0:00
I think historically I've gotten really caught in this trap where at any moment in Reforge, it's like, "Ah, if I just solve this one thing that's X problem, everything's going to get easier."
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0:06
That might be landing some big hire, some executive hire, or figuring out some major lever or defining some strategy.
0:20
But the reality is that the opposite is true.
0:20
The more problems you solve, you just end up taking on bigger and bigger problems over time.
0:27
And hoping it gets easier is the thing that just sets you up for this frustration, this anxiety, this stress.
0:33
And I think switching to that mentality of getting rid of that hope and more of like, "Hmm, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder thing," I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress.
0:56
Today my guest is Brian Balfour.
0:56
Brian is the founder and CEO of Reforge, which is by far the best place in the world to get in-depth training on growth and product and related topics.
1:07
Previously, Brian was VP of Growth at HubSpot, co-founder of three other startups, and in my mind, Brian is the sensei of growth.
1:12
With Brian on the podcast, I wanted to do something special.
1:18
So instead of going into the typical stuff that he writes about and speaks about, we instead talked through 10 of the biggest and most interesting lessons Brian has learned from his career and from his life.
1:28
These come from a list that he keeps where he gathers lessons that he learns over time, which turns out is over a hundred; we only have time for 10.
1:38
There is so much gold in this episode, and I believe there is something for everyone.
1:42
I can't wait for you to listen to it and to hear what you think.
1:45
With that, I bring you Brian Balfour after a short word from our sponsors.
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4:20
Brian, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me.
4:34
So instead of going deep on the typical topics, you go into growth loops and frameworks and all that kind of stuff, what we're going to do is we're going to go through 10 of the most important, interesting, unique lessons that you've learned from your career, your work and your job.
4:49
And as we were aligning on these topics, I learned that you keep this Notion doc of lessons that you learn throughout your work.
4:55
Tell us about this Notion doc.
5:00
I think one of the things that I've learned over time for me, I don't know about you, is that I just don't tend to remember things unless I write them down. 100%.
5:07
And in enough effort to not repeat mistakes, I basically just started keeping this Notion doc that I call 'lessons learned.'
5:19
And some of these are from things that I've picked up from others, as we'll talk about; some are things that I've learned the hard way, like myself, they're kind of OG Brian lessons, and some of them from others.
5:31
But I've experienced all of them in some way, shape or form.
5:36
And what I do is I literally write down a one-liner of what the lesson is and then a few sentence description.
5:43
And then the way I use this is that whenever I'm thinking about a big maybe strategic question at Reforge or something else, I kind of return to this Notion doc, and usually it's like two or three lessons jump out to me as relevant to that specific situation and help either unblock me or guide me to a better answer or one of those pieces.
6:10
And so I started only doing this maybe, I'd call it a few years ago, and I think there's a hundred and some lessons in there at this point.
6:19
So we're going to only cover maybe 10-ish percent of them today, but I've found it very useful just as a mechanism to unblock or ignite some new thoughts when I'm getting stuck.
6:33
I love that we have 10 more episodes we can do after this to go through all of them. There you go.
6:41
It's also amazing that you do two things that people wish they did.
6:41
Like I imagine everybody wished they had a list of all their lessons.
6:45
It's like, "Oh, I should have been doing this."
6:49
And then you actually use them, which is also the thing most people don't do if they have a list like this.
6:53
So it's pretty incredible you actually find a way to operationalize it.
6:55
That's why you have to keep it light. That's what I learned.
6:55
Because when I've read books, I used to take a ton of notes and all of that kind of stuff, but that also just ...
7:01
It's not only creation friction, but it creates friction in actually using it as well.
7:05
Because then it's like I got to sift through all of these notes.
7:10
So now I'm just like, "Well, what is the one liner?
7:16
What is the essence of this thing?"
7:16
, whether it comes from a podcast or a book or a conversation I've had, those types of things.
7:23
And so that's what I've found, is it's quick to create, quick to return to, reducing friction.
7:27
Maybe that should be the number one growth lesson we should talk about, but yeah, that ends up being the key. Amazing.
7:35
Okay, well, let's just get into it.
7:38
What is lesson number one?
7:38
I think the first ones we're going to cover are more related to startups, founder life, company, which I've been [inaudible 00:07:47] the past seven years as founder and CEO of Reforge.
7:47
We'll cover some growth ones later.
7:52
But one of them that I have just felt so strongly with in my entire career and what a lot of Reforge was founded on, but I didn't find the words for until I was listening to something by Frank Slootman, is just inspect the work and not the person.
8:11
And what that really means is, and the way that Frank puts it, is I just think it's really hard to judge a person from a conversation, whether that's a hiring conversation, a performance conversation, or something else.
8:25
That just never resonated with me.
8:31
And what it's saying instead is actually trying to draw a conclusion just from a conversation is honestly kind of bullshit.
8:38
You just have all these biases involved.
8:38
And instead of trying to just inspect the person from the conversation, it's like, how do you go to the work?
8:44
How do you see what their output is, the things that they've either historically created or currently created?
