Archive of posts with tag 'Growth'

Netflix Couldn't Build Netflix →

September 22, 2022 • #

David Carboni makes a great point in this piece: successful powerhouse businesses, paragons of scaling up (your Netflixes, Googles, Ubers, et al), could never build the disruptive, fast-moving products that made them successful from their positions today:

Admired and respected as towering giants of our digital world, our hero companies emanate an almost mythical quality. The scale, power and inspiration they command are the stuff of legend. Glib statements about “business” distort their stories into gaudy two-dimensional caricatures whilst organisations seeking Digital Transformation aspire to emulate what they see in this theatre. Paradoxically our heroes would be the first to point out they wouldn’t be able to build themselves as they stand today.

So much of what’s required to actually scale to Google or Netflix level is fundamentally unknown and actually nonexistent when they ran into their scaling frictions. Due to their unique needs to deliver their products to hundreds of millions of simultaneous users, Netflix builds Chaos Monkey, Google creates Kubernetes. There’s nothing wrong with these tools; they solve problems that are nearly one-of-a-kind for businesses that are in a class of very few.

The envy of their ability to scale, and an overconfidence that “I’ll need this one day, too”, tempts startups to build for scale way too early. But the cause-effect on their success is misattributed. These megascalers didn’t get to hypergrowth because they built deployment automations, CI/CD magic, or microservice‘d their architecture. They did those things because their early quick-and-dirty, unscalable experimentation helped them find generational product-market fit first.

From where they sit today, their inventions for scale would be active impediments to disruptive innovation.

Success is a messy business, exploratory, trying, failing, scratching your head, learning something new, trying to think different.

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Helping Instead of Selling

August 30, 2020 • #

David Skok opens this post on selling with the classic sales training mantra — customers love to buy, but hate to be sold to:

Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things is to have a salesperson try to get them to buy when they aren’t ready. Unfortunately too many people in marketing and sales positions don’t seem to understand this, and proceed to irritate their potential customers.

As one of the only “sales”people for the first 5 years of Fulcrum’s growth, I can attest to this working well for for myself. In my case my natural distaste for sales and total lack of experience doing it sort of forced me to figure out that this model was the only way I could get customers interested.

A self-service product helps, where you can rely on the ability to get the customer to buy something small at first that they can then grow into — a land-and-expand style of product. In SaaS, the game is all about expansion and retention. For the company, it’s not a life and death situation to maximize customer revenue right out of the gate. In fact, some of the strongest customers you’ll build are the ones that grow into your product organically over time. Champion-led adoption builds incredible gravitational pull around your product if you keep improving and continue expanding the value you’re delivering.

The best thing you can do in the early days is to help. Help prospects not only with your product, but help them with tips and tricks, help clean up their data, help connect other tools, and overall be a source of expertise that they can trust.

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Weekend Reading: Invading Markets, Sleep Deprivation, and the Observer Effect

June 13, 2020 • #

🎖️ Commandos, Infantry, and Police

Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely’s descriptions of three groups of people you need to “attack a market”:

Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. Woz and Jobs were the commandos of the Apple II. Don Estridge and his twelve disciples were the commandos of the IBM PC. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were the commandos of VisiCalc.

Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. The second-wave troops take the prototype, test it, refine it, make it manufacturable, write the manuals, market it, and ideally produce a profit.

What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops at all but police.

😴 Why Sleep Deprivation Kills

Behind all this is the astonishing, baffling breadth of what sleep does for the body. The fact that learning, metabolism, memory, and myriad other functions and systems are affected makes an alteration as basic as the presence of ROS quite interesting. But even if ROS is behind the lethality of sleep loss, there is no evidence yet that sleep’s cognitive effects, for instance, come from the same source. And even if antioxidants prevent premature death in flies, they may not affect sleep’s other functions, or if they do, it may be for different reasons.

📥 The Observer Effect: Marc Andreessen

A new interview series from Sriram Krishnan:

The Observer Effect studies interesting people and institutions and tries to understand how they work.

He kicks it off big with an interview with Marc Andreessen.

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Lower the Degree of Difficulty →

June 12, 2020 • #

Fred Wilson with advice to startups on keeping things simple:

I have sat through numerous pitches where I am listening to the founder explain their technology and go to market plan and I think “this is going to be a reverse triple somersault with two twists in pike and there is no way they are going to land it…

So the better approach is to pick something simple to execute, nail it, then build on it with another relatively simple move, nail that too, and keep going.

One of the benefits of staying in bootstrapped mode is that this is forced on you; if you make projects or goals too big, you waste time and money and don’t hit the target. There’s a temptation to overcomplicate goals or to try and build something too complex because it feels like it’s more valuable. If you index on the wrong things, you can get yourself convinced that the number of features tracks with value, when we all know that’s dangerous territory to tread, especially for small teams.

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Growth, Sales, and a New Era of B2B

August 12, 2019 • #

This talk from a16z’s Martin Casado covers how the market for B2B SaaS go-to-market is changing from sales-driven to a marketing-driven. We’ve been thinking a lot about this lately in the context of Fulcrum — how the “consumerization of IT” plays into how business users today are finding, evaluating, purchasing, and expanding their usage of software.

As he describes in the talk, consumer business tend toward a marketing-led GTM, and enterprise ones toward a sales-led GTM. A combined sales-plus-marketing approach to customer enablement and growth is super hard to execute on, and under the hood requires an excellent “adoptable” product at the center. You’ve got to enable the customer to try and implement your technical solution through a self-service and self-adoption model.

We’ve had this kind of land-and-expand phenomenon with Fulcrum since 2011 — wherein we attract early adopter types from within a company, get traction with smaller use cases, then watch as the company spreads the usage of Fulcrum horizontally to different teams and use cases. In the beginning we structured our GTM this way by necessity (a tiny team couldn’t do full stack marketing and enterprise sales), but have come to enjoy the fruits of this decision as we’ve scaled. I can sympathize with the challenges described here, though; building the right interplays and feedback loops between sales, marketing, and customer success is unnatural for a lot of people, and hard to execute on. The silver lining is that while you might have growing pains with process, at least you’ve got interest, usage, and revenue happening regardless. The magic is in the optimization of the cycle.

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