Rob Kaminski – Co-Founder & Partner, Fletch PMM

Speaker 1 00:00:02  Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.

Speaker 2 00:00:29  Hello, this is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests on this podcast have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Work Front, CHC, healthcare, Radical Systems, Enrollment Retail, Me Not, the San Francisco 40 Niners, and many more. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated. Growth elevated is a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CXOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to help all of us become better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast, as well as our blog and of course, our annual Tech Summit, which also happens to be at the base of a beautiful ski ski mountains.

Speaker 2 00:01:16  We’ve been at Park City Mountain Alta Resort, and I’m sure we’ll get to find even more exciting ones in the future. So if you like skiing, if you like growth, if you like, peer mentorship, check out what we’re doing at Growth elevate.com. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and, reach out and learn more about our community. Today I am super excited to be welcoming our guest, Rob Kaminski. Rob is the co-founder of Fletch Product Market Management. It’s a product marketing consultancy that has helped over 300 B2B startups figure out their positioning and translate it into clearer messaging on their home page. Rob has consulted with over 300 venture backed startups to develop their positioning strategy. He also has created an internal incubator for for a company that was acquired by Vista Private Equity Group, and he’s designed over 50 surgical instruments for specialty spinal surgeries. So he has a deep knowledge and in product expertise, and we are excited about having Rob on the program this morning. Thanks, Rob. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 3 00:02:21  Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 00:02:23  Hey, so, Rob, you first of all, let me just shout out, I think you’re probably the best, utilization of LinkedIn that that I’ve ever seen. And that’s how we got to know each other. You know, we were introduced by a friend. I saw your stuff on LinkedIn. And, man, it just it just spoke to me. I work with tech companies, I work with SaaS companies, and a lot of them struggle with positioning. And it’s almost like I just thought that and your posts started showing up in my in my feed and it worked great. So first of all, kudos to what you guys are doing with product marketing on LinkedIn. It worked here, and I’m grateful that we got to know each other. And obviously we’ve worked together on a handful of of portfolio companies, and you’ve done a great job. And so I’m excited about sharing the the exciting expertise that you do with our broader audience. today, how did you become such an expert on product marketing?

Speaker 3 00:03:17  Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:03:17  Well, for me, I’ve kind of done tours of duty around product and sales and marketing and I it was kind of funny. I ended up in a product marketing role at Oracle, but it wasn’t actually called that. And so like this triad of, like figuring out who do we focus on? How do we talk to them? What’s the strategy to get after them? I had always seen that through, like these different pockets of product marketing and sales. And now there’s like this actual label to it in product marketing. And so I circuitous like found my way in the space. And then more specifically where I’ve actually spent the thousands of hours of what I would say like focused in product marketing is when I met my co-founder, really about three and a half years ago. Almost four years ago now, where we were working for a digital product studio. And we effectively were just helping a lot of startups figure out what to build, how to build it, how to get to market. And it’s spending thousands of hours looking at companies and helping them do that.

Speaker 3 00:04:14  That’s kind of brought us up to today. And I would say maybe two and a half years ago is when we had this real shift of like, let’s just focus here. No one knows what the heck positioning is. Everyone’s got a different definition. What’s in a value prop? And we saw these as like, there’s a gap. Like if we can’t even speak the same language as practitioners and consultants and advisors, like, what are we doing? We’re just making stuff up. And so that drove us down this path where we’ve basically been obsessed with what is product marketing, what is positioning, what is good look like, what is bad look like, and how do you build it up and break it down to actually work for these early stage and growth stage startups? And so that’s been a probably more of a four year journey for us now, specifically in the space.

Speaker 2 00:04:54  I love that, and I love the fact that you identified it and decided to really focus, which of course mirrors your advice to clients, which is which is really neat, but but give us a little bit more like what were some of the what were some of the mistakes you were seeing that over and over again that made you, give you the confidence that this was a rich enough mine to, to invest in digging on onto it?

Speaker 3 00:05:16  Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:05:17  So it was kind of this perfect storm of signals for us. And so, again, for context, we were at this digital product studio and think of us, we were basically getting dropped into these early stage startups as fractional product and marketing leaders are kind of just depending on scope. And so having that exposure, what we realize is like, geez, there’s so much variety. But for ourselves, like just in selling strategy services. And so part of the task we had when we weren’t in projects is like, hey, how do we position product strategy as a service? And we’re like, well, and we went deep on that and we tried a bunch of experiments. And what we realized very quickly is It’s like being broad. It’s just it doesn’t work. There’s nothing repeatable about it. And then simultaneously, because we were targeting early stage startups, we started reading thousands of startup home pages just as part of our prospecting process. Right, right. And we noticed this thing. We’re like, we can’t tell what any of these companies do, let alone who they’re for.

Speaker 3 00:06:14  And we’re like, is anybody else seeing this? Like we were kind of blown away and we started writing about that. And so like the signal there was like we just thought this was silly. We started writing about it. And this lack of focus, this lack of clarity around how people talk about themselves, what markets they’re going after. And that struck a nerve. Like on LinkedIn, we just yes, sharing our thoughts. We were going deep and that’s what just pulled us down. The rabbit hole, so to speak, is just finding this interesting problem that we were bumping into anyway with clients. Because like when you’re starting to build a go to market program from scratch or layer on additional programs, there was always this really difficult tension between Big Tam and then really quality execution and quality content. And when you look and you trace that back to the core, it all comes back to really broad definitions of your ideal customer, really vague definitions of what the product does, usually because it can do so many different things.

Speaker 3 00:07:09  And it’s in that problem where we’ve just spent the past few years, I think it tries.

