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In this episode, Stephanie Melodia interviews Anthony Pierri, partner at Fletch PMM, who helps early stage B2B founders position their products and translate that to homepage messaging. We discuss, the power of honing in on your niche; creating repeatable processes for scale; best practices in brand positioning for B2B startups; personal branding (including dealing with trolls!); how to blow up on LinkedIn, and more!
Watch on YouTube via the link below or keep reading for the transcript:
SM: Strategy and Tragedy listeners, I have a very special transat episode for you here. I am sat with Anthony Pieri, who is a subject matter expert in the world of product market fair messaging, copywriting, and we are sat in the Windy City.
So this is a special. American episode here for you. We're sat in a little shoe box, so it's very nice and intimate. Anthony, welcome to Strategy and Tragedy.
AP: Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here.
SM: I'm so excited to have you. I know that I usually interview like founders, serial entrepreneurs, CEOs on the show, but it is great to pepper in subject matter experts like yourself. There's so many things I want to get stuck into, obviously around your expertise around messaging, copywriting, product market fit, super relevant to stressing tragedies audience. But also what I really want to get stuck into as well is your personal brand and how you've built such a profile on LinkedIn.
So you've amassed over 50K followers. I'm sure lots of our listeners will want to learn about. How you did that tips and tricks. I feel like everyone is trying to raise their profile on LinkedIn. So we'll get stuck into that. But first of all, tell our listeners a bit more about who you are and what you do.
AP: Yeah, for sure. So I'm the co founder partner at a product marketing consultancy called FletchPMM. And we primarily help early stage B2B SaaS startups, specifically when they're trying to rewrite their homepages. We usually help them figure out the best way to position their product, the best messaging to use. And then we translate that to copy and a rewritten homepage. So a lot of times we've seen other product marketing consultants, positioning experts, they kind of just do pure strategy work. And you leave with this really, really nice PowerPoint that then goes into a Google drive folder and it's never looked at again.
So we're like, if you can get the positioning down, you can get the messaging down and then get it housed in something like a homepage. Then all of your customers, your internal employees, everyone will be looking at the same thing. And we often find that people will internalise it way better across the whole org when it lives in something so visible like the website.
We've gotten to work with now, I think over 200, maybe 215 different companies at this point. We came from like a very, very custom agency world where we were doing really long engagements and we'd only work with a couple of companies per year. Now we've completely flipped it and we're essentially building out this framework for messaging, positioning, copywriting, and what we're trying to do is work with as many companies as possible to get the framework and the process as good and robust as possible. So it's sort of the flip side where now we're like, the more companies we work with, the more edge cases we find, the places where the framework breaks, because a lot of times too, we'll see people who have frameworks and things like that.
They were like, I use this at my one company and now I'm going to share it with all the other companies. And it's like, well, is it going to work in all the other companies? And so we're like, Let's go process first. And so we've joked that it's like a, like a large language model where the more data we can feed the framework, the better it'll be.
And so that's why we work with so many companies and it's a much shorter engagement basically to try to figure out where are the biggest positioning problems, how can we reframe it to get you into the right spot, and then. What would be the messaging that would support it? And then ultimately, what would be the copy?
SM: I love that. Okay, so much to dive into that. So the 215 companies over what period is that?
AP: It's about a year and a half. We're working with close to, you know, 15 to 20 different companies a month. We get a lot of feedback very fast. And the funny thing is the people who worked with us at the beginning, sometimes I feel bad because I'm like, they were getting the version 1. 0 and that was, it was pretty rough around the edges. Obviously, if you're company 200 and you have the benefit of 200 iterations before the process is going to be a lot better and more dialled in so yeah, it's really spanned the gamut of a lot of early stage companies, but we've also run our process on very large companies, enterprises, you know, publicly charited companies, and even things like nonprofits, you know, random service providers, consultants.
So it really is like a base level framework for positioning and messaging. We just have found, especially because of our LinkedIn audience, Most people who want to work with us and get a lot of value from us are these venture backed early stage startups. Amazing. And so servicing, what was it, like 15, 20 customers a month that you mentioned.
SM: So how big is your team?
AP: It's really me, my co founder Rob, and then we have two product marketers slash copywriters who support us. So this is not like hey, we hand this off and our team. It's really me and Rob in the trenches running tons and tons of workshops. Which is, it feels like a grind, but.
The learnings we get, and you mentioned about the LinkedIn stuff, part of the reason we're able to create content so frequently at a high depth is because when we work with a company in the morning, we'll debrief and say, how did that go? What was good? What was bad? Why did this break? What do we need to adjust in our approach? Where is it not quite solid enough? And then we'll change it and then try it for the company that we work with in the afternoon. And so incredibly fast speed of learning and iterating. And then we take all those things And basically share all of the behind the scenes stuff in post. which kind of fuels the flywheel.
SM: Anthony, I feel like this is one of the first times that I'm hearing about almost this like, lean startup model. This really like, lean, build, learn, iterate kind of model in an agency sort of set up, right? I feel like agencies always have that connotation of being so high touch, that service model really give that client like the concierge service on lengthy timelines is part of that as well, whether it's six weeks, six months to really kind of get in there with them but I love that level of like volume, the speed, the iteration.
So in terms of your funnel, Is that through LinkedIn? Seeing as you've got such a big following, I'm sure that's easier for you now. Where do most of your clients come from?
AP: I would say, 98% just straight inbound from LinkedIn. So we share, and my partner's, he's a, my business partner, his LinkedIn following is also pretty large. We both were sharing around the same type of topics in a very similar branding style, and so people just started following both of us. But that generates almost all of our pipeline. And people will come in and basically already know all the things that we stand for, all of our philosophy because we are not a, we keep things gated, behind the scenes. It's all, share everything openly, show everyone how the sausage is made. So we, we try to make it, when someone books a call with us, they already know exactly what the process is going to look like. Um, we have like a really long video on the website basically saying here's exactly the steps we're going to do, the workshops we're going to run, how they're going to go.
And we update that every, you know, couple months or so as we change the framework and the approach. And then we send them a bunch of pre, pre materials that they can watch. Hey, this is kind of all the key things. So when they get on a sales call with us, they're usually already bought in. Yeah. I don't even know if I would consider them sales calls because they just come on to be like.
When can we start? You know, are we a, you know, we're maybe not an early stage startup. Can you still work with us? Those are like the most common questions we get on the sales call. Interesting. It's it's crazy the power of Thought leadership and content in like moving people through the Yeah, yeah, they're basically conversion calls rather than sales calls, right?
Yeah, 100%. And I think that's a really interesting message to share with our listeners as well, which is, you know, I think there is more of that openness to like the building in public if you are building more of a digital like tech products. But if you're a service provider agency sort of model like you guys are, it can be can feel quite counterintuitive, right?
It can feel like. Oh no, but this, like our expertise, our methods are the value, like this is what you pay to get. Whereas doing the complete opposite positions you as a thought leader, you know what you're talking about, the prospects get to learn more about you, they get more of that familiarity so by the time they get in touch with you, they're just like ready to go.
Yeah. And the funny thing too is that we had a guy who actually booked a sales call with us. I sent him. the materials to be like, Hey, this is the process. He saw the materials and then he went, applied them to the homepage, canceled the sales call, launched it and was like, it completely changed. We had all, and he was like, I want to write a testimonial for how great it was.
And I didn't even work with you guys. And so people will hear that like other service providers be like, how could you give away that much for free? But the trick here is that. So if you give away that much, yes, you will get some people who don't work with you, but the amount of distribution boost you'll get from the algorithm will far outweigh any business that's lost.
SM: Distribution boost from the algorithm. What do you mean by that?
AP: Yeah. So like on LinkedIn, it's an algorithmic timeline, right? And so what the platform is optimizing is educational, helpful content. It's not a great place to. Start a dialogue, and you'll see this, if you ever just post on LinkedIn and ask a question, those posts will do terrible.
