#call that shit streamlining your workflow

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LET'S DO THIS!I've been getting some questions recently from people that have reached out to me for advice and I wanted to pay it forward to the community. I've advised a ton of businesses from idea, to seed, to raising money and exiting.My focus is on business strategy, sales, and marketing. All around building repeatable processes and streamlining operations.This is what I advise my clients to do right now -General thoughts about B2B and B2CIf you're B2B you're looking at either ongoing services or software and in some cases a little of both.If you're B2C you should be looking at consumable products, things people buy multiple times, with high LTV (lifetime value) customers or a product with a subscription element. NO OTHER EXCEPTIONS HERE.If you're selling into either businesses or consumers today, it's all about perceived value, which means there is some wiggle room depending on who you're selling to, BUT the following really should be held as foundational:These are pretty much the only reasons people buy things for B2B:It saves them time (reduces friction or replaces a time consuming task)Makes/saves them money (creates revenue/ adds value that lets them win business)Adoption is simple for their workforce (is easy to incorporate into an existing workflow and anyone can use it/cost of switching in relearning)Adds transparency and allows for bigger insights (provides data)B2C additional one - provides them joy or enhances their lifeThat's it.The most high growth businesses usually knock out at least two of the above. Really high growth companies hit four or more.Uber is an example of hitting just about all of them:No need to call a cab company and hope they show up, know where they areSaves them money, no more guessing on price and subsidized ridesJust download an app on your existing phone and add your cc numberTells me where my ride is, how long until they come to me, and how much it will costGives me an easy way to get a ride when parking is tough or drinking is involved because of their reliabilityThis works for a lot of businesses though - and there are more than a few SaaS companies that I’m close with that have nailed the majority of them and are creeping up in clients and funding as a result in historically busy spaces.Overall management advice because it’s more important than people thinkManaging is tough, just because someone was a great employee doesn’t make them a great manager and just because someone is an executive doesn’t make them a great communicator.Respect that everyone has different ways of communicating.Two lessons I’ve learned from working with a ton of senior leadership.Internally, break down everything into little goals, constantly ask yourself "What's my goal?" when it relates to calls, emails, outreach, posting, hiring, meetings, etc.Make that shit your mantra then distill it down to the simplest form it can be.You should always strive for clear and concise communication throughout all interactions. If you disagree with a request or find it not in the best interest, agree anyway first, then raise questions about it. Remember, we’re all in this together and our goal as a company is to help everyone clearly articulate “What’s my goal?” at a micro level to encourage good communication.Record all your processes from day one - process is what sets apart winners and losers, always be looking to improve your processes because down the line you're going to be looking to automate these - having records of your approach and what worked and didn't will be invaluable while growing, scaling, or building systems to streamline your approach.There is a tool for everything, that doesn’t mean you should use every tool. Find what works for your team and what has the highest level of adoption, create good habits around using the tools that provide you the best organization.Pep talk done let’s get down to businessWhen you're starting out the only things that matter are:Business strategy, partnerships, product, and marketing strategy.IN THAT ORDERSome of you will argue a team should be included, but I’m of the belief that if you nail all the above correctly, the people you have running it don’t matter as much. It’s more a matter of consistency and process than the people are executing.Today most smart businesses follow the same path:Start with your revenue and monetization plan (are you targeting a sector that has money and can/will pay)Align yourself with others in your space (cheapest way to get traction/credibility)Work on road mapping your product to align with what complements your partnerships (cheapest distribution)Work on building a marketing strategy that can help expose and align your brand while strengthening its recognition with your partners (will this make us both look good)Build customer advocates along the way, tell their stories (lead with examples)The above if done correctly massively increases your chances of successLet’s go over them one by one. (this post only covers number 1 - let me know in the comments if you want me to write up 2 through 5)REVENUE AND MONETIZATION - Will they pay? Do they have money?The following three questions can help you quickly weed out your ideas:Is what you’re building something that people are used to paying for?Is the part of the business you’re looking at a cost center or a revenue generator?Is what you’re providing a race to the bottom or increasingly a data play?You're answers should be, YES, Revenue Generator, Data Play.This is your best shot at success. Even a reduction in costs isn't as sexy all the time. Just compare your support budget to your marketing budget and these things become clear.Story time relevant to number 2 above - cost center v revenue generatorWe were using a series of three tools to automate a series of tasks we all hated. The three tools cost us around $1500 a month, the tools that did all the automation that we added, less than $200. We had to use the other tool either way but for $200 we were able to automate 80% of our work. To us we would have paid 10x for those solutions. The gap was we didn’t have any other good options to accomplish what we needed.I thought about building out a system and a product to fit this space, knowing the amount of savings this provided, but I ran into a problem - People weren't used to paying that amount for what we could provide, the part of the business was viewed as a cost center, and the data play is something that hadn't been used in that way before. Great idea, needed, proven out, but not marketable.You always want to be part of revenue creation - people are willing to pay more just about every time.Even really good ideas sometimes aren’t worth pursuing if the market conditions can’t support them.If you hit all the above three then we can move on to the best steps for getting this up and running.The steps for validating an ideaMarket knowledgeCompetitor researchNicheEarmarked budgetMarket KnowledgeKnow the industry you're entering.Please, for the love of everything, only start a company if you have intimate domain experience. Put differently, if someone was looking for someone to present even at a local level around what you're building would you be able to speak articulately about it where people would respect your opinion because of past work