Speaker 2 00:07:13  To ask you to give us, and I’m sorry to put you on the spot, but do you have any examples? Right. Because I know what you’re talking about because we’ve worked on some together and I’ve read your LinkedIn’s, but like the the vague big problem that the the founder thinks is clear to the to the, the the audience, but it’s just not give us an example or two. So our audience could really zero in on what we’re talking about.

Speaker 3 00:07:34  Yeah for sure. So we worked with a company, I believe I can say their name. they’re, they’re a venture backed group called called Maxar, and they’re going after the enterprise. They basically have an AI product that is sort of like an analytics tool. And that’s how they were initially positioning it. They’re like, hey, we’re an analytics sort of.

Speaker 2 00:07:50  Like an old school.

Speaker 3 00:07:52  Yeah. And they’re like, it’s for the enterprise. It’s for finance.

Speaker 3 00:07:54  And then. But then you ask the question of like, well, what would they use it to do? And the answer is kind of like, well, anything. And it’s like, okay, great. Like therein lies the rub. And so like and here’s like specifically what happens especially for venture backed companies doing these really innovative things that can be used in a lot of different ways. The vision for this company, like their technology is really impressive. As you imagine. It’s using AI, right? It’s very dynamic. And so like as an early adopter or a technology enthusiast, you’d look at it and be like, wow, this is incredible. Like, I don’t even really know what we’ll use it for, but I need this.

Speaker 2 00:08:27  And then we know what’s exciting. We know what’s new. But yes. Yeah, that’s a concept, not a product. Right? Yes.

Speaker 3 00:08:34  But for part of the market. Right. And so this is a story like as old as time in terms of startups is like new technology creates this like in this case Max’s product, this visionary analytics tool for finance.

Speaker 3 00:08:47  There’s a part of the market that sees that and goes, this is a game changer. And they’re really.

Speaker 2 00:08:54  Early early adopters probably, right?

Speaker 3 00:08:56  Yes. And it’s a combination of two roles. Usually there’s like technology enthusiasts, the folks that are under the hood that are like, well, how does this thing work? This is freaking cool. And then there’s these very visionary, usually executive leaders, very forward thinking folks, and they’re not looking necessarily for products to plug in to workflows. They’re looking for game changers in the way that they’re going to operate and get ahead of their competition. And so what happens is they see these products and so like and this is a true story from Maxar. It was a golf course sale, big sale for them early on where they connected to a really high executive I want to say was Mercedes. I could be off on that. So don’t don’t quote me on that later. But they saw the product. They’re like, wow, this is it. I want to do a big pilot.

Speaker 3 00:09:36  So it was like a multi-million dollar deal. They didn’t even know exactly what they were going to use it for. Right. Because these visionaries, they’re going to shoulder all that risk. They’re like, let me just bring you in. Let’s I’ll figure out how to do it.

Speaker 2 00:09:48  And they’re coming with a problem. They’re coming with a problem. They’re searching for a solution, and they’re willing to do the work to make it fit right.

Speaker 3 00:09:54  Yes. And. Well, and I might even challenge again. They might not even know the problem. They just see, like, this thing has so much potential. We got to get our hands on it. We gotta start doing something. And it’s very risky because they don’t have the definition of the problem. And then eventually, like the ones that succeed, is like you partner with them. And then over the course of 18 months to 36 months, like you find something very valuable and that acts as this like flagship case study for you to then go to these other executives and like, hey, did you see what we did for Mercedes? But they have to be very future forward, very like risk taking.

Speaker 3 00:10:27  And the what most of these companies bump into is that the majority of markets are not risk takers. That’s right. So this so what happens we see with startups usually the venture backed visionary product built on a new technology. They share the vision with tech adopters that are like, this thing’s freaking cool. I don’t just give me it, I don’t care how buggy it is. Then they get this visionary leader to buy a huge project. They’re like, I don’t care. I’ll shoulder all the risks. And then the investors invest more and the thesis is then, oh, we just got to keep sharing.

Speaker 2 00:10:55  Our vision lets us find ten of those, ten more of those. But that’s much harder.

Speaker 3 00:10:58  But it’s a wall, right? And even if they find 5 or 6 of them and at this point they might be a really good sized business, $10 million, $20 million. But then they think they can just keep sharing the vision. And then what? Here’s what happens. No one, these laggards, very pragmatic folks and the rest of the market don’t give a shit about the vision.

Speaker 3 00:11:16  And so they hear this thing and they’re like, but what would I do it like use it for? And it’s like, you know, well, it could be this, this or this or like, well, whatever you.

Speaker 2 00:11:23  Want, you can use it for whatever you want. I’m not searching for something. And then they use whatever I want.

Speaker 3 00:11:28  And then they ask the question of like, well, who’s done this before? It’s like, well, we’ve got like three companies using it in this way. And they’re like, okay, come back to me when you have 30. Like they don’t they don’t want to shoulder the risk. They’re like, they want this thing to be bulletproof. And there’s this gap. This is the whole thing that Jeffrey.

Speaker 2 00:11:40  Crossing the chasm. There we go.

Speaker 3 00:11:42  100% like he’s written about this at length, and we’ve just seen it play out in front of ourselves. And so like bringing this back to your question of like, where does this challenge happen? It happens in really two things that we can go deep in is this very vague definition of your target market, because it assumes you can go broad across all these use cases.

Speaker 3 00:12:01  And the fact that these markets are just very fragmented in terms of the tools that are being used, the workflows that are being carried out, and that nuance usually just gets oftentimes ignored. There’s a lot of smart founders that kind of know this stuff, but they don’t lean into that and recognizing, hey, I can’t just sit at this high level and go to market as like a better way to do finance. It’s too fricking broad where the devil’s in the details. And that’s what we see we bump into and what we try and address.