They'll get no engagement. Twitter's different. People will post on Twitter, and they'll get a bunch of people responding, and those posts will go viral. LinkedIn, nobody's going viral with a question, because LinkedIn, I, reasoning behind, you know, I don't really know this for a fact, but my guess is, LinkedIn is really optimizing for, I want when the users log in, it to be a really helpful experience, and they learn something and feel like they can apply it in their business.
So if you take that view and you provide so much value up front in every single post, ungated, we don't use any CTAs, we never say like, Hey, book a call with us or anything like that. It's just value, value, value, value. And we say, we're treating these people like they're adults. If they want to work with us, they'll figure out how to get in touch with us, right?
We have all the links and stuff on our website. But what happens is when you share at that level of helpfulness, LinkedIn will send you to so many more people than they would have otherwise. Yeah. When the agencies or consultants or whoever, they keep everything behind the closed doors and they're like, well, you have to wait to work with us.
All of their posts are not very helpful and they don't get any distribution. Yeah. So they'll post and it gets seen by five people and no business. Interesting. Where you, we've done the trade off. We're like, let's just give away effectively. Every single thing we learn, we give it away freely. And what ends up happening is the posts do so much better that it pushes out to people.
And some people who are really gung ho will say, I'll do this myself. But the vast majority of people will just say, this sounds like a lot of work. I don't have time to sort through all this. And they clearly know what they're doing. So we'll just hire them. So it's, it's really worked out. And we, because it's highly productized, which is different from most custom service agencies, like you were mentioning, right.
Do everything custom long term scopes always different because it's the the same process the same productized service It's incredibly efficient super high margin. And so like and we're pretty open about this like we'll probably do Maybe 1. million us dollars this year And it's probably close to especially if you take out our own salaries.
We're paying ourselves Just external it's probably 80 80 percent margin. So it's it's so much higher margin than the custom Services world where it's like you're really just fighting to keep the hours down and you're trying to squeeze It's like all the incentives are misaligned and all that stuff.
And so doing it this way we have found. It's just so much better And obviously there's people who make the other business models work We love this one and now we're like, we only would do productized for the rest of the rest of our service career. Anthony, I absolutely love it. It's so, I feel just so excited listening to you and I really appreciate, you know, your candor.
It follows through, not just on LinkedIn and so openly freely, uh, you know, freely sharing that, that content, but also, you know, extending here now to the podcast and you just being so open about your financials and margins and everything. So it's obviously super authentic, you know, beyond the buzzword. So I just want to.
Rewind a second because I want to unpack the value between that client who didn't become a client who never paid for your service versus the value in the distribution on LinkedIn. So like, if we just use that one specific example, just to go back to that, nine out of 10 people would be so proud. Pissed off that that person still went and took all the materials, all the advice, the frameworks, the guidance, they went and used it.
They, you didn't see a dime out of that. They got a ton of value like, you know, so many people would be so annoyed by that. But your take on it, which is so refreshing and I think, you know, definitely much healthier is the distribution value we got from that was greater. So how exactly, like, did that, Was it the fact that they then posted about you and that posted so well, or the fact that you leveraged that case study and then your post on LinkedIn did so well?
Like, did you look at the numbers? Yeah, it's not even really that specific example. It's more just the, the quality of posts that get pushed on LinkedIn are the ones that are just so 10x more helpful than the other stuff. So there's a lot of, Dribble, as you've seen on LinkedIn. There's the selfies and stuff like that.
We don't do any posts like that, right? It's all extremely, either, we do two types of posts. So there was a lady, her name's Wes Kayo, and I hope I'm pronouncing your last name right. Oh, yeah. She was co founder of Maven. Yeah, yeah. Very, very sharp. She had these two principles that have basically guided our LinkedIn strategy from the beginning.
One, she says you give super specific how, so it's posts that break down how to do something at an incredibly specific level. And then the other one, she calls them spiky opinions. And this is like, kind of like the hot takes, but they're, they're more deeper where they are trying to get across your point of view.
And this is where you like live in the market, you're differentiated, take on things. And so we basically just do those two types of posts and the spiky opinion ones help differentiate us from other people who do this type of work and really help us explain to people how they're getting things wrong, right?
Like this is why your positioning is so bad, where your messaging is so bad. It's because of X, Y, and Z. And some of that stuff is very counterintuitive to what general marketing advice would tell you. So you've got that on one side. And then the super specific how posts are. So detailed and thorough that a really gung ho person could actually use them to apply the things that we're saying.
And the funnier part is, even funnier than that example, we actually have all of our LinkedIn posts in a giant Notion database. And it's basically categorized by different themes so people can sort through, because we realize the search functionality on LinkedIn is so bad. Yeah. And so, like, we, we, another principle that we've said is make our posts so helpful.
that people would pay for them. And we actually go all the way to say, they're in this Notion database, that is filterable, and we sell it for 50 bucks, and we sell probably, I would say, we're doing maybe 3k a month, just from selling them. And these are posts that are publicly available on LinkedIn, but having them in a format that you could search that you could use, so, it's the complete opposite strategy than keep everything hidden, it's just give it away, and the way It's something almost like karma, like what you put out will come back, but it's really like when you're that level of detailed and helpful.
And helpful, yeah. The algorithm will push you to so many people. It's, oh my God, Anthony, you're so entrepreneurial. I'm so impressed. I love that. And this is super, super interesting, right? Because what this also speaks to is, what's the actual, Added value that you're offering and actually what I'm taking away from what you just described there with this notion database that you've also productized and monetized is correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's actually the accessibility and the searchability is that's actually what you're charging for, right?
Because the posts are public, they're on LinkedIn, but you're leveraging a weakness of LinkedIn, which, by the way, I honestly feel like, Not a single day goes by where someone doesn't complain about some shitty like LinkedIn UX like it's like just last night I was chatting with someone about how insane is it that it's this big and it's literally the world's biggest number one B2B Professional networking site and there are so many things wrong with it.
But hey, you've leveraged that you've leveraged that weakness and you've just kind of productized that in a way and 50 bucks. And I guess it's such an accessible price point as well, that with this huge funnel, it amounts to how much you say two KA month. Yeah, it's a, I think I, I have to check, but it's around there.
Yeah. So it's, it's, wow. It's basically just, you know, and we, we pay a friend of mine, an admin, and he basically will scrape our posts at the end of the day and add them to the notion database, so we don't even touch it. It's just a continually updated thing. So how much do you pay the admin? Oh, it's pretty low. High margin again. And what's the route for people to, is that just pinned on you? I think I did see it actually, is it pinned on your LinkedIn profile?
Yeah, it is. Is it promoted in any other way or literally that's just. That's pretty much it. Sometimes people, the funniest thing is the reason we actually first made it was because two or three people had already started making their own version of this. So one guy, he took a Miro board and had collected hundreds of our posts and started organising them by our posts.
And he did a post about it and was like, I've pulled and then comment after comment, after comment was all these people saying, I've been looking for something like this. I've been trying to be able to get all their posts in one place. So that happened probably two or three different times from three different people.
And we're like, we might as well just make it. No reason that these other people should get the spoils of that, you know? I mean you talk about validation when you're starting out a business. There's nothing more validating than like someone else. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like creating it for you.
And you being like, well, I'm actually the author of this content. Yeah, yeah. So, and that was actually similar to why we started posting on, on Twitter. And this is a very recent development. We've mostly been all LinkedIn since day one. And we, we were following a guy and I'm blanking on his name now, but he had this whole thesis where in the first year of your business, you should have one product on one channel that is for one customer segment.
And you do that for one year. So it's those four things. And so we picked LinkedIn as our channel. Our product was this homepage messaging process where you'd rewrite your homepage for one segment of people. It was early stage B2B startups. And then we did that for one year. So our year mark was in May of this year, but we had, we had technically started as part of another agency and then spun off.