you've done?If the answer is Yes, pat yourself on the back.If it is no, stop, don’t pass go, you’re stuck with two options -Recruit someone to work with you that has enough domain knowledge for the both of you, orGo get some experience in the field, then come back to your planFar too often I talk to people that have had massive success or are really really smart, but they are taking on a project or product that is outside of their sweet spot. This leads to utter and total chaos and really is a waste of time and money in the vast majority of cases.Those that don’t know, partner. We’ll get to more of this in the second step, I’ve seen this work with companies where some groups lacked complete domain expertise. These were 3x CEOs and founders with healthy exits. This is harder to do, but works if you're smart about it.So what happens when a founder doesn’t have domain level experience especially in the early going, problems with go to market and validation, sometimes a general lack of understanding of business principles and market conditions. The result 99.9% of the time is that without domain expertise, founders end up misjudging the market massively and fail to provide the appropriate value.They often find themselves playing catch up and not in a good way, this is something that is easy to avoid, but hard to admit to oneself.I’m a huge proponent of learning an industry on the fly, but I feel like the better decision when possible is to get paid by someone else while you’re learning.But what about getting advisors and consultants to help me bridge the gap?I’ve seen this one in person, I’ve been part of this one, people don’t listen all the time. In some of the companies I’ve done work for, I’ve laid out what steps they should take, and watched as they fought back based on calculations that lacked all possible basis of being remotely possible losing millions of dollars in the process. The lack of domain expertise kills you when it comes to decision making if you’re not open to listening. But as an advisor, your job isn’t to make decisions for the teams, it’s to provide guidance and engage in conversations to bring issues to light and help people focus on goals.I've literally called business results months in advance in single meetings with executives only to watch things play out exactly how I predicted - usually negatively.Competitor Research (this is just an overview - this is it's own post and a half)The basicsSelling to someone that is using an existing solution is easier than enticing someone on a new concept or idea - cheaper tooIf there's competitor there are easy ways to build entire spreadsheets of their client listLook for industries within those client lists to build case studies aroundRemember you're in the game of creating content - be a resource for your communityQualify potential customers by using their opinions in your content marketingUse existing platforms for distribution where possible (integrations anyone?)You have more competitors that you know when launching a product, even if you’re a market first, you’re going to quickly find that the barriers to entry are steep and if the market is big enough people will be able to out spend, out maneuver, and out shout you pretty quickly.This shouldn’t deter you, it just means you need to be smarter.Existing ProvidersKnow the entire landscape for the type of product that you are creating. Know all the sort of competitors, talk to people and see what they are using, ask questions on Reddit and in other forums, understand who people know in the market.Then go to G2 and capterra and every other place that people talk about those products, scrape all the reviews with pros and cons - on some websites the reviewers even have linkedin links - go to their profiles learn about the companies they work for, the roles they have etc.There is so much data out there, work smart from the start.This is literally a post in it’s own or a chapter of a book. (if you’re reading this and you want me to break this down I can in another form).Correlate what your competitors do well, what they lack, and everything else in between.If you look up CRM you’ll see more than 250 listed probably more than 300 now, not including all the new ones like airtable and others that have popped up recently that aren’t direct traditional CRMs but just as useful.That’s a lot of space junk to get through.But there’s an easy way to get through it.NICHE YOUR SHIT DOWNThe biggest problem that most companies have is being able to properly niche down to the most ideal customer profile first, then work to expand the market after the fact.Remember that perceived value comment from way above.So how do you find yourself in the best possible chance of creating something that you can do well with?Build something that people are paying for, generates revenue for the business, and includes a data play as icing on the cake that improves processes and decision making.This will never work in broad terms, you need to be specific.One of the most common missteps people have is saying, their product is for everyone or every business. This is a red flag, don’t do this. Focus on doing one thing better than everyone else, look for data that supports a 10x uptick. This is basically required if you want someone to give your product a try as moving things over from an existing system are annoying.Your product needs to be very narrow, when you think you’ve gone narrow, you need to go more narrow.Example:We’re a helpdesk product.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes.v.We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes who are currently using Zendesk.Just keep going deeper.There are perks to going deeper -The deeper you go usually the less competition you have - the more specific and tailored the easier the sales pitch is because you spend time creating things to help with workflows that relate to how they are working. When you know these workflows it's easier to have meaningful conversations.I’ve harped on the idea of process the entire time. And I’m going to continue to do it. Build things to simplify processes and watch people sign up and pay you to solve their problems.The ideal solution is turnkey that works with all the workflows people have or simplifies them with the amount of tools out there find the ones that you want to be part of the process with and integrate deeply.Earmarked BudgetIs the budget expanding, will it be expanded if you can tie results back to your product?This is actually really important because it comes to the ability to grow an account once you are in the account. Some businesses are better than others.If you’re a support desk product like above, and you reduce the amount of work people need to do, you’re reducing seats, if you can’t add features and other elements to increase the revenue per account or the size of the support team you’ve actually tapped out. This is the argument behind being a revenue generation company rather than a cost center. When it comes to a cost center it’s a race to the bottom and kills expansion, it forces you to always be acquiring new customers to increase revenue.This should be plenty to digest as you're thinking of ideas to pursue.Let me know your thoughts in the comments, hope this helps people out.I've got to stop here, we hit question 1 of 5 and we've barely scratched the surface.