Speaker 2 00:12:30  Okay. That that is awesome. I want to I’m going to ask you for like a Family Feud style top five reasons you might be, you know, going to broad or need to narrow in your, your, your product messaging and marketing. how do you diagnose if someone has this problem? What would be the number one symptom that you see in your work?

Speaker 3 00:12:52  Yeah. Where it shows up as a symptom is usually when we look across their current customer base and we start asking questions of like, how are they using the product, what are they using it for? And we start to get this picture of like, oh, you have 50 customers.

Speaker 3 00:13:08  It’s being used 32 different ways where there’s just no thematic like through line. And when we see that, we’re like, hey, you’re effectively building like in an RV. We were coming out of the agency world like you’re building a full service agency, a full service platform, which like, okay, fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no rocket scale on that because of what we see through a product marketer’s lens. Well, if you were to go and activate all of those different positioning and go to market programs, that’s 32 different go to market programs. And so at a surface level, it’s like, how are people using it? How did they find you. Yeah. you just can’t scale. And on top of that, it’s like. It’s just chaos. Like, if you’ve ever been in those businesses and oh, yeah, startup startups are chaotic. But like, especially when you go to broad.

Speaker 2 00:13:52  It’s a mixed blessing when the next client comes in because everyone’s got to stop what they’re doing and build something new.

Speaker 3 00:13:57  Yeah. And this I think this ends up creating this. Another thing we probably won’t get into. It creates a big divide between sales and ops. I think for a lot of startups where like sales, like, yeah, get a sales guy in front of someone, they’re going to if they’re good, they’re going to ask good questions, they’re going to follow the rabbit holes and they’re going to sell something great. But does the product do it? And then who supports it where? Like you get to this critical point where suddenly you’ve out kicked your coverage, you’ve sold more than what the product can do, and then you have some hard decisions to make. Do you hire to cover that? But then there’s nothing repeatable to where when the sales stop and it just creates all this operational chaos when this happens. So that’s like that’s a big one.

Speaker 2 00:14:33  So that’s number one. Not not a common common use case. What are some other symptoms or clues that you might you might have a challenge here. Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:14:41  The the second one we kind of already hit on is like over relying on vision, because from a positioning standpoint, when you’re doing a vision messaging that can do anything, what you’re doing, and this is very conceptual, is you’re almost positioning on a business outcome of like, hey, this is going to get you more revenue or this is going to change the way you do things. Very abstract notions. Right. And when you when you look at this through a positioning lens, the question is then, hey, through the lens of this customer, what are you competing with to increase revenue? And the reality is well guess what.

Speaker 2 00:15:15  Thousands of ideas.

Speaker 3 00:15:16  Now you compete with everything. And we’re going way beyond just software tools. You’re competing with hiring people and training programs and bringing on consultants and adopting a new playbook, different methodologies. And it’s like, you can’t compete with all of that. You’re going to be white noise at that level. And so that’s the other one like vision component. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:15:34  Okay. So we’re going to yeah. If you if you position as we are the the PNL solution you’re competing with every every potential solution. Okay. Interesting.

Speaker 3 00:15:45  And underneath the hood of this, this goes like beyond like the causes is like there’s a difference between marketing and sales market, the product use case and what you’re competing with. Sell the outcome. And so like we have in B2B, we have just gone off the deep end on this outcome thing of sell the outcome that we’ve let it overtake all of our messaging. Or if you go to any average B2B SaaS, you’re going to see some stuff about revenue. And it’s like, that’s right. You get it’s like people are buying beyond.

Speaker 2 00:16:11  ROI.

Speaker 3 00:16:12  Time, ROI.

Speaker 2 00:16:13  ROI. Yes, got this place. But let’s double click on that because, you know, there are good there are good, good, good lessons out there about using ROI in the sales cycle. Is your point to get it out of the product marketing and into the sales process? Is that the appropriate place for it?

Speaker 3 00:16:29  100%? And think about like any leader who’s listening to this, think about the emails you get outbound to yourself.

Speaker 3 00:16:35  And how many say, wouldn’t it be great to increase your revenue? What if I could get you 30 leads every month? Like they’re talking about these outcomes, but they.

Speaker 2 00:16:44  Get you a forex ROI, but with what.

Speaker 3 00:16:48  It means nothing. And so like the best. And this is like the connecting the dots on those folks. Like assuming you can get me 40 extra meetings a month with my ICP, you have to hit me with something I’m struggling with now relative to that of like, hey, do I have a volume issue or do I have a quality issue? And what tools am I using? It’s like, hey Rob, I see you’re using LinkedIn to get all this stuff. Like, have you ever thought about this? Like that wedges into more of my situation. That’s good product marketing. And if I buy into that, then you can walk me to the ROI and all the things that you can actually deliver.

Speaker 2 00:17:21  So. So you’re talking about being very, very wide and trying to get narrower and narrower and narrower.

Speaker 2 00:17:26  Is that is that the big theme?

Speaker 3 00:17:28  100%. And it’s so counterintuitive, like this conversation, this question you just brought up, Jillian, is probably the crux of what we’re giving therapy on to founders that come to us because they they all say the same thing. They just say, I don’t want to pigeonhole myself and what they don’t realize is like and again, it’s so counterintuitive. The more narrow you go, the stronger your positioning and the better your marketing and sales programs are actually going to work. And so what we try and do is we try and walk them off the ledge of like, hey, like, we know you want to be $1 billion company, but where are you today? And most of the companies we work with, they fall somewhere between, like, I don’t know, 500 K and maybe 10 million, 20 million. That’s kind of like some version of our sweet spot. Yeah. And so like, let’s say they’re doing 5 million. We say, okay, the goal isn’t what’s your $100 million positioning.

