September @ The Operators Collective
Welcome to the September wrap up of The Operator’s collective - a community of India’s top founders and operators!
September discussions in the community focused a lot on Customer Acquisition, Growth, Aha Moments and Metrics.
Started off with Rex Woodbury’s piece on The Challenges & Opportunities in Connecting Brands and Customers
Language/market fit is the most under-appreciated concept for early-stage startups. A great read on how to be a mind reader and make your customers go - “That is EXACTLY what I’m looking for”! (Tejas Shirodkar who is building Petrol Social recommended April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome to dive deeper and nail product positioning.)
Manan shared an interesting tweet thread with psychology triggers to help product and marketing folks build better products.
A hack that I have been using for non fiction books is to listen to one of the hour long Podcast by that author before I buy the book..
A) you end up getting majority of the content explained fairly quickly and with context
B) you can decide if you want to invest further time required to go through the book
Altho I still end up buying a bunch of books and they lie around half read.. Next on my list is BUILD by Tony Fadell (of iPod & iPhone fame)
Ayesha suggested Bob Iger’s Ride of a Lifetime as a must read while others suggested Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath, Inspired by Marty Cagan and Loved by Martina Lauchengco.
Robin launched SmartCue on ProductHunt and the community loved the product. SmartCue ended No 1 for the Day and Top 5 for the week!!! Have a look!
I have been reading about the Atomic Unit concept that many startups have used to validate, perfect and then scale their playbook. For Quick Commerce companies it was as small as a Building that then grew to micro market and then the city. For Social networks it was one College. So what would that look like for B2B SaaS - it would be one Company and yet I wonder how many founders go all in on One company to build a playbook that can be copy pasted many times. This one on Figma's early days of going all in on one company is quite interesting.
While I was possibly the only SaaS investor who couldn’t make it to SaaStr I decided to value add to my portfolio companies by sending them this SaaStr piece on things that always work in SaaS marketing.
Saloni had an interesting share on Hard Work which is often viewed as an adversary, to tame & conquer; or at best, a frenemy which is attended to only when we need it. Once our immediate goals have been achieved, we become complacent again. Imagine the possibilities if we made 'hard work' our friend 💫
How do you change your momentum in a week or two? Late to the party but finally learnt about Monk Mode.
What Aladdin Can Teach You About Creating a User Onboarding Flow
Abhishek shared the challenges for Indian Internet Companies to hit a 100bn USD valuation. Which was corroborated by Finshot’s take on Amazon’s struggle to grow in India
We always talk about network effects in context of startups.. but how does this hidden force propel our personal lives?? Fun weekend exploration from who else but nfx.
How to figure out a product’s “aha moment” by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Or you can use this simpler way to identify aha moments.
This post is 10 years old but still very relevant on how to choose market segments based on customer profitability
Great read from Amazon’s Kintan Bhrambatt on detecting and reducing points of friction in a customer’s journey
There were two interesting Billion Dollar events that lead to some interesting discussions in the community -
Patagonia - Purpose Marketing
Three-question framework called the “DAD” test (yes, it’s a riff on Rob Fitzpatrick’s MOM test!) to help people identify good onboarding friction from the bad
How does one extrapolate from a data set of one or fewer and build customer empathy without over pivoting on their own needs.
Abhishek from our community started his Substack which is absolute gold for those who want to learn more about Growth Marketing. His passion for Growth shines through in every interaction that I have had with him. He is crystalizing and sharing his learnings from the Advanced Growth Series at Reforge. Go check it out or explore this fantastic Mind Map on defining your company’s North Star
Love the contra thinking here, marketers think their company needs to be the one to educate all potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey, starting at the top. But for most SaaS companies their prospects already know why they need to invest in your category, who the big players are, and how it would help them. They don’t need top of the funnel content. They’re not starting from a knowledge level of zero. Therefore, more effective SaaS content strategy should prioritize middle and bottom of the funnel topics to capture people who are already actively searching for a solution to their problem.
LTV/CAC > 3:1 is every founder’s dream.. but it can knowingly / unknowingly be abused.. the article does a good job at examining each piece of the equation. Further on the abuse of metrics, this piece on how Magic No can be a bullshit metric to chase if not done correctly.
Amidst all the funding winter, this article came as much relief for founders - $290bn of dry powder globally and almost $50bn for India. Sure all of it wont be called and deployed, but surely exciting times ahead.
Ravindra is back in the driver’s seat at the Pop/Investech venture BHive Alts and shared what Real Estate 3.0 will look like.
Company data, app usage data, customer feedback, and win/loss data all bring different angles to understanding both the market and competitors. Here’s a list of tools & frameworks that some of the best PMs are using.
Paras Chopra’s list of 65+ mental models for startup founders is a fun weekend read. Or you can dig into this Huberman Labs podcast to understand everything about the role of Dopamine wrt motivation (it’s wrongly understood as pleasure proxy).
Well trained Intuition > Vastly experienced or credentialed. Well trained intuition is function of: Experience -> Reflection -> Abstraction -> Action
The PLG software landscape as well as the brainstorming framework for aspiring founders from Bessemer Venture Partners are well written.
Measuring what matters in a growth model and measuring how good you are at keeping customers around (Renewal v/s Retention).
Enough of metrics, we ended the month with this fantastic piece by Packy on how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from MAGIC!
Hope you enjoyed reading the September edition of The Operator’s collective - join the community to get early access and dissect all this content further with some of the sharpest minds from the ecosystem.
Thanks for the mention, Keshav.
The community discussions, resources, and this newsletter is absolutely awesome, as you are! ❤️