So being solo, we've been doing it since last May, but overall, it's been a little bit longer. And so we did that and then it was at that point where we said, all right, let's actually expand out and start doing some other things, maybe take some other experiments. And so one of the things that we did was we started posting on Twitter because We kept seeing people, I would log into Twitter, and it would be our diagrams that someone else had shared, a lot of times with no attribution, and they would have tens of thousands of views, and stuff, and I was like, come on, like, so, then we got on, and, it hasn't been as easy, because I think the format doesn't perfectly translate from Twitter to, or from LinkedIn to Twitter, but, you know, we've been trying to get our little slice of the pie over there.
Yeah. A capitalizing on that. That's amazing. Do you not like add a watermark or a logo or so so at least you get that? We do, but it's the watermark. You would have to go looking for it. Like to really figure out what it is. Yeah. And people just don't really pay that much attention. Yeah. They just say, oh, cool diagram, and they'll comment on the post that people are doing, I love this post.
Yeah. Without saying who, who is? Do you know what? I once shared a diagram of, I don't know if it was just like product market fit or something in a blog post with my last, I had a marketing agency before. And the actual like author, whatever, like reached out to me, I think he's an American as well and was like, by the way, that's not quite the right diagram to use, would you mind replacing it?
And it was like, and this was like, Not that big a deal, like it's a small blog, but it like he obviously was so kind of protective about it I was like actually this is the right one. Can you please use it? So I was like, okay But like I don't think like the ten people who are visiting my blog are really gonna like pay that much attention So you've totally got the right idea.
I am conscious that we dive straight into LinkedIn, which I love, and I'm sure loads of listeners will be super interested in learning all these tips and tricks and how they can apply it to their personal brand. Just curious, have you ever considered applying the success that you found on LinkedIn to your clients, like productising what you've been doing yourself to build the personal brand for the founders?
We really have. It's really funny. People don't really realise this, but we've We see it so much with founders once they've found their initial success, the big problem then becomes what's number two product or what's, what's the second thing we're going to do. And so we have this big audience. We have this service where it's primarily One and done projects.
We're not doing a subscription model. There's no upsell, right? We have the one offering we do and then a client will buy it move on and we obviously aren't capturing any more of the Value that potentially could be there. And so we've been thinking for a long time What is product number two and we we haven't found exactly what the right angle is Um, one of the things being, we could basically teach them how to do the LinkedIn stuff that we're doing.
We clearly have the, at this point, the credibility just looking at our audience. We can say, you know, Oh dear, wait. I had a problem. I can start over from that same spot. I was just like all the way over in the frame, so I was like, this is not going to be very usable. Oh no. Or very helpful. Let me just put it in this corner.
Proper DIY. Yeah, proper DIY. Say product number two, anyway. here, let me get a little bit like this. I think we're good. Still there. Yeah. Um, yeah, so, still trying to figure out what we think product number two should be. We've thought about the length and angle. Uh, it probably won't be what we do, because I think whatever we pick, we're trying to harness, All the different pieces.
So a lot of what we're thinking now of a second service or something would be capturing some of the value with the audience we've already built. And the LinkedIn thing is just maybe slightly too disconnected. Yeah. We would basically have to create demand for potentially a new segment in a new way versus just capturing more of the demand that's in the market with the people that are already coming to our door.
Because people will always ask us, can you help us design the whole website? Cause we'll help them rewrite the homepage and they'll say, well, do you do design? It's a natural evolution, right? Yeah, for sure. And so we've got a really good design partner that we refer to, but we've talked about, do we want to bring that more together that it's one service?
People always ask, will you help me write all the rest of the pages? Yeah. And at this point we just do homepages pretty, pretty much. Sometimes we'll do some other like use case pages or like landing pages for different pieces, but we're not a full service copywriting agency and then people will always ask, will you help me translate the messaging and positioning work to a sales deck?
It's great that it's on the website, but how do I actually say this on a sales call? Yeah, and we haven't taken that on either. So those are kind of the ones that we are toying with. That makes a lot of sense. Do we try to solve the whole website problem or is it more of like we solve the positioning and messaging problem?
Yeah. And then it's we help you actualize it in these different places. That totally makes sense. Like those are the like I guess add on services and actually evolution. Like they do sit very Adjacent to what you're already doing. And I guess the LinkedIn success is very much like your marketing channel.
Yeah. It's what's built up your funnel. So I get that that would also kind of muddy the waters a little bit. Um, just before we move on, there was something else I was just gonna ask you on LinkedIn as well. Oh crap. It's just left my mind. You're totally fine. Um, we can edit this one out. Oh yeah. Okay. . So this is so funny.
I thank God for editors. I love it. Just before we move on, I've got a load of other questions I want to ask you, but sticking with LinkedIn for a second, just while we're touching on the personal brand piece. What are your hot takes? You, Anthony, don't worry about Fletch or your views are your own, everything else.
What are your hot takes on like the future of personal branding? Because I feel like it exploded in recent years, but like are we at the top of that hype cycle or are we at kind of still those early days of it still going on that upwards trajectory for founders to build their personal brands? I would say I think that it's still has a lot of growth left.
Primarily because the markets are getting so saturated. There's essentially, if you think about B2B, right, we have a definitive number of departments that you could sell into, right? You could create product for sales, for marketing, for customer success. There's kind of like a baseline of here's all the different departments that you could build a product for.
And then there's all these workflows that all these companies are doing. And then there are. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of startups that are effectively trying to make every single part of those workflows more efficient. So there's only so many things that people are doing in business that could create an opportunity for a great new startup to come out.
And so a lot of times now what we're seeing is the companies that really do well in the early days are the ones that find a point of view that just makes them stand out. Because when they're evaluating different solutions. They want to say, well I could go with these people, they think and do things this way, or I could go with these people and they think and do things this way.
And one of those maybe resonates with me more. It's less of like a, well, X product has these features, Y product has these other features, and I want those, not those. And way more along the lines of, do I philosophically align with how this company approaches building their products, or how they approach these problems.
And you see these, the rise of these opinionated software. Microsoft Where it's not just, Hey, this is a blank canvas. Although that's kind of the other end of the spectrum when their software is, Hey, this is a blank canvas. You can use it however you want. And so to me, using this personal brand for founders is sort of a way to get people on board to how you think about the problem you're in philosophically and how it should be solved.
And that creates. Huge opportunity for you to sit in a unique spot in the market even if you have a relatively undifferentiated product Yeah, a great example of this is the guy Jason Freed who founded 37 signals it's like the parent brand of companies like Basecamp and Campfire and he's built up this really big audience and he has an Extremely dialed in point of view about how you should do work how project management should be done How product management should be done?
And so when he builds products, his fans and loyal followers will usually glom on to them. They'll say, I want to get this product that he's releasing because I believe in what he believes in. And so he's carved out this unique space. And so I think founders, especially, it's one of the biggest things they can do is to basically find a spot in the market that they can live, uh, that will keep them differentiated.
And then the craziest thing is how much of an unlock having that organic distribution is that you couldn't even pay to get that many eyeballs. Even if you were super well funded, running ads and things like that, having it be a hundred percent organic, people see you in their feeds, they trust you as a person.
They're just so much more likely to buy whatever it is you're selling. And on the flip side, are there any dangers to that? I mean, so it's funny, cause me and my business partner, Rob, we talk about this every day. We're like, well, Is there an exit strategy for our, our consultancy? Could we ever sell this?
And as of today, the answer is probably no, because it's so tightly wound. To our personal brand, our POV, our distribution. And so that's the flip side of it is that if it really comes down to the person's personality or brand or POV, it's way harder to remove yourself. And it would take a lot of effort to make it so that Fletch becomes its own entity that people still want to work with outside of us.
And it could be done, it's just very difficult. Preaching to the choir, Anthony. Been there, done that. Definitely, I totally, totally resonate. On the whole, you know, the biggest risk to personal brand is being too vanilla. Like, having your point of view, being distinctive. I can imagine some of the hesitations, perhaps, from some of our listeners is.