Speaker 3 00:18:16  It’s what’s your positioning to get you to 10 or 15. And when you realize that, you then go, oh, we can narrow. And the other thing that drives this, this is the question we always ask. We go, okay, great. How big is your go to market team? How many marketers you got. And we always hear, well, I’ve got like two people. I do it a little bit part time and we’re just like, hey, like, rule of thumb loosely is like, you need two dedicated people focused on one very narrow segment for 6 to 24 months to even get the thing working. They have to show up every day and keep hitting this. So you’re telling me you think you can go after ten segments with two and a half marketers? It’s like, I mean, hey, you can do it. We’ll write, you can write the page. But what we do in our work is like we’re just using the page as heuristic for like, what are your programs going to be underneath the hood of all these things? And once they hear that, they go, oh yeah, I’m kidding myself.

Speaker 3 00:19:11  And the only exception I will say to this is you can do that multi segment approach ultimately leading to broad. If you have a distribution advantage and the type of distribution advantages we see are like do you actually have a product led growth flywheel where when someone uses it more people can use it like think Calendly think loom or like they can be in multiple places at once. Yes. Or do you have a strong partner network or some other thing. But if it’s just your small team knocking on doors and trying to do marketing like that’s not a thing, like building your distribution is going to be the biggest blocker to that.

Speaker 2 00:19:45  Yeah, that makes great sense. And yeah, looking at those companies that have a distribution advantage could could disillusion you or make you make you have a false, hope that that you can do that too. Talk to me a little bit about the challenge that founders have, because they they do have to sell big and broad when they’re talking to VCs and they’re talking to their funders. And does that, spill over into the product discussions and leave leads to some common mistakes?

Speaker 3 00:20:11  It does.

Speaker 3 00:20:11  Yeah. So story comes to mind. There’s a founder. He’s a great founder. He’s actually making a lot of traction at a company called One Up. he had this scenario where he was early stage doing a couple million, but he wanted to raise again. And he’s like, I’ve got this conundrum. Like, VCs come to my site and then don’t think I’m big enough for worth the investment. Like, do I talk to them? Do I talk to customers? Our thesis on this is your marketing assets should talk to your customers. Your pitch deck should talk to your VCs and they should be truly separate. The only place they converge maybe is like your about page, your company info page where you can talk to the broad piece. And this I would challenge VCs like any VC worth their salt should understand that if you’re only doing 5 or 10 million, you shouldn’t be going to market like $1 billion company. And so like and think about the slide deck design for your VCs. Like you should be able to connect.

Speaker 3 00:21:02  Hey vision huge Tam 50 use cases. This is going to be great. But then I better see a go to market positioning slide of like hey we know that’s not reality. Here’s what we’re going to do. We are going to penetrate into the market this way and then scale into these adjacent markets like true beachhead style, unless there is again some distribution piece where. But I expect to see that and I see a lot of pitch decks as well, not even in there. And so these are the founders that are like, they just think that what I tell my VC is what I’m going to tell my customers. And it goes back to that whole vision thing. I’m thing, like, well, that’s how I got my first ten customers. Don’t I just keep doing that? And I, you know, you either get it or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re going to get bit by it to then address it and eventually come to someone like you or me to figure it out. or you get it up front and you get to educate your VCs, and they love that.

Speaker 3 00:21:51  Like really good VCs that I know. Yeah, right. They love the reality of like the.

Speaker 2 00:21:55  Differentiation of the different. You’re not going to convince.

Speaker 3 00:21:58  Yourself, right. Like they’re buying into the hype. Like, you know, bad VCs are the ones that are just like, yeah, how are you going to, you know, they just ask the question, how is this going to be $1 billion? Good question. But like, what are you going to do next month? Is the next follow up question.

Speaker 2 00:22:11  How do you go from 3 to 10. Yeah. Or ten to 10 to 30. Well that’s awesome. So what is what is good positioning look like. is how how do you answer that question.

Speaker 3 00:22:23  So there’s there’s two parts to this. I’ll, I’ll hit the objection first that we get from a lot of the founders we work with, we get this question, how do I know my positioning is going to work? And here’s the thing. You don’t write. It’s like the the analogy in my head is like positioning is this long term bet.

Speaker 3 00:22:40  And we love the phrasing of bet because it implies the risk. Like we can’t see around corners. So it’s more of a conviction of like, how are you going to steer the boat? And using that boat analogy, it’s like when you’re doing a startup, it’s like you’ve been dropped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you have to go find land before you die, right? And so your options are like, okay, I like that analogy. Do I paddle east and try and hit the states? California? Do I paddle west and try and hit Japan or China? And like what these founders think they can do is like, all right, position me. We’re going to go east and they paddle for three days and go, is it working? And it’s like, I don’t know, we’re still in the middle of the freaking ocean. Like it’s something you have to commit to overall. And so that’s one of these things. And so when you ask what good looks like, it’s good if it can actually help you create working, go to market programs and content that resonates.