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Tech Dopes and Politics

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/3/15904484/pincus-hoffman-linkedin-zynga-clinton-win-the-future-democrats-dnc-trump

This became MUCH longer than I thought, and yeah, it’s a slog.

Oh, where to begin with this shitstorm. Let’s start with some snark and then move onto more serious concerns (though really, it’s not like those are going to be held too far apart because good lord).

This is the kind of idea that two dopes in a sitcom or movie would be talking about to anyone who would listen. They’re young, white, male, and rich, though not necessarily in that order. They’re tired with politics or the delivery business or media - really, the exact what they’re tired of doesn’t matter so much as the disdain for “X as usual” (which they never really define nor care to). They’ve got this great idea though - “what if you could change the way X worked with just a click? Introducing, Win The Future! (with a giant poster board of a “WTF” logo in simplistic font, probably with some kind of geometric-esque symbol for branding)”

Everyone, except maybe the most gullible person, or someone who has no idea how politics or the internet work, in the room look at these two like they’re probably high. They never get mentioned again, except as a brick joke several acts later, and only in a positive light if the writers are trying a “take that” at consumerism and such. You’ve probably seen something like this in numerous versions of media, enough that I don’t even have to really give a specific scene because the idea of two rich novices trying to tell everyone EXACTLY what will fix their problems is built into satiric writing. Shit, the Big Bang Theory’s probably done this more times than years I’ve been alive.

