sure that you have a team that can iterate really quickly. Simple details like a confusing sign-up screen or a bad cult to action button can be super low-hanging fruit fixes that could significantly change the behavior or the conversion rate of your product. And then number five, measure everything. The only way you can make educated decisions is by measuring.

5:06Make sure that you set up good tracking across your product, the ability to go back and understand what your users are doing or were doing before is truly priceless. Now this brings you to my next point, which is going niche. Only a handful of products or platforms out there can do a great job at fulfilling the needs of every single customer. Companies usually try to be really good at one thing first and then slowly expand that audience for more uses. Let's look at say CRMs, for example. There are dozens of competing CRM products out there and more keep showing up every day. But if you look deep, you can easily find the target audiences for each one of those. Sales for us, for example, is in a temple of a corporate, large business type of CRM. It's expensive, it's hard to adopt, and it's built with very large sales teams in mind. On the contrary, tools by Big In, by Soho, CRM are focused on small businesses and simplicity. Pricing is a question for startups so they've made an effort to price the product low and to save companies money by integrating their phone system, for example, inside of the product. They essentially handpicked the very basics of a CRM,

6:08the pipelines or the customer and company profiles, maybe the overseeing of activities, the dashboard, and they package all out into a tool that's not overkill for the type of customer that they target, but that the sales for customer will probably find limited. You can't be great at everything or great for everyone. You have to pick not only from the product, but for the marketing side. Selling to a team of 10 people is completely different to selling to a team of 500 people. That brings me to my company, which is selling your product, i.e. growth marketing. Now, the persona of a growth marketer stands at the crossroads between the product and the marketing or the sales team. The traditional publicity slash marketing agency model is so disconnected from the product. They're so good at getting the word out there, at getting people to talk about a product, but they're not great about actual company growth. Growth means not only looking at the best cost per click or the best sign-up rate, it means looking at which campaign brings better customers. Customers that retain better, customers that love the product,

7:09customers that are product. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen, and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching, and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at ND.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Propel Fitness Water With Gatorade Electrolites, Zero Sugar, and Vitamins,

8:12Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolites. Like market fit customers, and that requires looking at the data. We published a video last week outlining every single marketing channel out there, and by all means should go watch that. But from that, I believe that you can actually filter or qualify and group these channels into three large groups. So first is self-service. This is where customers sign up completely on their own, and if there is a paid component to your platform, customers can find that, and they can convert without having to interact with anybody. Cell service growth usually applies for B2B. That's an user-focused product. And maybe for B2B products that have a low price range. Maybe, say, one to $200 a month. If this is you, you probably want to be focusing on bringing high converting clicks via paid ads, or maybe bringing a lot of clicks via organic traffic, which of course connects to SEO and referrals and recommendations out of those 19 marketing channels.

9:12And then you want to focus on finding a way to track and project what's going to happen next month, which is of course easier set than done since these are very unpredictable channels before you reach a certain critical mass. Like, for example, a PR article or a website that ranks well on SEO, you can't absolutely control how that page will perform. So you can't predict how that page will perform over the next few months. You'll also live by your landing page and overall by your screen conversion rate. You'll want to be focusing on covering holes in your funnel so that you don't have a leaky bucket from discovering your platform to conversion. Now the second large group is inbound sales. Inbound sales growth consists of generating leads and then having a sales team that takes them and converts them. Now leads could be generated via PR or paid marketing or business development, maybe webinars or maybe even in-person events. But the point is that these leads are funneled to a sales team that need to close that deal. Tech products that depend on inbound sales are usually pricey or and almost always b2b. The prices are necessarily responded

10:13to the product being more expensive to run or the servers being more expensive. It really responds to the fact that the product is harder to adopt. That means that the company needs to cover the very expensive cost of closing that deal. Now products growing through this channel might not advertise their pricing on their website because the purpose of their landing pages is not getting people to convert right there. It's capturing the lead and then moving them down this conversion inbound funnel. Each lead is expensive. That means dozens or maybe hundreds of dollars. So the sales team needs to make sure that they do everything they can to make the most out of each one of those leads. And this is where CRM's become essential, which brings us back to today's sponsor, which is Bigin. Bigin was envisioned by the folks from Zoho CRM, which do a bunch of other things. And their most important selling point is simplicity. On the other extreme, you have those things like sales forward, which are overkill for most startups. You probably need a course on sales force to learn how to use it. So it's simpler to like Bigin, allows you to move much faster, to visually understand the stage of your deals,

11:14to manage your funnel, oversee your activities and dashboard, automate processes, and even make phone calls straight from the platform. It's also priced, started friendly, unout mostly sole service approach at just $7 a month for their express plan. And you can get 50% off up to $100 on Bigin, by Zoho CRM, by clicking the link that we left in the description. Now the last big repair is outbound sales. This encompasses stuff like business development or partnerships or even outbound, cold emails. So if you rely on outbound sales, you'd probably be working with a demand generation team, whose job is oftentimes to just cold pitch people or to use their networks to get relevant intros to those decision makers. Products that are sold via outbound sales are usually the most expensive, not only to make up for the expensive cost of the acquisition, but because in order to cover that cost, they need to target large companies that have more expensive problems and more expensive needs. You also probably need a CRM for outbound sales, but this is absolutely not my cup of tea. I've built B2C and B2B companies,

12:14but I've always relied on self-service and more recently on inbound sales. Happy to bring an expert in outbound sales as a guest if you'd like me to cover much more on that direction. Hope this was a useful cover of the basics of product and start building. See you guys next week.