Speaker 3 00:23:31  And so it’s very it’s a qualitative sort of response to this. But like positioning is a tool that has two key things. It acts as like this beacon internally of like that’s where we’re paddling. And it lets this segment you’re going after know that’s what we do. And so usually good is specific because that’s where the differentiation shines. But to be candid it comes in a lot of if there’s a spectrum of good. And then we start to get into things of just pure execution. Is the product any good. Right. Like I can come up with a killer positioning and saying this great thing, but if the product doesn’t deliver, you’re then going to have this negative hit on your positioning and recognition. When people say, hey, they say they do this thing, but they don’t. And so like it’s this multifaceted, multi-variable thing. But foundationally, when I look at the elements, really great positioning has a very clear definition of your ideal customer, a very clear definition of the competitive alternative. You’re bumping into, the problem they’re facing in that competitive alternative, and then a clear message of why you’re better than the alternative, like.

Speaker 3 00:24:33  Those three components are the crux of any good positioning, really any valid positioning.

Speaker 2 00:24:39  I like those definitional pieces. I’m going to share a story, on how one of the clients that we worked on together, defined how they knew that this was positive. so they had been going to trade shows for years, and the CEO used to go because he knew he had to explain the inevitable questions like, what do you guys do? And, you know, explain this to me again. And so we would spend so much time, he had his whole routine where he would explain how they do this and they do this and all these different things. And then after we engaged with you guys and he had a one pager and he said, Julian, this was amazing. For the first time in five years, going to trade shows, people didn’t come up and say, hey, what do you guys do? They said they come up and said, can you really do this? And how much does it cost? So from what do you do or how does this work? Or what kind of company you are? Were the first sets of questions and then afterwards it was can you really do this? How much does it cost? So he felt like he he had just accelerated through the, the, the diaspora of complexity that, you know, where we maybe get maybe 50 or 30% through to the other side if they had and if they weren’t too exhausted at that point, they might talk about pricing and execution to people.

Speaker 2 00:25:55  With that one pager were ready to go, and they were trying to solve a problem. And not only that, he recognized that the people who didn’t have that problem, he wasn’t wasting his time with them. So everyone came up with that page in their hand, was super excited because the messaging had already helped them understand what they do and how they might be able to help them as they were coming. They’re interested in solving their problem and they were going right to tactics. Yep. Did you see is that that common? Do you see that a lot.

Speaker 3 00:26:21  100% what you triggered for me. The other thing, and in this case, I know who you’re talking about. So it’s like what usually happens when we work with these groups. It’s like, it’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they know too much. And so when whenever they start to communicate the positioning, turn it into messaging, whatever asset, there’s this tendency to pack in everything. Yeah, here’s your situation. Here’s the problem.

Speaker 3 00:26:43  Here’s why it’s bad. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s what’s going on in the industry. Oh here’s how we got solution. Here’s how I got here.

Speaker 2 00:26:48  Let me tell you my story. My corporate arc.

Speaker 3 00:26:50  Oh, and no one cares. It’s awful to where you’re just like you get in these monologue founders where you’re just the your eyes glaze over and you’re like, all right, okay, great. Nice meeting you. And like, you know, you politely exit. Yeah. When your reality is like.

Speaker 2 00:27:00  It’s like your open door closes halfway through the conversation. Yes.

Speaker 3 00:27:04  For sure. And so, like what we coach on to when we develop these positions is like, hey, you have to recognize that the positioning is kind of just the way of explaining your product and like what it’s for and why it’s better. Great. That’s pretty simple. It’s going to have implications of what you say up funnel and down funnel. But this is where sequencing and journeys really matters. And so like take my business for example.

Speaker 3 00:27:27  We do. We help companies with their positioning and then we translate it and documented on the homepage. Great. There are tons of problems and point of views and things we talk about. You won’t find it in my elevator pitch. It’s like it’s coming out in this conversation a little bit now, but like this is part of the marketing of like, yeah, founders have terrible definitions of their ICP and like they over message and they if they’re going to broad and all these things that’s me really educating and more positioning my expertise on the problem until I get someone to buy into some of my thoughts and perspectives on their situation and that problem, they’re not even ready to hear about my product or service. And this is what gets a ton of founders like, bent around the axle is like they’re just trying to, like, sell in one swoop. And it’s like, stop, like get some credibility, make some connections, get them to understand what you do. If they buy into what you do, they’re going to have questions.

Speaker 3 00:28:15  Take them further on the demo, then talk about the outcomes in ROI and try and close. But it’s a journey. And like that’s just another thing we see all the time as they know it and they cram it in. We call it the curse of knowledge.

Speaker 2 00:28:29  Where I can see that they know so much and they want to share it and they can’t help themselves. But yeah, you can see the window of curiosity from the client closing the door there. They’re buried with, with with context and data and stories. And I worked.

Speaker 3 00:28:45  With a VP of sales early in my career, and I was in sales. And my version of having this I was a sales engineer once upon a time was, you know, I thought I was really smart. I knew all this stuff. I was an old textbook over explainer, like, everything I just said was me and this, VP of sales was fantastic. His name’s Ross Bernstein. Taught me a lot about sales. He’s just like, I’ll never forget the moment he pulled me aside after one of our sessions we had live.

Speaker 3 00:29:06  He was like, Rob, when they ask a question, give them a short answer. And then he said, and shut the fuck up like I was just. And it like it just stuck with me. And he explained it. And then I started doing it. And naturally, what happened then is it allowed for a back and forth of like, yeah, I’d answer. Then they’d have another one rather than me just lecturing. And like, that’s the analogy of just what I see with founders in their marketing and their elevator pitches time and time again.

Speaker 2 00:29:32  I love it. Stop. It’s also like it’s a it’s as stark a lesson as don’t talk past the close. Yeah, right. Yeah. You just got so much you want to keep. You want to keep going, right? And we all do it. Yeah, I love it. Well, hey, listen. So tell me. So. So this. We’ve defined the problem. You know it. It’s out there. It’s common.

