# Customer-Led Growth: The SaaS Moat That Beats Better Marketing

Channel: MicroConf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlbAfgJ2umk
Duration: 41 min
Language: English
Words: 7030
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/FlbAfgJ2umk

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[0:00] All right, next slide. I have been kind of dreading cuz it's a little bit embarrassing. I always kind of doubt myself when I share this story and particularly share this photo. But this is me in 2012. And I'm going to date myself cuz this is me 10 years into my marketing career and I'm in-house working at a tech startup, shocker, Nerf gun, quintessential 2012 startup. Just out of frame, there is a ping pong table. It is exactly what you

[0:28] think it is. And I again, I'm about 10 years into my marketing career here. This company has brought me on. They're largely marketing led. So they are looking to marketing and to me now as this as the major source for growth, taking them to the next level. So I'm feeling a ton of pressure. I'm also a over deliver, under under promise type and so I'm operating, I often describe I'm operating like a chicken with my

[0:55] head cut off, terrible at prioritizing. Really honestly feeling like, you know, I really don't know what I'm doing. Some months I'm far exceeding my targets, other months I'm missing them entirely, really bad at prioritizing. Anyways, it's around this time, 2013 to be exact. I'm in San Francisco at a con to attend a conference and I reach out to Lenny Rachitsky and I am mortified at the idea that you all think that I'm name dropping his name, but this is in 2013. This is actually before

[1:25] Lenny was as big of a deal as he is now. And what a lot of people don't know about Lenny is that he incubated his startup in local to me in Montreal and so we were local for a couple of years. I got to know him. So when I was in San Francisco, I reached out. I promise I'm going to make a point of

[1:41] why Lenny is important to this story. So we hang out a couple of times and he was like, "Do you want to see the Airbnb office?" I was like, "Fuck yes, I want to see the Airbnb office." So we go to the beer Friday and uh gives us a tour. And I don't know if any of you have ever been to the San Francisco office, but it is amazing. It's gorgeous. It's multiple

[2:04] floors. They've spared no expense. The meeting rooms look uh are modeled to look like their most popular uh property rentals. Like it is absolutely incredible. And I'm like, "Okay, where does the products team work?" Cuz that's Lenny's on the product team at this time. And he takes us downstairs. This is not a real image, but it is looks something like this, right? Way less polished, all open concept, um kind of like messy or whatever, and the walls are white, like really nothing special at all. But what I notice is that there are sheets of loose-leaf

[2:38] paper taped to the wall. And I'm like, "Why are all these desks sort of, you know, facing in that direction?" So, I'm curious of what it is and I lean in and I realize that what it is is actually the Airbnb customer journey. Now, I'm 10 years into my marketing career at this point. So, I'm very familiar with customer journeys, but

[3:00] this thing was really, really different. It was nothing like any customer journey I'd seen up until that point. So, up until that point, this is what I was relying on, right? Funnels, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, flywheels, pirate metrics, um life cycle metrics, like MQL and SQL. Like that was my life was thinking in those terms. But the problem with these models is that they flatten our view of customers. I don't know if you've ever sort of gotten that feeling or that vibe from these, right? They assume that all customer experiences are the same and should be the same. They assume all

[3:38] product experiences are the same. And they really sort of reduce our customers and our product experience even to the the lowest common denominator of what they could possibly be. So, this thing was nothing like that. I don't know how well you can uh tell from this image. This is real. This is This is actually taken in 2014. So, this is about a year after I saw their like you know, loose-leaf paper version of this, the not polished version. They had a Disney illustrator come in to illustrate this thing. They They I think

[4:11] now it's like a mural in their office. They take this thing so, so seriously. But, I'm hoping what you can actually tell from this is just like how specific it is, right? It's anchored not in transactional moments of value to the business. It's anchored completely around the customer, right? The customer's moments of value, their

[4:33] emotional journey, their highs and lows. How they experience value. Their leaps of faith. How they make decisions. This was such a big shift for me. And it was a big shift for the company. So, went back to our Vancouver office, head of CS, head of product, and the co-founder and I decided this was it.