Like fear holds people back from so many things, right? Like fear, especially online posts. I feel like every day as well There's someone who's like, oh like I love your content. There's so many lurkers, right? Like on any social media channels, Instagram, LinkedIn There are so many people who are there lurking on the sidelines who are watching maybe like tapping the like button if they feel brave or whatever and I You know, some it's of either a fear of rejection, fear of judgment, fear of perfectionism, fear of not even really knowing like what they're afraid of, but what would you, what would you say to maybe some of the some of those fear?
I mean, there could be more rational fears, I think, for some as well, which is, I guess, again, the dangers of personal brand, which is, you have to stand for something or you'll fall for everything, right? And so when I first started getting like my first trolls or people who disagreed with me, I was like, that's fantastic news.
I genuinely because it's like I'm obviously getting some attention. I am being clear enough with my stance that you don't agree with it. And I think that's great. I think that it's great that we have disagreement. What I don't think is great is cancel culture and not being able to talk about this stuff, which is a whole other thing.
But what could you say? What can you speak to around like the fears of it still feels horrible to get a troll or get someone be like, and especially for your clients, maybe the more like B2B startups, I can imagine a lot of them being like, No, but we want sales. We want new client. We don't want to piss anyone off.
So yeah, what's your kind of hot take on that kind of the price, the price of standing out from the crowd versus not pleasing everyone? Yeah, it's, it's, it is a trade off, right? Yeah. And the way we've sort of mitigated it is There was probably a two month period where I was really leaning into just the posts that you would call those like spiky opinions.
And people started commenting, you've become so negative lately, you're, you know, and I would get some pretty intense. Criticism for people
So then after that, I mean I did revisit I was like, you know I probably have been doing way too many on one side. And so I shifted the pendulum back in the other direction where I was basically saying I'm just gonna put out as many Helpful pieces of content that I possibly can and then I'll do maybe, you know, every ten posts Maybe one or two of them would be like a more intense POV or something along those lines So that can help mitigate that but the other thing is keep things in perspective We're talking about people giving you criticism on LinkedIn, which is so different.
I have a friend who is huge on YouTube, like hundreds of thousands of followers. The hate that he gets on YouTube comments, which is fully anonymous, a non professional platform, right? It's not for professionals. It's just anyone. He gets death threats. He gets, you know, all sorts of personal attacks against him, like as a human, his family, all these terrible things.
And it just, it helps put it in perspective, like, Oh yeah, when someone comments on a marketing hot take and they're like, I think this is wrong. That's way different than people saying some of the crazy stuff that they say to him. And so give me a perspective that way. And then it is really like you look at some of the most.
Successful people in the world. They are extremely disliked by a huge Exactly. Portion of the population. Yeah. Like Elon Musk. Yeah. Um, Gary Vee. Gary Vee. Like proper Marmite. Donald Trump. Yeah. You could even say, right? Disgusting. How dare you mention his name on my show, Anthony. Exactly, right? And, uh, no, no, uh, promotion of him, you know, or support of him.
But you just have to look at these people. And it just comes with the territory. Yeah, exactly. When you're building a big following, you're going to naturally create enemies. That is easier said than done. Maybe I, maybe I just don't have a thick enough skin. Maybe I'm too emotional. Like when you, I think especially when it's, it's unexpected.
It's so impersonal. You see a notification pop up and you see something that hurts. Like it's, it's like road rage, right? Like it's, you're, you're not behind the steering wheel in another car, you're behind a screen on another, on another device, right? So you don't have that same in person connection. You don't really realize the power of your words.
So, you know, that's on the troll side of things. Is there any more that you could say to help encourage people to like get over that fear because it is worth it to like maybe piss off one or two people in pursuit of their dreams? bigger success. Yeah. I mean, I think it comes down to if you actually believe the things that you're saying will be better for the end person you're trying to reach.
Like the advice that we give, we truly believe will help founders succeed. Makes it easier to stand by, doesn't it? Yeah. And so it's like when I, when we're calling out things that these companies do, and a big frequent one is very large companies will hire extremely expensive boutique brand agencies. And a lot of times the brand agencies will come in.
And all they're trying to do is how can I get these 10 executives to be happy that we got this brand engagement. And so they'll find these very watered down ways to talk about the company, these cool taglines that sound great, but don't really mean anything. And then all the executives, it's like kind of lowest common denominator, like, this is fine.
I don't love it, but I don't hate it. And so they put it everywhere and the CMO who brought them in gets a nice pat on the back and then moves on to some other company, you know. But the problem is, then you have all these early stage companies who are looking to the big companies to figure out what they should do.
And so they say, well I should emulate the large companies. And they start doing these really weird, confusing statements that obscure what they actually do. And they don't have any brand credibility at all. So people are like, I don't even know what this company does. And so when we call these things out, Yeah.
So on one level, we're like, if you just say what your product does, that's going to help people want to buy it. If they don't know what you are selling, you're not going to be able to get that many customers. And so we get a lot of people, especially on the brand side who are like, Hey, you're trashing our whole business.
And it's like, your business is great. I don't think it's great for this segment of people. And they're looking to you to set the tone and all those things. And so you're naturally going to run into these rough spots, these friction points where it's like, Your view is gonna potentially anger other groups, but at some level if you really think that this is gonna be helpful for the group You're trying to help like it becomes worth the trade off.
I totally get it I love that advice Anthony and I love also that you use that particular example because that's exactly what I was just gonna come on to Which is I guess so moving more on to you know, the work that you do for your clients the day job Startup founders listening to this show as well.
Like, please take heed. Everything that Anthony saying is spot on. Like, I'm working with clients as well at the moment that are like trying to, especially with their home page with their website or their messaging and copy. Like they're trying to appeal to too many audiences. A quote that I say all the time that I love is you try and speak to everyone.
You talk to no one, right? And I love what you just said there as well, which is like the lowest common denominator, You're making 10 people like you as opposed to one person love you. So I can imagine is that quite a common problem that you kind of come up against on the client side of things where they're trying to speak to too many audiences and it's just diluting the message.
Yeah, definitely. And it's funny because nothing we're saying is very revolutionary. Like private equity firms, this has been the playbook for Decades, they come into a company, they buy up a big portion of the company. They say, all right, what 20 percent of your customers drive the bulk of your revenue.
And there always is like a, these 20 do 80 percent of the revenue and the private equity firm will basically say, all right, we're going to take these four other segments that are bogging down your company, making you inefficient, not really bringing much money. We're going to cut them off and we're gonna put all of our energy into the 20%.
That really is the biggest, you know, leverage point. And then the company will, you know, Get way, way bigger. And then the private equity firm will sell them with someone else at a huge markup. And so we're effectively saying the same thing. We're like, listen, you might be at, let's say it's an early stage company.
You might be doing a million in revenue, maybe 2 million. And if you're getting it from all these different segments and you have a small go to market team, this is not going to scale and you're going to get pulled in all these different directions. These five segments are all going to want very different things from you.
They're going to want different features. They're going to want different capabilities and you don't have a big enough team to A, change the product to make them all love you and B, have a big enough marketing team or sales team to actually get the word out to all these segments. And so a lot of times it's just saying, who's most important.
And prioritising focus on them. And a lot of times this really goes against the internal thing that the founder has been wrestling with, which is I raised money on a story of how I'm going to dominate these five industries or these 10 industries. I'm gonna change the world. You're telling me that I should focus on one of them and not go after all five.
And we're like, listen, it's just putting them in order. It's sequencing and saying, I want to go after this segment. That really loves us. Get to five, get to 10 million. And then when you're there, you can start hiring and expanding and launching new products for these other groups. And then. And that's like the story of almost all these really, really successful companies.
