Getting people to talk during discovery feels easy - it got us from 0 to 1. But going from 1 to 10 is a whole different challenge.
If you already have a product and are solving a clear pain, how do you keep being “weird” and stand out? At the same time, isn’t part of the job qualifying prospects - since not everyone in your ICP feels that pain today (or ever)? Just stacking calls with people who’ll never buy seems weird too, and not a great use of a founder’s time. Curious how you think about that balance.
I'm thinking of what Rob suggests as you have to qualify demand (as in, qualifying that there is a project we can be relevant to) before qualifying prospects. Have we qualified demand/project existence if we haven't gone 1 to 10?
Meaning that the 'weird' is perhaps still essential in 1 to 10 as we're still trying to talk to as many people who 'might' fit as possible while we qualify the project we're actually relevant to. So it's as useful to talk to people who won't buy but do fit our ICP hypothesis (because then we can find out why not) as it is people who will (because we can find out why).
Feels like the 'weird' is a flavour of what Rob used to call Founder Magic, and it's not so much about using this to scale up rapidly by getting more high-chance sales calls (also because it's not scalable, because we don't know what 'works' yet) - it's about getting more conversations that fine tune our sense of what 'works'...
I would love more examples of weird messaging that's working for you (especially for booking sales demos and customer discovery calls) as opposed to advisors and investors in the examples above.
How did you figure out customers were using your product for something different than intended? Any tips on how you discovered that?
This is super advice
Small example from me: I got way more feedback when I asked “am I tilting at windmills” than when I asked for feedback
Getting people to talk during discovery feels easy - it got us from 0 to 1. But going from 1 to 10 is a whole different challenge.
If you already have a product and are solving a clear pain, how do you keep being “weird” and stand out? At the same time, isn’t part of the job qualifying prospects - since not everyone in your ICP feels that pain today (or ever)? Just stacking calls with people who’ll never buy seems weird too, and not a great use of a founder’s time. Curious how you think about that balance.
I'm thinking of what Rob suggests as you have to qualify demand (as in, qualifying that there is a project we can be relevant to) before qualifying prospects. Have we qualified demand/project existence if we haven't gone 1 to 10?
Meaning that the 'weird' is perhaps still essential in 1 to 10 as we're still trying to talk to as many people who 'might' fit as possible while we qualify the project we're actually relevant to. So it's as useful to talk to people who won't buy but do fit our ICP hypothesis (because then we can find out why not) as it is people who will (because we can find out why).
Feels like the 'weird' is a flavour of what Rob used to call Founder Magic, and it's not so much about using this to scale up rapidly by getting more high-chance sales calls (also because it's not scalable, because we don't know what 'works' yet) - it's about getting more conversations that fine tune our sense of what 'works'...
EDIT: I felt like these were relevant posts:
https://open.substack.com/pub/howtogrow/p/milestones-that-matter-on-your-0?r=467kef&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/dont-do-things-that-scale?utm_source=publication-search
And slide 24 (The Path) of this deck:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rsnyder1_b2b-product-market-fit-playbook-for-0-1m-activity-7169325649604657152-QmHz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABUEuu4BHaphoZrfClChVrDsfWl6f58CWNM
I would love more examples of weird messaging that's working for you (especially for booking sales demos and customer discovery calls) as opposed to advisors and investors in the examples above.
How did you figure out customers were using your product for something different than intended? Any tips on how you discovered that?
Love this; finally a reference I can cite when people tell me my messaging is …