[4:58] This is We had to operate in this way. We were completely converted. It was the quintessential lightbulb moment for me. And we adopted this model, and the following year we were able to grow revenue nearly 900%. It was incredible. We were on the Forbes Fast 50. Like, and I don't want to over simplify here. Like, obviously, there was a lot of work that went into this, but um it really became this way of operating became part of our DNA. It became It was a major unlock for us, right? It was how we measured success. It was how we prioritized opportunities. We used it for benchmarking data. We used it to

[5:34] identify team handoff points. We used it for strategic alignment. This is really important to me, right? Strategic alignment between the go-to-market teams and the engineering teams and the product teams. And when I looked back at this a couple of years later, I realized that what was different about this and that what really happened there was that we actually decided as a company to truthfully prioritize and optimize our customers achieving their goals, and

[6:05] that's why we were able to achieve ours. So, at this point you're probably cool, cool, cool story, bro. Um what does this mean for you? How are you supposed to apply this? It sounds, you know, it's one of those things that sounds easy, but um you know, might be hard in practice. And I'm actually want to make the case that it is not actually

[6:25] all that difficult to do. But I want to talk about how you can get from where, you know, you are today to maybe experiencing some growth challenges to unlocking, potentially unlocking your next stage of growth. And I'm going to make the case that some of the growth challenges that you're experiencing that you might think are messaging problems, and I know many founders are thinking about messaging right now. I

[6:49] hear from them all the time. are not actually a messaging problem at all, but actually a positioning problem. And that your positioning problem isn't actually a positioning problem, it's actually a customer problem in that you don't actually know nearly enough about your customers or the problem that you solve for them. And the reason for that lack of understanding is my unpopular bonus round, which is you are over-relying on shallow ass

[7:19] data. And you can call this the Russian doll or the waterfall or the cascade or whatever, but I genuinely believe that these are the things standing between you and what could potentially, again, unlock your next amazing growth lever. So, let's talk about where you might be right now. Maybe you're in a situation where you are you know sign ups are not converting the way you want them to or what I'm hearing a lot right now from founders actually is that like early churn is becoming a much bigger issue. It's really starting to take up there was a lot of tire kickers in the market right

[7:57] now. Or maybe just overall acquisition feels much harder and more expensive. I cannot tell you the amount of years and stages and talks and material that I have you know given over the years saying exactly those words and it continues to be true acquisition is getting harder and more expensive. So what do we do in this situation? We run experiments, we tweak our onboarding as we should, we try new

[8:26] channels. All the same time though what we're very aware of and I when I know you are all very very aware of is that features are easy and product is easy to build and campaigns have never been easier, marketing has never been easier to launch, content is infinitely producible, there is literally an infinite number of things we possibly

[8:53] could do to grow at this point. Add to that that nearly every market is saturated right now. And so it makes sense that standing out feels like a messaging problem. If I could just find the right words, if I could just nail the hook, if I could just find the right channel. I love this example from John Henry Sherk. I don't know if some of you are familiar with him. He's a pretty well known B2B content and SEO consultant and this example like never ceases to amaze me, right? Even though he was able to generate a 600% increase in year-over-year traffic, high value, high quality solution seeking traffic

[9:37] because the company's positioning and messaging were not dialed in, he was not able to generate pipeline. So, no matter how much traffic you throw at your growth goals, if the fundamentals are off, you could be potentially throwing that investment in the garbage, right? If the If the foundation is off, we cannot execute our way to clarity. And so, yes, your messaging probably

[10:06] isn't the landing the way it could. But hiring a copywriter isn't going to fix this. Some of my best, closest friends are copywriters. And the best copywriters know that it is not a copy issue, because your messaging is just an articulation of something much deeper. Hey, Rob Walling here. If you're watching this and thinking, I wish I could be in the room for talks like this. You can, and you should. So much of the magic at our events happens in the hallway track. That's where you connect with two to 300 like-minded founders who are trying to solve many of the same problems you are. I hope you'll

[10:45] join us at our next event. Head to microconf.com/events to grab your ticket. Our next one is in Iceland in September of 2026, and then we'll be in Austin in April of 2027. So, most products, none of yours, but most products are positioned as nice-to-haves, vaguely beneficial, easy to deprioritize. Again, I'm not making any accusations here, but I'm sure we've all experienced

[11:15] SaaS websites like that. But in markets that are as saturated as yours likely is, and as commoditized as yours likely is, the only products that actually have a chance of cutting through are painkillers. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Right? Products that are positioned as painkillers solve a problem so specific and so felt that customers cannot ignore