They always started very narrow and then as they found success, they broadened out and like a super extreme example of Spotify, right? Spotify, I think only did music for maybe 10 years and then IPO as just music. Then once they were the market leaders in music, they said, let's add podcasts. They do podcasts for the next X amount of years.
I don't know offhand. They now are the market leader in podcasts. So then I say, great, now let's add audio books. So they recently added audio books. The jury's still out. Are they going to be able to own that market? But they basically expanded from a point of strength. And most of these startups that are so small, they're looking at the examples of these giant companies that are dominating all these markets that's saying, why can't I go after all of them at once?
And it's like, cause you have Susie in marketing and it's one person, you know, she's going to launch a marketing campaign for, Retail companies on Monday and fintech companies on Tuesday and logistics companies on Wednesdays and then oh, so you've got these three SDRs Awesome, and they're all straight out of high school They're expected to be subject matter experts on financial services and logistics and all these it's just not realistic And so a lot of times it's walking out those types of things where founders are like, oh, yeah I probably can't go after all of these at once.
I can't act like I'm a billion dollar company when I'm actually only making a million dollars a year. Yeah, I'm totally with you, Anthony. And it is, you're so right. Every single word that you say, like as much as these are best practices, this is obvious, you're saying this playbook has been around for decades.
I personally, like me, I know, I'm from the other side of the pond and I know so many. Startups, early stage entrepreneurs that have got they've got these ambitions and I think it is maybe it's par for the course when you're dealing with those earlier stage startups where they're still founder led those types of people like they went out and started a business and secured all that capital because they are those visionaries because they were like we are going to dominate these five industries and then you've just got to hope that like they've got enough of a head on their shoulders to So then defer to the subject matter experts in their various domains to be like, yeah, that's great.
I'm with you. I see your big picture. But for now, while you still have Susie in marketing and while you have these targets, like we're going to have to focus our energy. It is, it is insane though. I come up against it all the time, all the time. So common. The funny thing too is like, take someone like Jeff Bezos.
We could argue he's probably one of the most visionary people of all time. When he launched, There's recordings of him like in the 90s and he's like, I'm going to sell everything. Everything will be for sale on Amazon. And he would tell that to investors and he used that to raise money. And then he launched a bookstore and he only expanded once he was the market leader in books.
And so there was a time we all forget. There was a time when everyone said, Will this scrappy upstart Amazon be able to compete with big scary Barnes and Noble, which now is so funny in retrospect, right? Like Barnes and Noble is basically nobody and they're about to be out of business and maybe they're doing okay.
I shouldn't say that, but at that point you have vision, incredible foresight to the future, but you also have patience. Head in the clouds, feet on the ground. Exactly. And he's saying, I'm going to make, make sure that this model works with something that's really easy to do. And once it does, then I will start expanding.
And it was a while. I want to say it was many years before Amazon starts becoming more than an online bookstore. But it was there since the beginning. Do you get involved in advising the founders on which to prioritise and what might make the best starting point? Because that's another risk as well, right?
That's another roll of the dice. It's like, well, Jeff Bezos didn't have that crystal ball to say, we're going to dominate book sales first. We're going to do music. We're just going to, you know, that takes guts as well to put all your eggs in one basket and just be like, cause it only takes some sort of global, like, crisis or crash or something to ruin that whole thing.
So do you ever kind of help advise founders on that side of things? Yeah, there's a book that big marketers love. It's called Crossing the Chasm. And it's this author, Jeffrey Moore. And one of the quotes he has in the book that has stuck with me that we sometimes will bring up is the decision of who you're going to target is a high risk, low data decision.
And you just kind of have to be okay with the, that's the reality of it. If we could sit down and say definitively, here's who you should target and it's going to work. We'd all be doing it. Yeah. You would be a, you'd be a billionaire, if not a trillionaire at that point, because you would have solved innovation, right?
The point is the decision is around not which one is right. It's. Am I going to actually make a decision and commit to it and commit to it? And we say it's much better to pick someone Figure out it's wrong and then pivot then to pick 10 people and try and half ass all of them half ass All of them and not really make a product that any of them are excited about and then be able to not be able to Say I don't really know why it's working It's not working, right?
People are, these people over here don't really like us, but it's for different reasons. It just becomes this multivariate problem that is, it's unsolvable. And so we still love early 2000s lean startup mentality, which has fallen out of favor. There's like, we could talk about that, but people have moved away from lean startup.
We still are very much in the mind of, make the MVP for a specific group of people, test it, and if they don't want it, pivot. That's when you pivot. And you, it's very hard to pivot away from. 10 different things than it is from one. Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds super sensible. What's your hot take on entrepreneurial gut instinct?
Because going back to that quote, the high risk, low data decision making, there's something to be said for the amount of data points that we can process. In our gut, our gut instinct is a real thing, right? And I, it depends on the individual. Like, I think I'm a very intuitive person. So there's a lot where I'm like, this is data, it just doesn't live in a spreadsheet.
But it's pretty right most of the time. What's your kind of, what's your kind of take on that? Because I know that that could be a really slippery slope also into just like ego and I'm the founder and I'm the CEO and I know it's right and it's just my gut instinct. Let's go for it. My hot take on this, this is a very hot take.
Yeah, I love it. I actually think. All decisions in the world of business are God's decisions. Love that. Because I think that I'm happy to hear that. Yeah, people will find data to support anything. Yeah, I say that as well, Anthony. We're on the same page. Yeah, well, like there's people who talk about this.
There's a guy, um, and now I'm blanking on his name. Oh, um, Adam Robinson is his name. So he has this company, called retention, uh, dot com or dot IO. I can't remember exactly, but he launched a new company and has been posting about it. And so he, he did this long post about it where he was like, I meet with CMOs and I, he spends a ton of time on personal brand stuff.
So he's out there posting on LinkedIn, writing these thought leadership, going on podcasts, stuff like that. And so he says his CMO friends will ask him, they'll go, how do you attribute How much this is helping right? Is this actually this podcast or that appearance at this speaking event? How do you attribute to say well that drove this amount of pipeline and stuff like that and he said they're baffled But I say I have no idea There's no way for me to really know and I think we'd love to imagine that we're in this giant lab With all the controlled data points and we can say definitively Well this drove X but is that's just not the world.
The world is so messy and so complicated so confusing You Like this podcast I'm on right now, will this drive business for the consultancy? Who knows? I probably will never be able to definitively say yes or no. I like doing these types of things, so I'm going to keep doing them. And I'm like, I think this is helping, but I won't really be able to know.
And so in the really big companies, I think a lot of times they look at. being able to figure these things out with data and then the small startups look at them and say I wish I had the Data of Google or whoever it's like we they're just you can't really know you make gut decisions that you think you're looking at the data But you're making an interpretation of the data that's there and there's just too many different factors to be able to definitively say Well, this is why this work This is why it's not like that's a key strategy element is being able to cut through the clutter and Put guardrails and basically say, I think this is the factor that we should be identifying, but no one really knows.
Yeah, for sure. I'm totally with you on that as well. And I think there's also, you're just making, you're making my cogs turn here as well. I think there's also potentially a danger of spending too much time, energy and effort, reverse engineering what others are doing. And you've mentioned a few times, you have startups looking at the bigger guys and that's hilarious, right?
They've got the big budgets. They've got the established brands. So like we don't have either of those two things. So what can we learn just by looking at them and observing? Of course, apples and oranges, it's not comparable. There's going to be so many different factors in the equation. There are different types of companies as well anyway.
But even on an individual level, right? Even looking at, you know, like, your open source philosophy, right? You're putting all the stuff out there. Someone could come and look at your LinkedIn. I can come and look at your LinkedIn and be like, well, fuck me, I want 50 K followers and like, we'll try and reverse engineer, try and unpack what it is that you're doing.
But even if I were to clone that, I'm not going to have that same success because it's just a different kind of thing. So I think this is even more of a case for that gut instinct, at least to a degree, to be like, look, do you feel passionate about this? Do you stand by this? Is this something that's authentically coming out of you?
