June @ The Operator's Collective
Welcome to the June wrap up of The Operator’s Collective community.
We started the month off with Abhijeet setting the tone and sharing a seminal piece by @balajis on the The Idea Maze.
Followed by The Steve Jobs Bias - The Steve Jobs bias is a mismatched gap between how you envision users will use your product - and how users actually use your product
We were happy to have Suneel the OG podcaster from SaaS Sessions join our community.
Chat with an aspiring founder who is cranking out a ‘solution’ without dep diving into the problem led me to sharing this gem of a thread by Shreyas Doshi on Execution Orientation Fallacy & Bias for Building Fallacy. (We don’t take the time to thoroughly understand the problem, domain, competitors & other determinants of product success because we feel compelled to be in constant motion. We tell ourselves we must begin building & just iterate based on feedback)
Amidst all the recession and black swan memos some ‘helpful’ VCs actually made an actionable navigation map on how to do a scenario analysis and ensure you don’t end up being too pessimistic or end your runway.
It paired well with Rachel Lambert’s post on Lean Marketing tips to remain "default alive" or "default investable" in a downturn .
The community really resonated with our commentary on a Rex WoodBurry tweet showing how iPhone caused chewing gum sales to plummet.
“Ya sure we can argue about diff between causation and correlation.. also the fact that this could be cos of online grocery purchases etc.. but the key take away is.. Businesses operate in extremely multi variate world and while you can be busy obsessing about the competition, you can get hit by much bigger forces at play.”
Manan shared an insightful piece by the founder of SprintAI on tough questions that every Indian SaaS entrepreneur, in the first year of their journey, must answer with limited data.
With many community members being alums from GrowthX we generally dont encourage growth hacks/tactics listicles, but sometime you need a quick win or proven ideas when you are feeling stuck and this 800 odd idea list can help!
We also explored ‘MEDDIC Sales Process’ - an acronym that stands for Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, and Champion. This process helps determine whether or not you should expend effort getting a customer into your sales funnel.
NFX really puts out great content relevant across a startup's entire lifecycle. Its a must subscribe for any founder/operator, their new post on Habit Making Insights for Product minded founders was absolutely on point.
Ryan Singer, Head of Strategy of Basecamp explains why a product’s position is the most important thing a company should focus on. Without a clear point of view on what makes a product different, it’s easy to wander.
This was taken up a notch by Tathagata who shared a podcast with Stephen Lochhead on ‘Category Design’. Stephen is the author of Play Bigger and urges founders to think about Category Creation and not just Product Positioning.
We also nosed around Flywheels and Business Equations. while this was written by a VC from investing perspective but extremely important for a founder to digest.
- Simplify business to key variables
- Identify high leverage variable that drive the flywheel
- Make sure entire company is aware of relationship of the key nos to their role.
We liked Tom Laufer’s advice for growth teams to create sustainable growth by:
Identifying your “aha” moment and creating a path that gets users there ASAFP
Aiming to optimize activation rates for users who fall in your market-fit rather than ALL users
Joshua shared the Kunal Shah’s podcast with Shane Parrish of The Knowledge Project. Apart from the usual fare that you might have already heard, what stood out was the ASIAN Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Mridvika got the community to rally behind the good folks at Insightly Analytics on their Product Hunt launch (they landed up as the 3rd Product of the Day!!). Insightly allows teams to build better software faster by providing actionable insights from Git & Jira to create high-performing teams and efficient processes.
The Operator’s Collective Job Board
Minko is hiring a Head of Engineering
URLife is looking for
Head - Brand & Partnerships