An interesting post from Sandy on the “stealth objection”: when a customer, investor, user, employee — anyone — harbors some resistance to what you’re selling them, but doesn’t make it explicit.
My experience here is mostly in getting users to buy or adopt our product. Anytime you’re showing off what you’ve got and selling them on the concept, some objections are out in the open. “It’s too expensive”. “It doesn’t support SSO”. “I can’t integrate with X”. These ones are on the easy end of the spectrum. At least you know where you stand!
In the wake of Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack, there’s been a flood of analysis on whether it was a sign of Slack’s success or failure to grow as a company. It’s funny that we live in a time when a $27bn acquisition of a 7-year-old company gets interpreted as a failure. I’d consider it validation for their business that a $200bn company like Salesforce makes their largest acquisition ever on you. Broadly, it’s a move to make Salesforce more competitive with Microsoft as an operating system for business productivity writ-large.
I rediscovered this great piece from Patrick McKenzie, an SEO primer for startups, but actually valid for anyone trying to generate traffic, interest, and business from the internet for anything at all.
The first cut of your SEO strategy will be wrong, just like v1.0 of your product will be non-responsive to the needs of your users. That is OK: after you start you’ll begin collecting insights and data which let you refine it. You want to get something out the door as soon as possible so that you can begin collecting links, other indicia of trust, and data on what...
A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas from the authors on spaced repetition.
Interesting take from one of Byrne Hobart’s recent newsletters. Contrasting a typical “full-stack” model of company-building and VC funding to a “sumo” model:
The amount of VC funding has been rising steadily, and returns are skewed by a few positive...
I enjoyed this deep, transparent history from Nat Eliason on how he built up his website over the past several years. He covers basic technology, content, habits, promotion, and monetization.
The precis:
Tech stack doesn’t matter as long as it’s reliable, supports what you want to do, and doesn’t get in your way
Habit-forming is hard; being intentional and setting goals is the primary tactic
Topics and content don’t matter as much as you think in the early days; the best way to work it out is to start and gradually zero in on what...
Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems beneficial then to figure out the means of using it with the lowest possible opportunity costs. One of the simplest ways to do this is to establish how you’d like to be using your time, then track how you’re using it for a week. Many people find a significant discrepancy. Once we...
I enjoyed a couple of notes from this interview with Atlassian President Jay Simons. They’ve famously built a business with bottom-up adoption dynamics, allowing them to hit the $1bn revenue milestone without a traditional sales-led model. It’s especially impressive how they’ve been able to do that while also successfully going upmarket to larger and larger customers, who are typically high-touch by default.
My favorite comment:
“We think of the funnel as a product. Potentially when a customer raises their hand, when they actually need to talk to you, that’s...
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....
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is part of the tech company canon. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years unread, but I’ve known the general nature of the problem it illuminates for years. We’ve even experienced some of its highlighted phenomena first hand in our own product development efforts in bringing Geodexy, allinspections, and Fulcrum to market.
If you’re in any line of product management or product development, you’ll be familiar with the argumentation process around defining the product launch. The concept of a “pre-announcement” is something as old as the job of product marketing, with all forms of the process being tried by companies over the years. You have the Apple-like “no announcement til launch day” approach on one extreme, and the “announced before any of it exists” vaporware announcements of which there are hundreds of examples.