In this article? Played completely straight. No winks, no asides (except one kinda-sorta-maybe), just two scrappy underdogs with degrees from little-known universities like UPenn, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, armed with only $5 billion between themselves, trying to change the world. The underdogs in question: Mark Pincus, co-founder of Zynga (of Farmville fame, among others), and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn (the eternal punchline of social media platforms).

I’m trying not to dip into ad hominem too much here because there are plenty of smart, compassionate, self-aware people who happen to be wealthy, I’m sure. Not most of them and certainly not the ones you hear the most about, but I’m willing to grant that not everyone with an income over $250k a year is an abominable moron divested from reality. But as the tone may suggest, I’m skeptical.

And it certainly does little to suggest you fit in that category when you spout this nonsense:  

“It’s become this competitive insider’s world,” said Pincus, who has donated nearly $2.5 million to candidates and causes, according to federal records. "Whether it’s me or my family and friends … we just feel - we’ve always felt - left out. It just feels like the bar is so high for any of us to have a voice and choice.”

Setting aside for a moment the gurgling rage that threatens to dispose of my ability to construct coherent thought, the lack of self-awareness in those three sentences is almost staggeringly funny. It almost makes me think the writer was trying to slip an aside in about how absurd that statement is, coming from that source, but given a) it’s from recode and b) the generally positive tone of the piece, it seems unlikely.

Mark Pincus is from the neighborhood in Chicago were the terms “Trixie” and “Chad” sprung up to describe the young affluent type who was as vapid as they were wealthy, and boy does it seem to fit. Pincus’ career tab on his wiki page goes, “Before he became an entrepreneur, Pincus worked in venture capital and financial services,” which is shorthand for ‘he wasn’t quite rich enough to buy an island, but enough to make some really dumb purchases at the yacht dealership” and was rich enough to be “an early investor’ in basically every major social media platform of the early-00s. Richard Hoffman has a similar setup, growing up in Palo Alto and Berkeley, attending Stanford and Oxford, becoming an “angel investor” and investing in too many startups to list here for practical purposes. They are, if you hadn’t guessed, both white, live/work in the Silicon Valley area, and incredibly well-connected (Hoffman’s a member of the Bilderberg Group, if you ever want to fantasize about the closest thing to the Illuminati in real life).

This is not to diminish anything good either of them has done. Jury’s out on social gaming’s ultimate effect on society, but I lean towards neutral at worst, and it’s been helpful to people in all sorts of ways, and Zynga upended the market and general consensus on that. Hoffman, while being one of the guys behind PayPal (yeah, another one), a member of Microsoft’s board and has a history of investments in Facebook and Airbnb, is probably most notable for a number of tech-related philanthropic endeavors and was the money behind Crisis Text Line.

The notion they’re advocating, of a more democratic process, is not a bad one at all and if we’re choosing between folks like these two and Peter Thiel or even Mark “I’m So Normal Guys Look I’m Going To Iowa” Zuckerberg, I’m with Hoffman and Pincus any day (Never mind that a world relying on the deep pockets of tech billionaires for political reform makes me gag). But to call these two anything but “insiders” is a fundamental failure to grasp how much power and access that the people with lots of money (remember: $5 billion between them) have compared to the vast majority of voters in this country.

And, you guessed it, it gets worse. The only platform items that the WTF (I still cannot fucking believe) have committed to far are “Whether or not they believe engineering degrees should be free to all Americans, and if they oppose lawmakers who don’t call for Trump’s immediate impeachment” per the article above. Which, uh, that’s cool how about college for everyone not just engineers (while super important and underappreciated), and second, again, uh yeah but that has the same effect as threatening to boycott space travel: the people who agree with you are already there, the people who dislike it aren’t gonna move (especially for you), and there’s really no practical effect that’ll happen in the near term (i.e. Elon Musk loses it Howard Hughes-style, Spruce Goosing our way to space and when a Democratic majority takes the House, for space and Trump respectively).

Worse, in the same vein as saying they’ve “felt left out” the article details an approach that is, well, concerning.