Speaker 2 00:29:53  And and I want to I want to hear two things. I want to hear, you know, how you guys decided to narrow in yourselves? Because I think you guys are really good about that. And then let’s tell our audience how you how you solve the problem.

Speaker 4 00:30:04  Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:30:05  So for us, as we were developing this thesis, we knew specific was the way. And so keep in mind, when we built our business, we are actually inside of another agency. And so this project for us was sort of like, hey, I’m on the bench. I’m not working with startups like in between engagements. How do we get more startups to work with us, and we knew specific was the way and in our minds. You either have to get really specific on industry or really specific on like workflow and asset for them to like deliver. So you can get hyper clear. Ideally, you’re doing a bit of both. And so we ran some like tests in a couple of different ways and maybe we can get into those.

Speaker 3 00:30:40  But it started to work. Except when you’re specific. As you might imagine, you can’t sell everything. And so the CEOs that we were partnering with on this were like, what are you like? This is only a few thousand bucks like engagements. Like we’ve got developers, designers, all these other services. And like the reality is we were telling them like, hey, this is like a land and expand thing because they just didn’t see it. They’re like, are you going to do 100 of these a year? Like it just doesn’t add up. And then our minds were kind of like, yeah, it’s it becomes repeatable. Repeatable. Yeah. And so like but what was really happening to force the, the niching down, it happened through our content first. And so when we started we were talking about product strategy and just like stuff.

Speaker 2 00:31:21  That’s that’s big, big.

Speaker 3 00:31:23  Stuff. Yeah. And it’s like, okay, you know, very low engagement. And then eventually, like, you know, we get to something specific, start talking about product marketing and then like, okay, the engagement went up a little bit like okay, but still super broad and we’re low engagement.

Speaker 3 00:31:36  And then we started talking about positioning and messaging. Oh, got a little better. And then we start talking about positioning messaging for B2B it got a little better. And then we started talking about positioning messaging for horizontal B2B companies and then horizontal B2B plg companies. And what we found is every time we tick down getting sharper into a scenario, LinkedIn engagement went up. Founder DMs to me on LinkedIn went up and they’re like, oh my God, that’s me. And so like, again, counterintuitive just from a pure like, hey, we’re writing about things that we’re learning and who we’re working with. And so it was just validating this thesis of like really focus. And there’s a lot of stuff out there. There’s a concept called the five ones in terms in the service world where it’s like one avatar, one product, one channel, one tactic, one year. And we were like loosely following that as a construct. but in the beginning and this will relate for a lot of early stage startups, we were trying a lot of different stuff like founders, because we were so all over the place.

Speaker 3 00:32:32  We did some pricing projects, we did some product onboarding stuff, we did some product road mapping, we did these product marketing and messaging things. But we were very mindful of like, where is there going to be a theme? Where is there consistency to it? And so as our LinkedIn stuff was really starting to work, we had solved kind of for distribution. Like I was able to get in front of founders, probably 15 founders a week each. And so me and my co-founder Anthony, we literally like by the hour we’re testing out different almost pitches of like, hey, yeah, we do this. We’re pricing expert. Like, you know, we’re selling it before we even built the thing. And then when we sold them, we’re like, I guess we better go build this. And we were literally just checking in with each other, like once an hour of like, hey, what worked, what resonated, what didn’t. And we did that for maybe two months. Again, hundreds of calls and the themes were just this positioning, the messaging thing.

Speaker 3 00:33:23  It just kept coming up and we’re like, let’s just focus on that throughout everything else. Started writing about that and then that took us down. This is now like over two year journey and we’ve had to keep refining, and there was a lot of learnings along the way. But like I’ll pause there. But that was loosely like start broad, throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, be mindful to listen for focus. And we just knew like, and this was just a principle. Like, we knew we can’t do multiple things because we were living inside of a digital products to do that was trying to do everything, and it was a really chaotic scenario, and we just don’t want to do that. And so anytime a new I shall pause there and then I have a funny follow up that we use to like, keep ourselves, from chasing these silver coins, these new product ideas and these new markets.

Speaker 2 00:34:05  Yeah. So, so you, you, you had the blessing of, of necessity.

Speaker 2 00:34:10  That was, that was focusing you there. What what was your what was your, your slogan or whatever that, that pointed you that might be memorable.

Speaker 3 00:34:17  What do you mean by slogan?

Speaker 2 00:34:19  You just said you had something you wanted to share that kind of forced you to.

Speaker 3 00:34:21  Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:34:22  So like August.

Speaker 3 00:34:23  As we were making progress, what kept happening? So like we started, we were maybe got our first 10 or 20 customers, 30 customers. We would do this positioning and messaging thing and basically create this credibility of like building like the strategy of go to market. And then these founders would be like, hey, can you do a sales stack? Can you help me with onboarding? Like all the things that we do in our in our other job and the temptation and there’s where a lot of founders get stuck. They take the money and they go, oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 00:34:50  Well yeah, money.

Speaker 2 00:34:50  Of course we can.

Speaker 3 00:34:51  Yeah. And we were just like, no. And so this heuristic we had number one having a partners key, just a challenge on this.

Speaker 3 00:34:57  Because anytime one of us got excited like we should go do this thing, these onboarding flows like it’s a whole other way to make money. Like all that the other person pull.

Speaker 2 00:35:04  You back in.

Speaker 3 00:35:05  Well, the running joke was like, well, that’s product number 13. And it started as like less product number two. We don’t want to do product number two. And I kid you not, hundreds of ideas, people ask us to do all this the stuff that any of that can work, where now we have this funny running joke where like when we want to go do something, we’re like product number 67, and it’s just our way of saying, hey, that’s cool, let’s stay focused.

