July @ The Operator's Collective
We started the month with the wrap up of June@The Operator’s Collective containing all the content shared with the community during the month.
Followed by my learnings and decision making framework on completing a year in early stage investing.
For PLG companies freemium or free trial is a false trade-off. The reality is that you can have your cake and eat it too with the ‘reverse trial’, where users start with a time-limited trial of your paid features. At the end of the trial, they can either buy or downgrade to a fully free tier.
As the market dynamics are changing fairly rapidly with the new funding reality Playing to Win ‘P2W’ template is a quick strategy sprint that founders can run with their top team.
Big fan of Basecamp and their working style so their guide to product development is worth a quick skim through at first and then exploring what maybe relevant for you at this stage. Long read broken into two parts: arriving at absolute truths and steps/process for implementation.
A vitamins website is NOT tech and Viagra subscriptions business is not SaaS. No matter how much your SPAC or S-1 repeats the magic word. This is why Twitter, Robinhood, and Uber have "too many engineers". If your operating margins are 5% and you are competing for engineers with Salesforce and Google with 95% - you are going to bleed cash and equity.
Gokul Rajaram is always a delight and a must listen for any operator. In his pod with Daniel Scrivner - specially liked the point on ensuring that every feature/product launch should lead to change in behaviour else its wasted effort.. great insight!
“….figure out what customer behavior changes will lead to that business outcome and then to figure out what the best solution are. What are the best ways tactically to basically change this customer behavior? That's at a high level. It's a very, I guess, abstract way of thinking, but I think this framework is a good framework. Business outcomes, customer behavior changes, and then which features, which are really hypotheses around what things can customer behavior?”
Ravindra from our community hosted BHIVE Workspace & SaaS Circles of SaaS Industry event for SaaS founders in Bangalore on July 14th.
Bok summaries often take the joy of intellectual exploration as you go through the book on your own pace, but still wanted to share the notes from ‘Competing Against Luck’ by Clayton Christensen.
The community cheered Jesal Sangvi and his team @Homexchange on a super cool USD4mn fundraise to help remove friction from new home ownership.
Weekend Worksheets: we looked at a very effective and easy to follow worksheet to tighten GTM, equally useful for launching a new product / feature or just reevaluating your past launches.
Mental Availability in Marketing: Roughly 95% of your buyers aren’t in the market right now, Mental availability means the buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand when considering a purchase. This is really important to marketers as often the buyer is not in the market when they see marketing materials, and therefore marketing should aim to increase mental availability. As purchasers are often pressed for time, they will often choose a mentally available brand that is “good enough”, rather than fully researching all the options.
Suneel shared a handy guide on how founders should thing about Equity and Early Stage Financing.
Choosing the right metric: Lag metrics are for long term goals. Lead metrics are predictors of achieving those long term goals. In most situations, lead metrics are the ones that are more helpful to track because they are more moveable.
Great Landing Page Copy is a fun weekend scroll - lots to learn on how to connect with your audience better and stand out. This was topped up by Aditya with Do you even Resonate from Wynter.
Good managers write well, and bad managers write poorly. The best managers I’ve ever seen were not just good writers, they were terrific.
High Output Marketing increases leverage and optimizes your workflow so that you can have a more profound impact on the bottom line through marketing. Here's how to go about it.
PRDs must DIE.
In response to a Ken article and as a follow up to Matrix’s State of The Fintech Union discussion on Neobanks I explore how one could go about building a profitable Neobank. Would love your feedback on this.
Community folks were pretty inclined on attending a conversation with Srikrishnan Ganeshan, co-founder & CEO, Rocketlane on how to get your first 20 customers in the US (especially if you are not based out of the US).
Coinbase has been in news lately for wrong reasons, but I liked this blog post on operating efficiently at scale - love the part on Ship Products Not Slide Decks - even more important for smaller companies.
Anu Atluru was one of the earliest employees and Head of Community at the once super hot startup Clubhouse - she shared her learnings on hyperscaling across Product, Community, GTM, Ops and Hiring.
This article along with the complete airtable on 12 diff GTM motions adopted by over 100 Unicorns.
Jason Fried from basecamp has become fairly active on his blog and I enjoyed reading this post on Binaries over Priorities. “Being binary about what you choose to do brings clarity to what needs to be done.. Maybe is a scope expander, a deadline wrecker, and an appeaser that ends up being a displeaser in the end.”
Another easy weekend scroll for inspo to craft a solid Above The Fold.
Question almost every startup struggling with today. What to do when Growth isn’t happening.
This is so brilliantly executed!! 10 points extra if it was on purpose.. you gotta do what you gotta do to get those eyeballs!
Rex Woodberry wrote an interesting post on investing in The Seven Deadly Sins of Consumer Technology. Lust, Pride, Sloth, Greed, Envy, Wrath, and Gluttony!
Tanay Jaipuria writes fairly well, but he hit it out of the park with this one on reducing the time to utility / value for your product.
On one hand there is a funding winter and on the other had VC funds raised over 12bn+ to invest in Indian startups. I have a feeling Investors will be out hunting soon. Here is a list of all the funds launched in 2022 & 2021.
We are a fan of Gokul Rajaram and it is no coincidence that his articles and tweets get shared by us routinely.
Abdz.do with an insightful one on using design thinking to create ideas that better meet customers' needs and desires.
Community led growth is becoming an abused word restricted to having a slack/discord and throwing freebies. Anastasi Nesterova explores how to do community led marketing inspired by DAOs.
That’s all the action from the month of July at The Operator’s Collective. We are just into the first week of August and it is already looking very promising.
If you’d like to get daily content bombs and jam with super interesting operators and founders drop me a line on what you are building and how you can help other community members, would love to have some more curious folks join us!