In politics, though, Pincus sees a similarly — needlessly — complex game. Replace the Xbox controller maybe with the impenetrable machinations of Congress, where bills and markups and votes are often the stuff of hard-to-discern theater. So, too, are the costs of playing increasingly high at a time when political money can — and does — flow uninhibited to campaigns in the forms of hard-to-track nonprofits and super PACs.

Simple things are not bad - simple ideals like universal health care, college tuition for all, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay for equal work, guaranteeing the right to vote for every person in the Constitution are all ones I’ve heard Democrats talk about and I for one embrace enthusiastically. But this isn’t about simplicity of ideal, this is simplicity of process - and democracy, even the lacking measures that are so often twisted or bandied about for gaining power, is inherently messy and complicated. It’s designed that way, because if something is simple, then it is easy to manipulate and seize control of. Tech guys, more so than most businesses it seems, are all about efficiency - getting down to basics, streamlining workflow and production, which again! All good things! But politics and civic service is not a business, and it cannot be operated on the same principle of a business - those in power have to be held accountable, and that means you will inevitably sacrifice some efficiency. Not the kind of partisan wrangling and obstructionism (again rooted in accumulating power rather than serving the people or process, but that’s another rant for another day) that has been a problem for the last two decades, and for both parties but predominantly the GOP; complexity is not a vice - if we wanted simple and efficient, we’ve had plenty of examples and most of them we’ve fought wars again at one point or another.

No, this kind of simple suggests that you just don’t want to learn or be troubled to get your hands dirty in what you see as a nasty business, the holier-than-thou kind of simple. It’s the kind of simple where you run into a problem you can’t fix with a check or a call to someone you know, so you call the system broken and impenetrable and fund-raise or petition based off of the frustrations of other people, usually those who have far less money, power, access, or time than you do. It is the simple that is based off of good intentions because it’s easy and you’re scared and you’ve seen the other side go for easy and simple and win, even while lying or rejecting reality entirely. “He doesn’t speak like a politician, he thinks like one of us! He’s authentic!”

And now this is the part where I have to make more in the way of conjecture rather than history and background, but it’s equally important.

As a general rule, Pincus told me in June, WTF aspires to be “pro-social [and] pro-planet, but also pro-business and pro-economy.”

I said this already on twitter, but how can you much more of a useless “both sides” centrist techie stereotype can you be? Other, just as useful ideas from this platform:  

"We’re pro-puppy, but also pro-kitten."

"Pro-blue skies but pro-clean water.”

“Pro-justice AND pro-equality”

Also, “pro-social” - whatever the fuck THAT means - is the only mention of anything in the ballpark of issues of racial justice, economic inequality, women’s rights, LGBTQ issues, and more. Hold onto that for a moment.

The exact direction is up to its supporters, who can steer the organization through the campaigns they choose and promote, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that WTF seeks to push Democrats further to the political left.

“I’m fearful the Democratic Party is already moving too far to the left,” Pincus said. “I want to push the Democratic Party to be more in touch with mainstream America, and on some issues, that’s more left, and on some issues it might be more right.”

Yeah, this is pretty concerning, especially given a long list of failed centrist political programs like No Labels or Americans Elect. Both of those groups (which, disclaimer, the latter I signed up for with its “national online primary” in 2012) tend to focus towards “fiscal responsibility” and “treating America like a business” and policy like a balanced budget amendment (nope) and tone policing stuff like you see from Peggy Noon or David Brooks. It usually couches this in “both sides are bad” rhetoric or in the case of some more progressive elements, decries both parties as being basically the same (see: “She’s no better than Trump!” for a more progressive take on it with 2016).

What WTF isn’t: “Pro-politician,” Pincus said. “So we’d like to see either political outsiders or politicians who are ready to put the people ahead of their career.”

And then we circle back to the “simple because it’s easy” route, where anyone can look at the current White House and go “jesus christ, I don’t have any experience but I can certainly do better than that!” Because politicians are an easy target (boy howdy do I know that) and it’s easy to find things in the political system that seem antiquated or archaic or overly coated in red-tape and you can sure bet that some of them are. But it’s the one we’ve got, and making another out of whole-cloth should terrify anyone who understands half of what that’d entail.