[11:41] them. But as I'm sure many of you in this room have experienced, it is it can be very hard to read the label from inside the jar. It's a real issue. So, I a good example of this, a team that we worked with not too long ago, their name is Rent Check. And uh they the stage that they were at when we started working with them, um 4 million ARR, a couple thousand customers. They had grown to that point

[12:05] largely through ads and outbound. Amazing head of sales, they'd done a great job. But the founder knew and really wanted to start moving into and taking advantage of more inbound opportunities. He wanted to stand up their product-led growth motion. And so when I I was like, that's awesome. Let's let's do it. What does your product do? Like tell me about you. And he described his solution as resident-led inspection

[12:30] software for property managers. What do you think customers said they were, right? Customers on the other hand described something very, very different. They said things like, "What's the point of growing to a thousand doors if the properties are crap?" These are like verbatim quotes. Uh I'm losing sleep over the liability of missed inspections. Or there is no secure way for me to grow if I can't confidently manage the

[12:58] growth. So it quickly became obvious, this is not resident-led inspection software. This is growth infrastructure for scaling for operators scaling more quickly than they can confidently manage. So this completely repositioned the company. This is only a couple of months ago. And as of February, what they shared with me was that their sign-ups have doubled. And that was just results of February, and they're telling me that March is even

[13:29] better. And this segment of customers that are scaling are converting 70% higher than any of their other segments of customers. Again, this is as of February. So, I'm really looking forward to hearing what's going on in March and April. I'll keep you all posted. So, as as I hang out on the sidelines, um so you might be going through something uh uh similar to this company where they

[13:53] were at the beginning of this, right? Uh where the founder was relying on channels uh to bring customers to the front door, only to fall flat and miss the mark. Um or, you know, miss the mark entirely. And it might be because you're inside the jar. I know you've all heard that analogy before. It can be very hard to see your value sometimes through the lens and through the eyes of your market. And so, yes, you probably do need to work on your

[14:23] positioning. But as the best will tell you, right? Weak positioning cannot be fixed by hiring someone to overhaul your website based on assumptions, right? Positioning your product, especially in this market, is a highly strategic It's a It's a business-level decision, right? And I know you probably saw this one coming. You cannot reposition a product for a market that

[14:51] you don't understand. Not only do you need to carefully choose your market and who you're going to prioritize, but once you do that, you need to deeply understand the problem that you solve for them. So, most founders I talk to, they can tell me lots about their customers. They can describe their industry. They can tell me company size, revenue. They can tell me job titles, team structure. They can tell me um, you know, tech stack or

[15:24] infrastructure. And they are I'm not saying that those things are not valuable. Those ICP attributes are not valuable. They are super valuable. They help us put our customers into boxes. They help us make sense of our customer base. Um, they certainly help with things like ad targeting. But when I asked these founders why their customers chose them over all of the other options that are available to them right now,

[15:51] almost none of them can tell me. Almost none of them can tell me what was going on in their customers world before they came to you. What was the old way that they were struggling with? What sucked about that old way? What was that moment they when they went from passive looking to active looking? Right? Why did they choose you over all of the other all of the other available options to them, right? What can they do now

[16:17] that they weren't able to do before? If you are nodding along as you recognize this as jobs to be done, this is absolutely jobs to be done. Maybe you've done this type of work, uh, before. You've done this type of research research potentially, uh, in the early days. Many founders do. And honestly, kudos if you have done this. That's incredible. Unfortunately, though, the elephant in the room is that

[16:44] shit's changed. Like a lot. Like just that Q&A with Rob, uh, you know, has proven just how quickly things have changed for our customers. All of these amazing questions that were asked about, you know, how do customers think about this and do customers like or dislike or liabilities and all of these things? They're All of that it's all new, right? It's all in the last even couple of

[17:06] months potentially. The environment in which your customers are making decisions has completely changed. Competitors, alternative ways of solving the problem that you help customers solve, budgets are completely different, teams have been restructured, case studies I sorry not case studies use cases have disappeared and appeared overnight. They're evolving very very quickly. The circumstances that brought your customers to your front door maybe even just 6 months ago or less depending on your product may not be why they hire

[17:42] you today. To be a painkiller in a saturated market, we need to deeply understand what is going on in our customers' lives before they get to our front door. So again, most founders can tell me a lot of their ICP attributes. Almost none can tell me with any amount of confidence what was going on in your customer's life that made them desperate enough, have urgency enough to choose you and