Post without that fear, like get over those blockers. And, and then you've just got those best practices to follow, which is just like, don't water it down. Don't try and please everyone. Stay true to who you are, be consistent, you know, and, and then I, and then, you know, I think Lady Luck enters the equation as well.
Right. And I think that's the other problem where it's like, Well, we can't reverse engineer luck either, but it's, it's still there. It still exists. There are, and I think this is another truth that a lot of people don't want to hear, which is there are external forces at play that are outside of our control.
As much as we want to try and be control freaks, as much as we want to try and, you know, fulfill on our promises to our VCs, good things and bad things are going to come our way. So it's just like how you deal with them. I think it was maybe the, one of the guys from Y Combinator, if I hope that's who it was, but one of them was talking about.
At the beginning of the pandemic, all these different startups sprung out that were doing video startups, right? Like video calling and stuff like that. And the guy was basically saying, the best time to start a video startup to capitalize on the campaign, or I mean, on the, uh, on the, uh, why am I blanking on the word?
On COVID, right? Like to capitalize on the pandemic. We've all pushed that out of our minds now, Anthony. Yeah, so like, uh, you know, he was like, the best time to capitalize. On Covid and, and the Pandemic as a video chat startup was five years Yeah. Before the pandemic happened. Yeah. Yeah. And Zoom had been doing video chat stuff way before it was cool and in vogue.
Right. So they got to capitalize on Right, right, right. And how, how do you, how do you factor? That's factor for, that's a perfect example. Who knows what's gonna happen. Yeah. Different forces are gonna, are gonna change. Yeah. How things work and what doesn't work and all that stuff. Yeah. And so I think it's like the posture you wanna be in is looking for opportunities.
Like, I think there was some interview with Steve Jobs. where they, they were talking about other people's strategies and they were saying other people would approach strategy. Well, we're going to go after this market. We're going to do X, Y, and Z. And then they would ask Steve and they would say, well, what's your strategy?
And he's like, I'm just waiting for the next opportunity. I'm looking for the next thing that I can jump onto. And so more thinking about making these decisions as in where is their pole in the market, where is something happening? And I'm going to jump onto it versus like, I'm going to go into a dark hole.
conceive of my entire solution, create the whole thing, and then say, how do I turn on marketing for this? How do I get people to like it versus proactively just looking for opportunities. And that's a big reason we haven't started the second part of the business because nothing has fully jumped out of like, this is going to be it, right?
This is our, our next, our next thing we're going to go after. We built the company primarily using signals from the market and homepages was not some. Um, In a lab figuring out this, what people want. It was in response to the stuff we were posting on LinkedIn, people started asking us, can you help me rewrite my homepage?
And so we thought there's an opportunity and there's a way to productize this. And we could, and so we only discovered positioning specifically around homepages, all that stuff through spending time with the market. And it was not some amazing, brilliant insight that was in a corner. It was. talking to people every single day and finding, Oh, there's an opportunity that we could capitalize.
I love that, Anthony. Another, another truth, another like eternal, you know, bit of good advice that again, it like, it sounds so simple. It's just best practice, but so few people do it. So, so many are just like, I've got this great idea. I love it. My mom loves it. You know, I mentioned the start of the whole mom test thing.
I'm going to put it out there. And as long as I, I think I've been a victim of this quite a lot as well, actually, because I've got such a hustle. I'm just like, cool, whatever it is, I'll just hustle around it and like, find the market and create the demand as opposed to being out there actively speaking to people and building something around.
an actual customer request. People are actually asking you for it. So yeah, I love that, Anthony. All right. A couple of quick things before we start wrapping up, because this shoe box is, uh, I'm very thankful that we're a few years out from COVID. Yeah, for sure. This is not COVID friendly whatsoever. Social distancing.
The amount of situations I'm in where it's like, wow, we forgot about face masks and two meter distances a long time ago. Um, no, but anyway, I wanted to just touch on the point of Specificity. So I know we've kind of circled around that a little bit as well, talking about, you know, diluting a message and the risks of trying to appeal to too many people.
With you in particular, it says on your LinkedIn profile, right, it's like you help specifically B2B early stage B2B founders with the homemade messaging. Yeah. I guess like what, can you speak a little bit more to again, kind of the, the risks around like. Going to generalize, going too broad.
And again, that kind of the, the power of going super specific on something. Cause again, I feel like it's something that's so counterintuitive to like, just go, just honing it in like so much on that one particular thing. So I'd love to just hear more on your thoughts on that. Yeah. A friend of ours, his name's Pep, Pep Lea.
He's the founder of a company called Winter. And he talks about this concept of mental availability. And it's the moment where I have a problem. And you say, who does X? And whoever pops up in that moment is going to win the business. It doesn't matter if they're the best, doesn't matter if they're the cheapest, whatever, it's going to be just, who do they think of?
And so there are certain concepts. that people say that to. They say, who does X? And then there's certain concepts that people do not say that to. And it comes down to like in the day when people sit at their desk and they're working on something and they're getting frustrated or they need help about something, what are they actually thinking in that moment?
And so what we found at least with service providers, and I think this is true with products though also is that people don't sit down and say, all right, I'm going to work on growth. Right. I'm going to work on business building. I'm going to work on increasing revenue, right? All these outcomes. And yet you would think that that was what everyone was saying, based on the fact that tons and tons of startups and software providers, service providers say.
We grow your revenue. Grow your company. And it's like, okay, save you time. Exactly. We save you time where it's like, actually, people say, I'm looking for something that can do X or a service provider who can help me do Y. And the more specific you've positioned, the more likely you're going to win that battle.
Yeah, exactly. So it's a dance of finding something that is specific, but is big enough and universal enough that many, many people. We'll want that specific thing. Yeah. So for us, we could have said we do positioning and that's it, but there's very few people who sit down and say, all right, I'm going to work on positioning.
Normally it gets brought up as an ancillary thing of, Hey, Q1 goal is to relaunch the website. We're going to go through a brand refresh. We need to rewrite it. And they start getting stuck and they go. Do you know anyone who helps with homepages or helps with, and then when they remember us, because we pop up mental availability, because we say, we'll help you rewrite your homepage.
And they say, Oh, those Fletch guys, they do homepages. And then they talk to us. And then we're more likely to win that business versus if we were like, we are product marketing consultants who help with strategy, right? Like people are just not sitting down thinking of, I need someone to help me with strategy.
I love that. I love that. And there's a, there's a cascading thing too, where it's like, Like leadership, a lot of times like people will try to reverse engineer how to make their sale because they're thinking, well, who, who, who was the last person I had to talk to in the last deal to get this closed? And they'll meet with a senior leader, like a CFO or a CRO or someone.
And that person will ask like, are you going to drive this business? Is this software going to drive this business outcome? But if you trace the steps of how it got there, usually what happens is. You know, in, in the beginning of the quarter, you're doing your, your QBR or your, your planning or whatever.
And you're basically saying, all right, here's our goals. We want to increase new customers by X. And then they start ideating, well, what would be the best way to do that? And they'll evaluate all these different things. Well, we could hire more people. We could maybe launch a new marketing campaign. And so they're already filtering down into different solution sets at this point.
And then eventually they say, okay, we think we need. better attribution. We think that the big problem is we don't know how to add, you know, attribute our, our pipeline to the right thing. If we could get better attribution, then we would be able to really, you know, make this work. And they say, all right, well, what, how do we want to do that?
Do we have anything in house? They're like, no, we actually, maybe we need to buy dedicated attribution software. And then they start, they would, this leader would probably task one of their directors or managers, go look around at the attribution software. And at this point, the attribution software companies, there are many of them.
They have two choices. One, they can say, here's why we're the best attribution software. Why you should pick us over the other people in your consideration set, right? The other ones, they do it this way, but that's going to cause those problems. We have a really specific take on how we approach attribution.
