3 Common Founder Issues

I somewhat randomly tweeted this on Wednesday of this week:

And got a LOT of interest and response.

5 booked calls in about an hour, and my Thursday afternoon and Friday were full of calls with amazing entrepreneurs who were looking for some help in growing their business.

I was humbled, to say the least, that they would take time out of their busy days to speak with me.

And along the way in these conversations a few common threads kept coming up, and wanted to highlight those (and how I think about overcoming or solving them) here for you all.

Hiring Is Tough

Whether it’s for new or seasoned founders, hiring is usually the highest leverage action you can take in your business. But also the one with the most opportunity to blunder a whole bunch of your time.

Get a hire right and it can transform the trajectory of your business.

Get it wrong and it can ruin your company culture, result in enormous wastes of time for you and your team members, and end up with loads of lost opportunity cost (time and money) for the business.

Hiring needs a high degree of alignment.

You need people who have similar sets of experiences across several aspects of your business:

• Team size: don’t hire someone from Oracle to be employee #2 at your startup. They’ll be lost and you’ll be miserable.
• Customer type: hire someone who has experience working with your type of customer. Their interests/pains/desires/passions – knowing the customer is so key.
• Transaction type: especially for sales and marketing, hire someone with experience in the type of transaction you do. Enterprise, PLG, Freemium, sales led vs. marketing led.
• Domain expertise: when at all possible, hire someone from your industry (ideally hire existing customers) who have deep expertise in your industry and product.

Aligning on these 4 aspects of a candidate will give you a better chance at them being successful. My book recommendation on this is The Who Method for hiring.

How Can We Test This

The topic of a lot of the calls I was on this week (and the majority of my regular, paid coaching clients) revolve around uncertainty in the face of big strategic decisions.

As Rob Walling says “Being a startup founder is all about making critical decisions with incomplete information”

We’re tasked with working the Ouija board to determine the path of our business, but without some of the letters, and with one hand tied behind our back.

But a great way to overcome this is to get a preview of the missing information.

I like to do this in the form of testing a hypothesis on a small sample size.

Want to raise prices? Do it on a cohort of existing customers.

Want to build a new feature? Build a “ghost feature” into the product, and see how customers interact with it.

Want to test a marketing campaign? Run a pilot on it at scale, but for a short period of time.

If you were on a coaching call with me and asked “Should I do this thing”, among other clarifying questions my response would eventually be “How can we test this?”.

Find a way to close that knowledge gap between where you are today and having complete information about a decision you’re facing, and you’ll make better decisions every time.

Levels Of Saturation

This one really just came to a head this week but has been a theme I’ve seen over and over (and in my own business), which is the difference between local and absolute maximums.

I think about this mostly in the context of marketing, but you can think about it from a product, support/success, and even finance perspective too.

The instant you start making progress on an initiative in your business you start approaching a local maximum…a point at which more input of your time/energy into this initiative will result in less and less result.

But, as you get closer to that local maximum point where you see diminishing returns (which could be months or years) it’s likely that there is another hidden pocket of opportunity for you to explore.

Here’s an example:

You’re working on reducing churn in your SaaS business. First you focus on reducing involuntary churn by using something like Churnkey. Great. That’s solved, but now you can work on voluntary churn by understanding why customers stop using your product (also something Churnkey helps us with, but in a different way. Shoutout to our friends at Churnkey!). At first you reduce involuntary churn, until you get it as good as it’s going to get…to where another hour of your effort has almost no added benefit. Then move on to the next area of larger opportunity for that hour of time to have impact.

Once you have addressed the initial aspect of a challenge, take a step back and evaluate whether there’s more meat on that bone…more of a chance to make a difference, but in a slightly different angle.

Doing this reduces context switching, avoiding another big strategic decision, and likely keeps you on point of addressing the #1 most important thing in your business a bit longer.

Get A Sounding Board

Whether it’s booking a 30 minute consultation call with me, ringing up a friend you met on Twitter, or going to a conference, it’s really important as founders to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

Being a founder can be a very lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be.

We’re all here to support you in this quest, and together we’ll make it!