[18:10] spend money with you. Because knowing who your customer is is not the same as understanding why they buy from you. Those are two completely different levels of understanding. And the difference in these two usually comes down to the inputs that we are relying on. We have more data at our disposal than we ever have before and yet so many of

[18:37] us are still just guessing. Because the data can tell us what is happening, right? It can tell us that conversion rates are dropping, it can tell us that activation is stalling, it can tell us that, you know, churn is ticking up, but it can't tell you why any of those things are happening. I loved Jason's talk from yesterday morning. I was like it was a it was a a big sort of like preface-led foundation for the stuff that I'm talking about, right? This data is so important, but it can't tell you why any of these things

[19:08] are happening. We tend to see our customers as this big homogeneous blob of numbers in the aggregate. We fall into the trap of just focusing on what our customers are doing instead of why they're doing it. So, I'm going to give you an example. Uh invoicing tool that we worked with a little while ago. Um they had a very different set of challenges. They had healthy sign-ups,

[19:34] lots of their top of funnel was great. Um self-professed data factory this product's team was running experiments all the time, but they could not get enough of these free sign-ups to turn into long-term customers. And this is a big customer base since we had a lot to work with. Two groups emerged and that were really interesting. And the first group were those who just needed a simple way to

[20:01] send an invoice. This was by far their biggest group. And they were actually the group that was the easiest to please and their NPS was amazing. The second group were those looking for a mobile invoicing solution. So, they wanted to be able to generate and send an invoice from their vehicle right there on site with their client. And this group was more likely to be firing an old solution like QuickBooks or Docs or spreadsheets. Um and they were really picky and they wanted lots

[20:34] of customizations. They were not the higher converting. They were not the high NPS. But they were the highest LTV. So, this team had just been lobbing all of these customers together into one big homogeneous blob, treating them all the same when actually they needed very different onboarding experiences. It was actually their pickier customer that they should have been optimizing for. Meanwhile, they'd been inflating their data

[21:02] with a poor fit more vocal customer. This is actually super common. I've got other stories like this. This was just the easiest one to tell and it's very easy to see how we could get stuck into this stuck in this trap because so many of us are operating with huge blind spots. So, we've got lots of ICP enrichment data like demographics and firmographics and even technographics. We've got product usage data to rely on. We may be even have product feedback, which is great. But if it's layered on top of a foundation of understanding that is too shallow, it's not helpful, right? It's

[21:40] missing so much customer context. This is the kind of customer context that will radically change how you think about your customers. How you see your customers. How you position yourself in the market. Segmentation and how you message your product or even how you think about how to measure a happy healthy customer. What should activation look like? What does healthy

[22:06] product engagement look like? What's our, you know, the North Star product product usage that we're looking for? Even the experiments that you end up running cuz don't mistake me here. I'm not saying that there's no room for experimentation or incremental improvement. There absolutely is. But if we're honest, we all know that those little arrows do not always go to the right, right? Testing does not

[22:30] always lead to better performance. I heard recently that we are supposed to expect new heads of growth in their first 3 months to have a 97% failure rate. Like that's normal. We have normalized this. We haven't only normalized it, we have completely glorified it. This is a LinkedIn post by Jason Knight. He's a pretty well-known product

[22:55] management coach out of the UK. And he sort of perfectly articulates the advice being given right now. All we need is at bats. It's all about taste. Get it out into the market and test it. See what happens. Right? At bats without a system is like activity without progress. Whether it's product design or your go-to-market or

[23:18] even research. We are skipping first principles. We've lost sight of first principles. The foundation that actually leads to Right, this is the foundation that actually leads to what I've recently only been able to describe as strategic quicksand. So, it's hard to recognize until we're already stuck. Execution drifts away from um you know the the we get disconnected from what we're trying to do. We focus on quick wins instead of those bigger

[23:47] opportunities that end up going ignored. I sent an email to my list recently, my modest little list. And there's founders on there and heads of product, heads of marketing, heads of growth. And I asked them, "What is the biggest challenge that you're dealing with right now?" Probably none of the responses are going to surprise you. About 200 people

[24:07] responded to me. And founders, unsurprisingly, said that they the founders that responded said they were focused on really big picture [ __ ] Overhauling our go-to-market strategy, dealing with some product gaps, thinking about repositioning. I'm assuming the majority of the folks in the room today are founders. Who are the founders? Raise your hands. I want to see like 90% of you. Okay. Keep your

