November @ The Operators Collective
This is the November wrap up of all the discussions at The Operator’s collective - a community of founders and operators helping each other level up and get unstuck!
Proprietary product distribution is the only approach to acquiring customers that can generate the necessary scale to create businesses with multi-billion dollar valuations. In fact for startups it is better than Sliced Bread
With all the pressure from investors founders may want to change their North Star Metric to Revenue, Eze Vidra shares why it might be a bad idea and why founders are better off choosing a NSM that drives sustained growth by focussing everyone in the company on a single customer behaviour
Incase you missed our last month’s TOC Digest, you can check it out here:
Elon famously asked - What did you get done this week? This template is a great way to capture learnings from what you got done this week
Crafting a narrative for your product - and giving other teams what they need to tell this story. You’ve got to convey the value of your product to your specific target audience, in a way that makes clear the unique reason they should choose you over their current solution - and all the competition
With all the chatter about $8 for a twitter checkmark, this a16z deep dive into the opportunity for paid membership programs and framework to design a successful such program, based on learnings from China’s social media giants is a good read. Also explores the the impact of paid memberships on the consumer experience
VP of Product Ben Williams of https://snyk.io/ (a PLG unicorn) on Lenny's podcast about their initial target customer segment:
→ NodeJS developers using open source node components concerned about the security of their code
GTM 101 Insight = Specificity of ICP
I found it is extremely interesting that company chose an absolute niche as the ICP that will love and evangelize the product, while addressing that this product will be needed by much larger audience in future. Interesting tension between PMF v/s remaining a product that will forever be needed by small set of customers
Abhishek added that since, Synk is in dev ops space. it can definitely add tools for other language developers which will mean expansion of ICP, or it can expand for tools in the workflow of NodeJS Developers (in this way they don't change the ICP) or it has large enough market wrt the PMF ergo for same ICP <> Product.
Hubspot defined its ICP as relationship-focused professionals in B2B companies. Ergo, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Customer Support, RevOps, Human Resource etc. BUT they started with one persona of this ICP with Sales.
Deep Delight vs Surface Delight and how to build delight in your design system.
FacebookMeta was in the news for all the wrong reasons this month:
Crazy :
Crazier:
Absolute bonkers that 11,000 employees are only 13% of Meta.. and 1/3 of them were hired through the pandemic.
Figma’s Early Days — How Patience & Discipline Fostered a Killer Product
Metcalfe’s Law shows that the number of relationships within a team increases geometrically as the team grows. Tomasz Tunguz shows how a simple increase in span of control for a manager from 4 to 7 can change a 4 layer organizational size from 112 to 466 employees. keep an eye on the shape of your organization!
Everyone was talking about the Mochary Method
People tend to use the words “goal” and “aim” interchangeably, but those words have very different definitions. Archery is the perfect metaphor to understand the difference between a goal and an aim. (weekend personal growth readings)
Spiral approach to early stage startup sales
A simple framework to help you with your 2023 planning - What’s your hierarchy of goals?
Great insights in to how Knock built an onboarding flow around a single magic moment and helping users reach that moment
April Dunford’s 10-Step Method to Overhaul Positioning - a step by step playbook
Ankur Nagpal is from teachanble is building a new startup called Ocho - he shared the tactics used to scale Teachable to 10mn ARR
on similar lines - deep dive on how Capchase built a Unicorn in 2 years
Houck's Newsletter has great tactical advice to build your startup from a venture backed founder. A Must susbscribe!
How do online betting apps gain the trust of users? this article was a Goldmine of insights
Conclusion: As product builders, we optimise reducing steps in the onboarding for the user. Sometimes we are so ingrained in friction free solution that we miss the more significant issue of the user's intention to use the app. The above example is an interesting case study to showcase that when there is high intent to use the app, the users are willing to go to great lengths to access it. I do not promote online betting, but this is an attempt to understand the psychology behind trust
Ship outcomes, not just features, with the Product Impact Framework - learnt about it first from Gokul Rajaram
This is amazing - Uber losing in Pakistan to an app that allows customers to haggle and arrive at right price for the ride. Talk about listening to your customers and being authentic to the culture of the market you are in. True Product localization!
Does my company spend too much on marketing? Too little? How I do know? What is the right level of marketing spend at an enterprise software startup? the answer lies in an Inverted Demand Generation Funnel
Harkaran shared how leaders need to excel both at being the “visionaries” and the “operators”
Aditya Ramakrishnan shared a comprehensive Product marketing Stack
Don’t miss this absolute baller collection of GTM plays across various stages of a product!
Global data: Apps earning per month
Indian Data: Value of a user
Benchmarks: Stage wise SaaS product metrics
And if you need a reminder - Why everyone should pay more attention to India!
Have a great rest of 2022 you all. We will see you in 2023.
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Cheers,
Keshav