Which makes the end buyer now, who, who, the person looking, who's probably a manager or director, Ooh, this is really interesting. I was evaluating these three. And then, you know, this one looks really interesting because they have this interesting point of view. But what most startups do is they go, our attribution software is going to help you boost revenue.
Yeah. And so they went five steps back. Yeah. I was not our guy or gal. Who's not even in the conversation, not looking. And they're like, we're going to boost your business outcomes. And it's like, I know, I already know that I wanted this. That's why I'm looking for this software. So you're just telling me, you know, now I'm actually trying to figure out which one I should get.
And so there's this mismatch that happens when people message to the wrong group. And so the level of specificity that you can get knowing who is really going to be the champion of this deal, what level of awareness do they have around this problem? Do I need to educate them? Are they comparing me against other vendors?
Are they comparing me against other activities altogether? Getting into the head of it that allows your message to be so much more targeted, so much more specific. And then you, you get thought of and you win the deals. Yeah. You'll be more likely to actually be the vendor that they go with. Oh my god, Anthony, mic drop.
Absolutely love that. Spot on, spot on the money. There's a few things, one key word that comes up to mind here as well while I'm listening to you is infantilizing. Yeah. I think there's a lot of infantilizing that's happening, right? Where it is, yeah, not treating your audience as the adults that they are.
Yeah, yeah. Trained, well you'd hope most of the time, like, trained, experienced professionals. And as you say, been through this series internally of meetings and discussions. To then be told the wrong business outcome to the wrong person who doesn't give a crap about that. Um, and what was the other thing I was just thinking as I was listening to you as well there?
Um, Again, it's just these business basics. It's just these like best practices that gets so that gets so often overlooked. Um, there was something else I was going to say while I was listening to you there. That's so annoying. I was just there was so many things that came up while I was listening. It was a long rant.
No, no, it's good. It's good. But you see it all the time. It is like save time, boost your revenue. And it's like, are you really going to choose? Like if I'm shopping for a CRM, I know what a CRM does. I know why I need one. You don't need to be like, Hey, did you know what the CRM it can help you keep track of your pipeline?
Like I know what the product does, right? Like why are you, why should I pick you over the other ones? And so there's these different levels, right? And when there's new emerging categories that people don't know how to categorize, sometimes you do need to So basically say, Hey, you know, you should actually consider us for this business outcome that maybe you, you weren't thinking like, like there's a guy, um, he has a company called comms or he's very much in a very early stage emerging category.
And what he's doing is he's selling to sales teams and he's trying to get sales teams to reduce the amount of time they spend cold calling, cold emailing, and basically saying his software has a way to turn on a warm intros at scale. And so when you look at the activities of a modern day sales team, Very little time is spent on a day to day basis with BDRs, SDRs, AEs on How many warm intros are you driving because people like that's not really possible I you know, I I know a couple of people but that's not something scalable So the founder of this company is beating the drum every day of basically saying if you want to get more meetings Don't look at these activities like cold calling and cold email You should actually consider getting warm intros at scale and that that's a new concept and to win over that audience You He has to convince them that those activities are worth doing.
And if they say, okay, fine, you've convinced me. How could I do that at scale? Now he's got them in the palm of his hand. He can basically say, well, I've actually created this platform that allows you to do it. And, and it's pulled them in. Right. So when he's in this new emerging category, he has to do way more education.
I'll give you one more example. Gong in the early days of Gong, what they do is they. Sales teams use them to record all the sales calls, and then they can find insights of what openers work the best, right? Like, is there a percentage of how much you talk about X that makes it more likely to close? All these insights from the calls.
In the early days, Gong wasn't able to just go out and say, Hey, we're the best way to record your sales calls. Because nobody was recording sales calls. And they're like, Oh, that's like big brother. I don't want to have people recording my, the reps are going to be so they're not a little recorder in there.
Like, no way. Am I going to get people to do that? So Gong had to convince people first that recording sales calls was a worthwhile activity. And they're like, you know, you can actually get these way better outcomes that weren't possible with these other activities. You should start thinking about recording your sales calls if they win that battle.
Then now they're, they're primed to become the market leader of this new sales call recording thing. Cause they did all the work to capitalize on it. But even there, there's even some risks that of like doing the, the demand, uh, creation, the education. There is still big risks that you could be the one who does all the education.
And then the big company comes along and says, Oh, well they got everyone to want this. We'll just add it into our suite. And then, you know, so there, there is a trade off being really early in these emerging markets. It has its upsides, but also has its downsides where someone, a big player like Apple does this.
This is the whole Apple strategy. Let the little guys innovate, create all things, whatever works the best. We'll just add it to the ecosystem and put them out of business. Well, right now where we're sat, you know, Apple intelligence was announced not that long ago. I mean, this podcast is probably coming out a bit later anyway, but like, Yeah, like they're a huge tech company and yet they start, they sat back and we're like, okay, we're gonna let you guys like have a play around, you know, the second, the second move or advantage essentially, right?
Um, just to summarize, you know, some of those key points here for our listeners, there is context is key as well. If you're by, especially, you know, in the context of a B to B buyer space, which is, you know, the world in which you operate. If they've already had quite a few discussions, few meetings, they know what they're looking for.
They're in depth. They're in that stage of the buying cycle. You need to be the first to come to mind for that specific problem. I love also what you're saying about, you know, no one, wakes up and gets out of bed in the morning and thinks, I need business growth. I need business growth today. It's like from 1 p.
m. to 2 p. m. growing the business, you know, like it's just not how people operate. Don't infantilize your customer. If they're in that consideration phase of that buying cycle, right? Like they know what they're looking for. You need to you speak specifically to those pain points, have that personality to get your point across as well.
Whereas if you are in an emerging market doing something that's more innovative, disruptive than yes, you do need to do more of that education. You do need to build more of those poor factors. So having all of that context before you dive into writing your homepage copy is so do your auntie. I'm thinking of like a few specific startups that I know that could Definitely use your services that are just like, I don't know what this is.
Like I was just, I was just someone this morning as well. And I was like, it was at, do you know what? It was also for me to refer them to a potential client. And it's because I know them. I know them personally. I know the founder. I know the team. So I do have that deeper awareness, that deeper understanding of who they are.
And I, and I met, and I was like, Oh, you'd be a great match. But I wanted to send them a link to their website. And do you know what, Anthony? I was like, I can't send them. Definitely not the homepage. I definitely can't. Put, you know, XX, whatever the name is, dot com because I, I don't understand. I don't know what you do.
I don't know what you do, literally. So I had to go digging around and I had to try and find, thankfully they had something that spoke a little bit more. I was like, and they got, and, but even then I still had to augment that referral with They did this. They did not because I've got that information and all that friction is what so much friction.
Yeah, that's what prevents word of mouth. Exactly. A simple idea. Yeah. Spread word of mouth very quickly. Exactly. Complex, nuanced, multi prong thing. Yeah, it's just not going to get spread because people. And if it does get spread, you're going to have one person giving one very different version and a different person's version.
It's going to get very muddled. They'll be like, I thought you did this, or, you know, I heard that you, and it's like, well, we kind of do. And usually that's a sign of like a big position problem. And then they've lost interest and it's like, I don't even know. It's kind of the bar test, isn't it? It's like, how are people actually going to describe you when you're not in the room to someone at a bar?
In just like a sentence like, oh, yeah, these guys do that. And like, what are those key words that need to fit into that? Anthony, so many powers of wisdom. Thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Just before I ask you my last Traditional closing question. I know that you've been so generous already with lots of tips.
I've loved this chat with you. Is there anything else that you want to share with startup founders who are listening to the show? Any other like big mess, missteps to avoid or any other pearls of wisdom that we haven't already touched on before we wrap? I think one thing is just to remember that you should position and message relative to the stage of business you're in and Don't make the mistake of trying to position like you're a 50 million company if you're really doing 5 million.
