Differentiation and excellence

And how to make everything - sales, support, marketing, product - easier.

Hi all —

There are tons of seed-stage startups out there. As I look at them, I’m often blown away by the quality of their websites, marketing material, team sizes, funding amounts, and products.

And then I find out that they have much less revenue than we do, and it confuses me.

Because we don’t have a fancy website, highly produced events, a big team, or even an objectively “great” product yet. So what’s going on?

I initially thought it was due to founders focusing on the flashy things instead of the important things. But that’s not quite right.

What I’ve realized is that our success has resulted, in large part, from a maniacal focus on differentiation.

When you’re different, you don’t have to be excellent at everything.

But when you compete head-on with a bunch of incumbents who have $100M+ funding and you don’t have a clear reason why prospects should choose you, you HAVE to be excellent at just about everything. And that’s nearly impossible to do as a startup.

As a founder, one of your many responsibilities is to make it easier for your team to deliver outstanding results. So here’s one high leverage way to do that: Invest a few minutes this week into exploring the question: “How can we be wildly different - and the obvious choice - for our desired customer base?”