Speaker 2 00:35:28  I love it, I love it, and you guys do a great job of that. And that’s like I said, while your content resonates so well, let’s walk through. So I’m a founder. I’m guilty. I’m too broad. I’m confused between my investor messaging and my my customer messaging. And so I’ve come to you and said, okay, I hear this.

Speaker 2 00:35:46  I need some help. How does it work? How do you work with with with the startup company and how long does it take? What do you what do you do?

Speaker 3 00:35:53  Well, so the first thing we do is we look at what they’re doing now. We basically do what we call a positioning audit. So we review their whole site, their sales deck. We actually try and get a call of them demoing the product, because founders do pretty good in like a 30 or 45 minute session, like they eventually do get it across of what they do, right. They just can’t do it in 30s. and what we do is we use our model and our framework to really map out, like, hey, what are all the markets you’re in? And the way we look at markets is through a workflow lens. And so like think workflow use case activity job to be done. Like this is our lens into markets in B2B because B2B software and our view is is workflow software like you’re helping people carry out a process.

Speaker 3 00:36:33  And so some of those are broad. Some of those are specific. We have a way of mapping those. And so we map all of this out. And then we look at the product and their interpretation of like hey this is what makes it really good. And as you can imagine for all these different markets, there’s different value props and all these things. We basically take this chaotic blob of how they’re showing up in all these different ways. We organize it into these, into our framework and think like very tactical rows with elements of like, hey, here’s your definition of target audience, here’s your differentiation, here’s the alternatives you’re competing with, and here’s the value. And we end up with these what we call positioning options. And we say hey today this is kind of the markets you’re in. And then what we do is we evaluate with them. Like you can position for any of these. You have different levels of differentiation, different levels of competition, different sizes of these markets. And we start to look at things like, where are you at? How many resources do you have? What’s your revenue today? Where are you trying to get? What’s the goal of this whole thing in general? Where really is there an opportunity? Where is there a problem with one of these alternatives, where there’s just a gap and we walk them through it? And I think the thing for us that some founders don’t get immediately is we’re not market whisperers like we don’t we’re not trying to be experts in any market or any space like that.

Speaker 3 00:37:46  We think that’s pretty ignorant of some agencies that say, yeah, I’ll help you get customers and do all this. It’s like, no, you’ve been working this problem maybe for up to five, ten years. Me in five days isn’t going to get you there. What we can do is just visualize the strategies. And once you have a visual and you see it now as a tactical choice that has implications, that’s where all the values unlocked. Because what usually happens is these founders, they know the Situations. They just can’t clearly articulate which ones are best and which ones not. And so they never make a decision. And so they move along doing ten things at once. And so anyway, that’s basically our first part of the process audit. And we walk them through that in a workshop, make it visual and we guide them to make a choice. And it is their choice. This is the strategy. This is the audience I’m going after. That’s the strategy I want to take. And then once we have that, we move into a messaging exercise where we unpack what are our what are the supporting arguments of going after the market this way? And then once we have that copywriting, let’s translate it into an asset that acts as the centerpiece for both you and your teams as well as your customers.

Speaker 3 00:38:49  And so it’s kind of a three step process where like, sure, we deliver copy and messaging on a home page. We see it more as the documentation of the positioning strategy. And so we reverse engineered of like let’s solve for positioning first, then let’s solve for messaging, and then let’s worry about this asset that you’re going to use to communicate it with your teams and your customers.

Speaker 2 00:39:05  And if I recall that you have that document with, with the positioning and and a very clear set of instructions of like, this is how you can use it on your home page. This is how you can use it in your sales deck. This is how you can use it in your one pager. Right? And so the asset you get is a tight set of messaging and a translation table that helps you create those core assets. And then you have consistent assets that are tied to that particular messaging strategy 100%.

Speaker 3 00:39:33  And and that becomes a little bit of an art as well as a science, because whenever you’re taking strategic positioning and messaging and translating it into an actual asset, you got to understand the medium, you got to understand the channel, and you got to understand how the audience is going to consume in that channel and that medium.

Speaker 3 00:39:50  And we know we’re not experts in all of those. And this is why we’ve actually been like, we don’t want to go do a deck and a campaign and a TikTok campaign and all the it’s just like, you need to go have people that are skilled in that. But it should be rooted in this definition of the audience and these key differentiators and how you do that. And so we we stopped short in our process of like the execution because that’s something that frankly, we just were not experts in like, you can’t be experts and all that. We don’t want to be a full service marketing agency.

Speaker 2 00:40:21  I love it. Well, listen, I think it’s working. Obviously, you guys are growing fast. You’ve been helping hundreds and hundreds of companies. in terms of your own entrepreneurial journey and building this business, what are some of the lessons that you learned, in building your Fletch?

Speaker 3 00:40:35  Yeah. I think there’s there’s really two things that come to mind. I think number one is just there’s so much you don’t know.

Speaker 3 00:40:42  And this is maybe more specific, to us trying to be productized and trying to stay really small and bootstrapping. So maybe not as much for the venture bank folks. but you just got to figure out a bunch of stuff. I think Adam Robinson says it really well is like bootstrapping companies is equivalent to like the ultra athletes of the world where, like, you just have to be able to do it all. And to be candid.

Speaker 4 00:41:06  Put the.

Speaker 2 00:41:06  Mileage in.