[24:30] hand up if you have a team. If you're not a solo founder Okay, wow, a good amount. Okay, so this next slide is for you. Team members, nearly every single one of them complained about team alignment or lack of strategy and being overwhelmed with competing priorities, right? Execution overwhelm. All of them. There's a massive disconnect going on right now, right? Again, these were heads of marketing, heads of growth, heads of product all talking about moving goal posts, all talking about no product strategy, no product vision, not being able to get buy-in for their

[25:10] ideas. People said things like this, "It feels like no one knows what's going on." This is one quote of dozens in just the 200 again responses that I got. I heard it over and over and over again. Imagine for a second, and I'm not saying this is any of you, not saying this is any of your head of products or your head of growth that feel this way, but imagine for a second this was your head of product that felt this way

[25:35] about your product or your company. I heard it over and over and over again. Founders are rethinking their entire go-to-market strategies. Meanwhile, teams feel like no one's at the wheel. And we are literally being told by the experts to throw [ __ ] at the wall. There's just this widening gap between strategy and execution right now. And the reason that that gap exists, the reason that our positioning and messaging doesn't feel dialed in, the reason that we're throwing [ __ ] at the wall is almost never a creative or copywriting problem. The best UX designers and the best copywriters will tell you that. It is almost always an

[26:21] understanding problem. We are spending so much money, so much time, so many resources executing, running experiments, you know, adding new channels, driving traffic, but none of it compounds if the actual foundation of what you're doing is off. Because when you fix that, when you actually put understanding at the center of how you operate, you don't have to guess anymore. You don't have to throw

[26:44] [ __ ] at the wall. I am not here to tell you to talk to your customers, even though obviously you should talk to your customers, but I'm not here to tell you that. I know you know that, but I want you to know that there is a system, there is a better way of doing this. There's a systematic approach that you can take to talking to your customers and doing research. It doesn't have to be a month-long research project that just leads to more questions than

[27:13] answers. Because when you talk to your customers, you'll ask better questions, you'll know how to interpret their answers, you'll know what to do with their answers, right? So, I'm talking about a way of operating that puts customer understanding at the center of every growth decision you make. Maybe you saw this one coming, too. An operating model that puts

[27:39] understanding and resonating, i.e. converting, and even measuring our ability to help our customers get from one milestone to the next. Reaching customers that experience the pain we solve through what actual healthy product activation and adoption should look like, could look like for them, what healthy product engagement could and should look like, even expansion in our product. A genuine way to actually get the right message to the

[28:08] right person at the right time. So again, we've got lots of data available to us. We've never had more data available to us. But rarely do we have a system, do we take the time to have a system to anchor it all and make sense of it all. And I implore you to stop thinking about understanding customers or being

[28:34] customer-led as a research project. This is not a research project. Think of it as a competitive advantage, because it is, right? Because when products are easy to launch and build and marketing is easy to run and launch, and and, you know, all of this activity, the only way that actually compounds is to actually understand our customers better than anyone else, better than all of our competition. It is the closest thing we have to seeing around corners that our

[29:08] competitors can't. Or the Canadian analogy, skating to where the puck is going. So, start thinking about it as an operating model, a competitive advantage. The founders who figured this out, and I've got lots of examples, but the founders that figured this out, they don't just grow faster, they grow with more confidence, more clarity, a whole lot less waste. Again, like I mentioned, I've got examples of this on the website if you're interested in in checking those out, but if you are, obviously, there's not time in a talk in a 30-minute talk to actually go through how to do this, but the shameless plug, of course, is

[29:43] going to be we wrote a book about this process. It's a very short, practical book. It comes with a workbook. If you're interested in doing this for yourself, and actually being a little bit more customer-led, and taking a systematic approach to qualitative research, uh if you want, I I'm happy to send you a copy for free. Uh just shoot me an email. I do have a couple uh copies with me if you're interested in that. I really appreciate

[30:10] your time. Thank you so much. [applause] YEAH. I'M SURE WE HAVE [cheering] 7 minutes for questions. And we're counting those very strictly. Do we have any Yep, one back here. Question over here. So, um I uh like to talk to my customers, um and schedule interviews, and all that stuff, but I get burned out very

