One of the Goldilocks problems in B2B startups is defining who you are selling to. On one extreme is the entrepreneur that says "we sell to everyone." That could be every company, every role or both. The challenge is how do you build a great product for "everyone?" How do you market to "everyone?" How do you sell to "everyone?" When I hear the "everyone" TAM, the only way it gets worse is when it's followed by "actually, our target is the CEO." That's a tough Ideal Customer Profile. But the other end of the Goldilocks problem is making the target market too narrow, such that you get stuck. Eventually every company hits a TAM wall, but you want to push that off as much as possible. An ideal middle state which is easier said than done is to have a very specific ICP that naturally either grows or leads to other related ICPs. The TAM of everyone and the TAM of 1 are both problematic - finding the sweet spot in between is the art.
One thing that’s interesting in the AI Apps world these days - everyone competes with everyone. And for customers, it's confusing to figure out the right approach. For example, if you're trying to grow your pipeline, do you? * Buy an AI...
When you create a company culture, it carries forward not only into your startup but also into where your alumni go in the future. One more reason to be very intentional about it. You're putting something into the world. Make sure...
W.A.C.C.: WACC Ate Cloud Companies One way to think about the repricing of SaaS is to go back to the Discounted Cash Flow formula itself. While this is an oversimplification, we can think of 3 core elements: * Expected Cash Flows * Weight...
Me: "So who's your target persona?" Early Stage B2B Founder: "Pretty much anyone" Me: https://t.co/IynLc0uSru
Excellent advice from @arampell. One of the toughest and most important turns for a startup is to have a point of view around how your technology SHOULD be used.
Behind almost every bad customer experience with a big company or government is tech systems that aren't connected to each other. This is one of the biggest opportunities for AI agents to improve CX.