Time to come back to that idea I said to hang onto at the top of the page, “pro-social.” As I noted, there is not one mention of what are commonly referred to as “social issues” - LGBTQ rights, civil rights, women’s rights, all of which (if the names didn’t tip you off) tend to be about what the folks in power already have and minorities tend to not. There’s one mention of immigration policy, and that’s in the context of the Muslim travel ban being a catalyst for rounding up an email list of wealthy white liberal donors, and “affordable healthcare” is similarly piled into that one block quote from said email. And that’s frankly not surprising.

These two, and pretty much everyone else mentioned or sniffed at for this idea, is of that rich, white, male, and young demographic I talked about back in the beginning of this novella. So, no, it’s not surprising - it is still frustrating, and dangerous because it begets ideas like this:

Initially, Pincus had planned to solicit feedback at launch on recruiting a potential challenger to Democrats’ leader in the House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in a primary election. That idea is on hold — for now — but Pincus and Hoffman are still trying to solicit candidates to run elsewhere as so-called “WTF Democrats.” For Pincus, one of his early targets: Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind. The two have met in recent months, in fact.

At first, Pincus planned to pitch potential supporters on challenging Pelosi, an audacious move at a time when insurgent Democrats are wondering if her leadership in the House has given Republicans too much opportunity to go on the attack. Days before the launch of WTF, however, the Zynga leader opted against proposing such a plan. (Asked if he backed a fight to unseat Pelosi, Hoffman told me hours earlier he was “waiting to see,” but stressed that he’s “certainly not opposed to it.”)

Also on Pincus’s potential target list: California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who he derided as a “career politician.” Feinstein also isn’t an introductory target for WTF, but Pincus said he’s already had conversations with folks like Jenkins, the frontman of Third Eye Blind, about someday challenging her.

Pelosi and Feinstein, two of the most powerful women in Congress, are the only listed targets this group has been public about so far. The only reason for doing so seems to be that they’re folks who have been in politics for decades and based in the San Francisco area. You could say it’s the “career politicians” thing (see: No Labels for an example of another centrist group that talks about experience in political arenas like leprosy) but that doesn’t really add up. There are Democratic leaders in Congress like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York (18 years in the Senate, another 18 in the House), Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont (42 years in the Senate), Steny Hoyer of Maryland (36 years in the House), or John Lewis (elected just months prior to Pelosi in 1987); all of which are senior to Pelosi and Feinstein, but with zero mention - and while you can make arguments that careerism has influenced any and all of the individuals I just listed along with Pelosi and Feinstein, only the latter two are singled out as public targets.

Yeah, you can probably guess the difference, but here it is: tech companies are shit when it comes to women in their midst. Tech culture (and venture capital and business in general and… ad infinitum) is notorious brutal to break into, and even more so for women who often deal with harassment, stagnant wages, lack of promotion, and hostile atmosphere. The most visibly toxic results of tech culture’s osmosis into society are, unfortunately, displayed often enough on Twitter and the White House (and sometimes at the nexus of the two), but it also manifests itself in ways that are, in the big picture, subtle or even benign in their appearance, but have the overall effect of leaving women on the outside of policy and power - and leading to bullshit like Viagra being covered by every fucking insurance plan in the known universe, but birth control being a coin toss (at best) prior to the ACA.

Ridding Congress of the deadwood is a popular drumbeat and has been more or less since there’s been a Congress to campaign about, and especially against. But kicking out people based solely on the fact that they’ve been there for a long time is a great way to ensure that the folks who make up the institutional memory of how to get things done and passed (see the current Republican Congress as to how important it is to have the folks who know how to make a deal and negotiate with the other party). And when it’s clear that you’re only thinking of doing that, at first blush, to the women in power, including arguably the most efficient and successful political operative the House has seen since Henry Clay?

Yeah, fuck that nonsense. I’ll ride with Nancy Pelosi and complexity any day over two rich bros who think they know just how to fix all our problems with one easy solution.