I saw you post something about maturity. Is that your point? It's, it's very like, it's so common. And if you go back, the great resource, if people aren't familiar is the Wayback Machine. So the Wayback Machine lets you look at websites. From when they first were started, right? From way back. So take any of the companies that you're like, Oh, I love this multi product platform thing that doesn't, and go back to the beginning and where they were at the same level as you, and likely they will be much more specific, much more dialed in.
The, the great example we constantly get people saying, uh, there's a company called Rippling and they basically have all these different products. And so most people who come to us who have this positioning problem, they'll say, well, I want to do what Rippling does and they have all these different things.
And it's like, go back and watch their demo day at Y Combinator because they originally had one use case and it was, we'll help you with employee onboarding. When you hire an employee, you have to get them into all your systems. Rippling will help them get to the systems. And so that was the use case that they went to market with.
And over time, as they won that use case, they started adding these adjacent ones. And now they're this giant suite worth X billion amount of whatever, you know? And so position relative to where you are today, don't do like aspirational. I want to look like this hundred million dollar company. So I'm going to show all these different things.
Um, because the best way to get to that is to pretend that you're not that right. And work your way up to it, which is why there was some study recently. I saw that they were saying like bootstrapped companies, a lot of times are like more likely to actually make it to a hundred million in ARR than these venture backed ones.
Because They're thinking like someone who needs to grow a business through revenue. And they're like, I'm not going to overextend myself. Good old fashioned business. Not right. I'm sitting on this pile of VC money. And so it's like, even if you phrase venture, grow the business, like you're a smart business owner and use the money wisely.
Don't just. You know, say you could jump from one to, you know, a hundred overnight or whatever. Anthony, this is like a whole other like episode that we could definitely do. Like bootstrap businesses versus VC. It's definitely something I've been thinking about a lot as well. I'm definitely in that space.
I've seen both sides of the coin and I definitely, you know, I do just have to say, you know, without getting stuck into this whole other like juicy topic, but What I do have to say is I think there is such a case for those bootstrap businesses, like building on your point there, the whole VC back to you, you mentioned lean startup earlier.
I do fall in that camp of like, yeah, there are some great principles, but also that was published like 15 years ago now. And I'm kind of like, we are in a new era now. Like, and this is also part of the show. The whole like core philosophy of this show is I do firmly believe that we are in another era.
Things are getting a bit more sophisticated. We've come a long way since those early days in Silicon Valley in like the 2000s and the 2010s. And so part of that is, you know, what we're coming out of, especially more recent years, is all of the vanity around the VC backed tech business. And I do think, you know, back on LinkedIn, this episode is not sponsored by LinkedIn.
Clearly we've been slagging them off enough so they probably won't ever consider it. But, um, I think LinkedIn has driven a lot of that humble bragging. A lot of that Pictures of the teams. They've had all the overhiring. This is how big our team is. This is how many offices we've had. This is our neon side.
That one always makes me laugh. There was an earlier episode, um, shout out to Charlotte Morley of The Little Loop, who I actually launched this podcast with. So it's episode one. There's episode zero, which is like a few minutes just to get the context. But the one I launched it with, with Charlotte Morley, she had this whole thing on, I'm never going to let her forget this, how it's the neon signs that like, in particular, like rub her up the wrong way.
She's like, it's hilarious because also neon signs are like not that expensive or anything. But it feels like a big flex. It's the trope. It's the trope of the VC backed startup and these founders who are so obsessed with. schmoozing the investors. You've then got this whole power dynamic as well. So it's, it's really speaking to some of the worst parts of humanity, right?
It's speaking to like the ego, the pride, this chest puffing, the sifted tech crunch, like press coverage. Whereas, yeah, coming back to your point, you know, these, these bootstrapped revenue generating profitable businesses where you're also your own boss is the founder to, you know, it's like nine out of 10 people also go into business to be their own boss to have that freedom.
You don't have that if you have got investors breathing down your neck. So I think it's, there's just, there's that case to kind of, you know, celebrate the underdog a little bit with that too. Anthony, thank you so much for coming on this show. My traditional closing question is in line with the title of the show, Strategy and Tragedy.
One of the core beliefs is that not to be all doom and gloom, but often the best lessons can come from those biggest mistakes. So that's kind of the tragedy side of it. What's one big mistake in your own entrepreneurial journey that's taught you an unforgettable lesson? Yeah, I mean, so it's funny. Me and my business partner, Rob, who's co founder of Fletch.
The two of us started Fletch basically as the, you know, antithesis of what we had tried before. And so we were, we were part of an agency that was extremely broad and would service anyone in any way possible. And I actually came on as a entry level sales role. And so I had had a long career in a different industry, pivoted into tech way later in life, basically took a lower level job to get my foot in the door.
And so, So I came in and part of my job was figuring out who are we going to try to reach? Like who would we do outbound to and things like that. And so we didn't really have any of these core practices that we've been talking about in place. We were like, well, we can serve anyone, you know, that's going to be the beauty of it is there's so many people we could work with.
Our service is so malleable that we could be pretty much fit in any different way. And I spent basically nine months just banging my head against the wall. Trying to figure it out. And eventually it struck me and it was so obvious after doing it for so long. It's like, why did this take me nine months to figure out?
You listened to all these different influencers and people like, just try this and this, this. And it was, it came down to like, if you're going out and you finally get someone's attention and they say, okay, well, what are you selling? And you respond, well, what are your problems? It's like, you came to me, right?
Like you have to come with the hypothesis of here's what I think your problem is. And here's the thing that I'm selling. And just keeping it open ended, like doing, it can only ever grow through referrals and, and work like, you know, people recommending you and things like that, you can't actually market custom, right.
To go to market, especially as a service business, but really a software too, you can't just market like, here's, we solve problems, right. Even, even like the giant, like Deloitte and McKinsey and all those people. They have basically go to market plans for every problem area in existence. They have dedicated, uh, consultants for, you know, if you're in a large legacy logistics business and you're struggling with it, we've got 10 MBAs who have that specific area.
So there really isn't a way to go to market or to market custom anything like just we solve any solution you can have. It just doesn't work. And so, we spent so much time trying all these marketing stunts, outbound sales, to basically get repeatability, when in reality, repeatability requires things to not be custom.
Because custom means different every time. So, no, if it's, if it's custom, there's no repeatability. And so it took us, you know, probably two, two and a half years before we, we realized, okay, we need to come in both with a hypothesis of what market segment, and what do we think the product's actually going to be, or the service is actually going to be.
And so, you know, it, it looks like, wow, you guys blew up so fast on LinkedIn. And it's like, yeah, because there was years before that of like, just banging our heads against the wall, no success. Um, you know, it's a pretty dark periods of like, well, I'm never going to be able to get this thing off the ground.
You know, this was, I should have stayed in my previous industry. I shouldn't be like, this is going to be a failure. Um, and then learning those things in the trenches of the tragedies, right. And being able to say, okay. If we're going to ever build a business, we're going to do it the exact opposite way, right?
We're going to be hyper targeted. We're going to have one specific thing and the B the ability to market it. When you make those hard, like niching down decisions. I would never go back. I would, I would never go back to the old way. And, and, you know, you, you couldn't force me to start that type of company, no matter how much money you offer me or anything.
SM: Fantastic. Well, congratulations, Anthony. I'm glad that you managed to figure out the key to it, to unlock that. And again, I think it's super transferable, right? Whether you are an agency owner, you're more of a consulting kind of practice, or indeed the B2B founders who are listening to this as well. Golden Nuggets, Pearls of Wisdom from you, Antony. I feel like we've just like clicked immediately as well. So it's been so much fun to sit down with you.
Really hope you've enjoyed this episode. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. You know what to do and hopefully see you next time.
Strategy & Tragedy: CEO Stories with Steph Melodia is the best podcast for curious entrepreneurs and ambitious founders. Learn from those a few steps ahead of you in these candid interviews of the highs and lows of scaling and failing business.
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