[30:35] You get burned out personally? burned out very quick cuz I'm doing like Zoom calls with them, and then I'm following up with them, and trying to build that relationship. So, after like it's very useful. Um I do it like once a year. Um and I do it for like a month and then I'm like, "Oh my god, I just need to like put my head back down under

[30:49] the sand and just like get doing stuff." How do you I guess manage the balance of talking to your customers? Do you think doing it every just all the time is good or how do you prevent burnout as well? What a great question. Thank you so much for asking it. Um so, first kudos, that's amazing. Um like really, really impressive. So, I think batching it is a really good idea um so that you don't burn out on it. I think you know, what I hear a lot is founders or teams even that speak to their customers on the regular, but they're speaking to their customers on

[31:21] the regular, right? Like their day-to-day in using the product. What I'm actually referring to here is a very specific type of conversation that you're having with new customers. So, customers who just signed up in the last couple of months, cuz remember that recency thing that I was talking about, right? Like shit's changed. So, carving out like a 2-week period, what we do is we do outreach for a week, we do a 2-week basically sprint where we run like 10 to 12 interviews. And in those interviews, what we're asking is things like, "What was going on? What

[31:52] happened? What were the circumstances?" Because they they're recent enough that they remember. They're not going to fill their memory with um what they think you want to hear. Cuz that's really, really important is recency. But it's also really important too that the customers There's like a sweet spot of who you should talk to. Um recency is important, but also customers that are actually getting value from the product from your for your product experience. So, they've reached some sort of milestone of engagement. Um so again, you only need 10 to 12 of these conversations. You'll start to see patterns show up and then

[32:26] you'll know you're on to something. And how often do you do that? Like every quarter or So, the answer to that is it depends. Right now, obviously a little bit more often, but if your product has has meaningfully changed, it's certainly if your value proposition has changed and if your product is meaningfully changing, definitely those are really important inflection points to do to do it. And again, I'm not talking about a big long project here. I'm talking about

[32:48] 10 conversations. Um Hi there. Um fantastic talk. Um you said I I hooked onto one statistic that you mentioned kind of in the middle. You said that 97% of directors of growth failure rate uh they have like a failure rate expect to experience a 97% failure rate of their tests. Oh, of their tests. That's insane.

[33:11] Yes. Sorry. Yeah, [laughter] I know. I was curious where you got that figure from and like why are we testing in the first place in that case? Like what is that about? Yeah, I mean, you get to know a lot of growth teams, right? Like their whole thing is how many tests are we running? We need to prove that we're running, you know, X amount of tests on a weekly basis, let's say. So, there's a lot of just like meaningless

[33:35] tests that are happening. Where I got that stat, I believe it was Elena Verna at an article of hers. And I trust Elena. You know, that of course these numbers are are accurate, but it just blew my mind that this is something that we're like, "Cool, cool." That like carry on. Like that's normal. I just it Just maximizing the testing volume at

[33:56] all costs. That's right. Like optimizing for for velocity of testing versus what we're actually testing and taking bigger swings. Cool. All right, thank you. Um I wanted to if I could be super annoying for a moment, I wanted to add an idea on talking to your customers. So, this helps also for marketing purposes. Something I've done in the past is I've created customer advisory boards where I kind of just choose my like eight to 10 customer besties and I just kind of stay dialed in with them and talk to them regularly. And so if I have an idea for a marketing campaign or even a blog post, I'll just

[34:35] ping them really quick or even text them and say, "Hey, do you think this is a good idea?" It's a lot easier for me cognitively, so sharing that in case it's helpful to someone. Yeah, totally. From a From a content perspective, absolutely. That's amazing to have that like feedback loop. Um for positioning and messaging though, like if you are revisiting your positioning, that's a bit of a different style of research

[34:57] for sure. Um but yes, 1,000% yes. Right here. So, in B2B, there's a difference between buyers and users. Yes. Right? And understanding both of them is very important. How do you differentiate gathering and understanding both and how an understanding of both or either fits into positioning? Yeah. So, when you say the difference between buyers and users, more specifically, do you mean like functional users and and executive

[35:29] buyers? Yes. Okay. Um so, it depends. [laughter] There's always an opportunity typically. So, you can There's There's two different ways to to slice it. You could go for an outbound more an outbound motion, upmarket motion where you are seeking out those executive buyers and you're going directly to the executive buyers. Um even in those situations though, I often am finding myself recommending that your website actually speak more to