Speaker 3 00:41:07  It’s not for everyone. Yeah. I mean, it’s a ton of work, right? Like people like some people said like, oh, my God, you guys, you did this so fast. It’s like, no, we’ve literally been grinding for years. And like, what they don’t see is truly the night and weekends figuring this stuff out and working through and putting in the work. Like, you just have to be willing to do that. And that was just a thing that like, you think you’re prepared for, but once you’re in it and do it, it’s like, oh my God, it’s and it’s both awful and amazing at the same time.

Speaker 3 00:41:31  My wife can attest it’s like brutal days on calls all day, working through things, working through the night. And then like, you get through it and you’re like, that’s freaking awesome. Because, like, the outcome is so good. So it’s this weird addiction type thing.

Speaker 2 00:41:42  putting in the work.

Speaker 4 00:41:43  Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 3 00:41:44  And then and then the, the second one I think is just like, you really do just have to nail nail the problem. And I think and it’s, it can be a moving target. And when you feel it it’s incredible when you don’t have it, it’s scary. And I just think being like really realistic with that. when I tie this into like and I know we talked a little about this, like, how would I approach that as a founder? Like, what would I do? I think it just leans into like, do the work and stay consistent. any time they can, because there’s kind of been ebbs and flows. You know, I try and take a week off here and there anytime.

Speaker 3 00:42:19  I’m not like doing the work. And I get in my head and overly strategic. Everything’s harder when I ignore the outcomes that I’m trying to achieve. And I just roll up to my desk and I’m just like, these are the things I have to do. I want to think through the problems. I want to help my clients right now. I want to create content when I do the work. Everything else truly takes care of itself. And so, like these venture back founders I think, have this burden on them of like they’re constantly being asked to be future focused, strategic and worrying about all these things. And I think it makes them horrible at execution. And there are just rare breeds that can do both. And that’s why I think you have to be really clear early on of like who? If you have co-founders, like, who’s going to own all that? Because if you share that, I just think the future stress of stuff is just going to slow down your execution to the point where it’s just not going to work.

Speaker 3 00:43:08  And I’ve seen that play out in our business as well. When we try and get overly strategic and think about the future.

Speaker 2 00:43:14  It’s a really interesting dynamic of one of the many challenges. Why being a founder and early stage executive is so difficult, but but really? Well well said. Hey, so if our audience wants to learn more, where can they go to learn more about what you guys do and how it works?

Speaker 3 00:43:29  Yeah, LinkedIn is the place. So you nailed it in the intro. It’s the only channel we’re focused on right now that might change here in the coming months as we’re expanding a little bit. But yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a DM. We have yet to automate anything. So up to date like you will be messaging with me, although to be candid it may be slightly delayed. There’s a volume issue we’re facing with LinkedIn, but that’s the best, best way to get involved and join the conversation.

Speaker 2 00:43:53  Awesome. Well, I love that. And then last question is, what what are some of the most interesting books or podcasts or blogs that you’re following that you might recommend to our listeners.

Speaker 3 00:44:05  Yeah. So I would say big influential books will start there. we talked Geoffrey, more like Crossing the Chasm, must read, a must reread and a must read. Reread like there’s just so much in there.

Speaker 2 00:44:16  How many times do we reference it today? Exactly.

Speaker 3 00:44:18  Oh, yeah. And Anthony and I will find ourselves, like, just rereading it every 6 to 9 months. It’s just like there’s just gold in there. Like, he really does nail it. And we built a lot of our principles on top of that. I’m a big fan of Steve Blank and the stuff he’s done with, four Steps to the epiphany and technology entrepreneurship, him as well as discipline entrepreneurship by. And I actually blanking on the author. Sorry, Bud. and then if you’re in the service business, built a cell is a must read for anybody in, like, consulting.

Speaker 4 00:44:46  Love it.

Speaker 3 00:44:47  it’s a yeah, you’ll read it in, like, a day and a half. It’s kind of a story in there, but it’s perfect for folks who are struggling with the operational chaos of going after different markets and scaling.

Speaker 3 00:44:58  And it really challenges your thinking around Productize. I also love all the stuff that 37 signals, and Jason Friede and David Hoppe and Meyer Hansen do like. So their book rework, I think, is just fantastic. It’s another one. It’s like fun to read and they really just very practical stuff. from a podcast newsletter. some other folks I follow on LinkedIn pretty closely. Kyle Poyer, Emily Kramer, my co-founder Anthony Perry, like we as much as we work on the same thing, like getting a different perspective. Like our content can be unique, even though, like thesis wise, it’s very driven together. And then podcast, I love the ones that are just, usually pulling out stories of startups going through go to market. I think first Rounds in Depth does this best. And, Lenny is also pretty good, although sometimes he gets more into like larger company product stuff and not always on the startup realm. So you got to just like cherry pick a little bit and then the last one again on the service side, check out the two bobs.

Speaker 3 00:45:53  And so David, David, C Baker and Blair, eds do a wonderful job. They’ve written about positioning and building service based businesses. They’ve written a bunch of books that are also great. but we dip into that one for, you know, they’ve got really tactical stuff around, whether it’s pricing or structuring or productize and how you do all of that in a service side. And, they also have a business to support it, which is pretty, pretty killer.

Speaker 2 00:46:16  That’s fantastic. Awesome. Rob well, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for sharing all this, with us this morning. And, look forward to to staying in touch, working together in the future.

Speaker 3 00:46:26  Likewise. Thanks for having me. This was such a such a fun chat.

Speaker 2 00:46:30  Awesome. Have a good day.

Speaker 1 00:46:35  Thank you for listening to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please follow us and subscribe on your favorite podcast player and we’d be grateful if you recommend it to a friend. If you’d like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at Growth elevated.com.

Speaker 1 00:46:52  We’ll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.