Product Habits - Speed is the killer feature

How to Sell Yourself, Your Startup, and Your Product

One of the things I've seen founders struggle with is selling themselves and their startups well—especially during fundraising conversations. This podcast episode drives home the importance of spending less time on your deck and more on answering the following questions:

• Why are you and your founder the best people in the entire world? 
• Why is your market amazing, and why are you the best person to go after it?
• Why is it the best time for this product? 

I Said No to $30 Million

Guillaume Moubeche and his lemlist co-founders said no to a $30 million investor offer—half of which would've gone straight into their pockets. This is why they ultimately turned it down. It's important for all founders to hear this. There's nothing wrong with raising money for the right reasons, but it's important to question whether you need it first. The answer may surprise you. 

Lessons Learned From Selling a Startup With No Revenue

Victor Ponamariov created an uptime monitoring tool called Pingr and sold it about 14 months later even though it wasn't driving revenue. He breaks down the time and costs invested, his main traffic channel sources, and the lessons he learned along the way. One of the points I found most interesting was his advice to not use the top-notch tech stack—use the stack you know. Check out the rest of his lessons here. 

Speed Is the Killer Feature

When it comes to building products that dominate, speed is the differentiator. No matter what you're building, you will never hear a customer say they want a slower product. And yet, teams consistently overlook speed and do the exact opposite—add more features which ironically makes the product slower. Here's how you can assess speed, and where it matters the most. 

The Power User Trap

The Power User Trap happens when a company either over-optimizes for or neglects its most important users. It's easy to fall into this trap because power users aren't necessarily the most frequent users, but rather those that are outliers in both influence and behavior when it comes to your product. This is a great breakdown of what leads to the trap, how to avoid it, and perhaps most importantly, how to better define different types of power users. 

An Alternative to Competition

Basecamp Co-founder Jason Fried says, "Competition is for sports, it's not for business." He's consistent in his commitment to focusing on having enough customers to make his business work, not by taking market share away from other users or spending a lot of money to get people to switch. In his words, "When you think of yourself as an alternative rather than a competitor, you sidestep the grief, comparison, and need to constantly measure up." I can't help but agree.

Acquisition Channel Opportunities

Not all customer acquisition channels are created equal. Some work better than others depending on your business, and getting creative is of paramount importance given how much harder it is these days to capture people's attention. These three acquisition channels are not ones you'd expect, but they have the potential to be quite effective. Would you give any of them a try? 

Starting a Growth Design Team

Starting growth-focused product teams is uncharted territory, but that is the role Jacki Bauer took on 18 months ago when she offered to lead GitLab's Growth & Fulfillment team. This is how the 21-person, multidisciplinary product team uncovered constraints, built an experiment backlog, and developed a growth framework for the whole company. It's a worthwhile read for anyone who works on product or growth at their company.