[36:00] the functional user. Because it is often that functional user that's doing the first round of research. They're often the ones that are being tasked with solving the problem. They're the closest to solving the problem. Uh if you have functional users, typically that's true. So, though your outbound motion, now you have to be careful cuz you've got two go-to-market motions happening simultaneously, which is not nothing, but that would be two separate sort of go-to-market motions that you might want to consider. So, your website would target your functional, really getting close to that pain, and then your outbound is focused on an executive buyer. But, every team is different. Maturity of team matters a

[36:34] lot, like whether or not you can layer on additional motions like that. But, hopefully that answers your question. That's how I tend to think about it. Hi, Gia. Hey. Thanks for the talk. Um, I have a question about your book. Sure. Does it contain like scripts, frameworks, etc.? Okay, perfect. Yeah. I'm going to buy it. [laughter]

[36:56] Sweet. Yeah, I I often have a slide that has like literally a list of questions. Um, I didn't include it, but uh it is included in the workbook. So, like like I said, it it was a lot of work to make this book really short. Um, and a lot of what we didn't put into the book we actually put into the workbook. So, if you're interested in that, we also actually turned of course we turned the book into a book companion. So, you can also ask the book companion questions for your

[37:23] specific situation. Um, but there's interview scripts and and stuff like that. Emails, that type of thing is in there. Awesome. Thanks for asking. Hi. Um, I've kind of noticed that it's not always the easiest thing to get your customers to actually talk to you, regardless of the fact that you might have ongoing users and businesses using your systems. Um, you mentioned that it's not always the loudest customers that are always, you know, telling the

[37:51] truth actively and are actually right. How do you differentiate between the loudest versus the ones that, you know, have the right intentions and filter out the noise in there? Totally. So, what we how we typically do it is we will carve out a very specific segment that we will decide to uh talk to. I was actually just explaining this earlier today that um sometimes you will just know that there is a segment of your customers that you want to focus on, and you've got some way to identify them in your customer base and you'll use that to sort of pre-qualify for interviews and that is easy. Not every team is in that

[38:29] situation though. Sometimes they're literally like we got a big group of customers, we need to figure out who's in here, we need the lay of the land. And in that case, what I would say is again, recent customers are really important. So, ideally last 3 to 6 months. Um if obviously if you've got a li- longer buying cycle, you're going to have to go further back than that, but as recent as you can um get, but also they've used your product in a way that indicates that they've gotten some value. Because then you're not running interviews with not I mean not all

[39:00] customers are created equally, right? So, you want those that are actually getting value, they've paid you and they're recent. Um that goes a really, really long way. And then once you've had those conversations, even again, you can have just like 10 or 12 of these conversations. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Bob Moesta, he's one of the uh co-architects of the Jobs to Be Done methodology and he even he says you can probably get away with like eight to 10. We tend to do a little bit more than that, but even that amount of conversations, you're likely to identify generally between like three to five

[39:29] Jobs to Be Done. A- Jobs to Be Done you can think of as like the motivation, like the reason why they showed up at your front door, the reason for that urgency. And what we do is we say like look, these three Jobs to Be Done, I know are the represent your customer base today and then we sort of compare them when we we typically try to prioritize them. Um sometimes it's really obvious, other times it's not super obvious and we have like a bit of a rubric that we use to prioritize, but there's generally the recommendation is to

[39:59] prioritize one. Um some teams do continue forward with two. It's a little bit more difficult to do that. In the earlier stage, I would definitely recommend focus on what do a really good job with one and then expand, but um hopefully that answers your question. Not all customers are created equally, that is 100% true. That's all the time we have for

[40:20] questions. Give it up for Gia. Thank you. Yay! I've been running MicroConf for more than a decade, and the thing I hear from attendees more than anything else is I wish I'd come sooner. Not because of any single talk or tactic, but because they finally found their people. Founders who get it. Founders who are building the same way they are. At our events, it's not just about the talks. In Portland, we organized waterfall hikes, food tours, happy hours, real time with other founders outside the sessions. And those relationships don't end when the event does. They turn into the people you text when something breaks or when something

[40:56] finally works. If you've been thinking about coming, I hope you'll join us in Iceland and Austin. Get your tickets at microconf.com/events. If you got something out of that talk, make sure you hit subscribe. We're putting out more of these every week. And that wasn't the only great talk from Portland. Go watch this one next.

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