8:53
Because that's, in the work environment, ultimately the thing that shows you what this person is capable of, how they approach the work, who they work with; all of these things that are a much more meaningful signal than asking, "Tell me about a tough situation you faced in your career," those types of things.
9:14
And so I've always applied this from day one of Reforge.
9:19
Even in our hiring combos, 80 to 90% of the decision is based on either some type of portfolio review or what we call a simulation.
9:28
A lot of people call them exercises.
9:34
And I get a lot of pushback from that internally from my team because it's a lot of work to come up with these things, it creates friction in the hiring pipeline, all of these types of things.
9:43
But every time I've made an exception on one of those things and said, "Okay, [inaudible 00:09:50] not do it", I have regretted it.
9:49
I have flat out regretted it.
9:53
And so I think this is one of those things.
9:53
When you're actually trying to make a decision ...
9:53
So much of our work is based around people; trying to judge a person or come to a decision just from a conversation on the surface almost always misleads you.
10:04
And instead, it's really just, how do you just go look at the work, the actual assets and things that they have helped create and bring to life in this world?
10:14
Because I think that tells you so much more about the person.
10:19
You touched on this is useful for hiring, but also performance, like how they're doing at the job, right?
10:24
There's always just like, "Here's what I've done", but you look at what they've done and it's like ... I don't know. Yeah. Well, because even ...
10:27
Especially as a company grows, there's all sorts of processes to put somebody up for a promotion and all that kind of stuff, and the way a lot of those processes are designed is the individual that's going up for promotion tries to tell a story about what they have accomplished and then the manager's going to advocate for them.
10:46
And I think in that process, there's just too many opportunities to either twist what actually happened or there's all sorts of biases that end up involving.
10:59
And so me as a potential decision maker on a yes or no on that decision, all I have to go off of, being multiple steps away from this person's work, is essentially these words that are being promoted.
11:11
And how can I actually make an accurate yes or no decision on that? I can't.
11:18
And it works in the reverse direction too.
11:18
People who are doing amazing work, but maybe not the best at advocating for themselves, or maybe have managers that aren't doing the best job at advocating for themselves, end up feeling disenfranchised and forgotten and just a lot of bad feelings emerge.
11:35
And that's how you lose essentially these really talented people.
11:40
So even in processes like that, it's like, how do you surface the person's work over the past time period so that the ultimate decision maker can look at that work, go straight to the source rather than relying on this game of telephone that's happening as well?
11:58
And so something that we've started to try to implement at Reforge, what we're doing it very slowly, is building in regular processes for people to record the work that they've accomplished internally, kind of keep a log of it, the things that they've helped create and ship, so that when it comes to those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part of that process.
12:19
So I think it works in a bunch of different avenues, but it just kind of comes back.
12:27
There's so much more you can glean from inspecting the actual creations of somebody than just a surface level conversation. Amazing.
12:39
Just one more question before we get to our next lesson; along that same line you just mentioned of just how to actually do this.
12:45
So you mentioned exercises in the interview.
12:45
I think the extreme of that is something Linear does, which I recently learned about, where they have a work trial where they work with the team for five days, one to five days.
12:53
You just mentioned keeping track of your wins.
12:53
Is there anything else you can share of just how you actually implement this sort of lesson?
13:03
Well, I think it's not even wins.
13:03
It's like a log of what you've helped ship and your role in that piece.
13:08
Because even if it's not a win, it's possible that you did some really amazing work, but there's all sorts of other possible circumstances for why it ended up not being a win.
13:20
And that's also what gets lost I think a lot in these processes, is that somebody could be doing really amazing work, but maybe it's not an obvious win from the metrics or some other perspective, however else it's being judged, and you never do that.
13:37
And so I think where we started with this, the question is, how do you make it super lightweight?
13:44
And I think internally what we've been trying and we've been trying to figure this out is it's not about writing a book about your work every couple of weeks, right?
13:53
It's grabbing a couple screenshots and writing down a few bullet points of how you participated in creating and shipping this piece.
14:04
I will also say that this also keeps the emphasis on things that have shipped to end customers, which is the ultimate goal of most functions.
14:10
You know, finance is a little bit different, like some of these internal functions, where their customers are the internal employees, versus I think ...
14:15
We even had a pattern of this in the past at Reforge is people put a lot of emphasis on creating the awesome internal document.
14:27
And it's like, "Look, you can create some awesome internal document, but if that's not translating to shipping something that's impacting the customer, that's a loss for the company."
14:39
And I think once again, a lot gets caught up in these processes, where the judgment gets placed in the wrong places.
14:45
And the last thing I'll ...
14:45
For a quick plug; Reforge has created this product called Artifacts, which is a place to both store and showcase the things you've actually created in your work.
14:56
You can think about it as a portfolio or GitHub for everybody. And that could be ...
15:01
Look, if you're a manager and creating performance review processes or career ladders or interview simulations, all these types of things, that is work that showcases what you're capable of as a leader or a manager.
15:14
Or you might be an individual PM and be involved in shipping a feature.
15:19
And so we've created that place to not only store and showcase that stuff, but for folks that are coming along and solving a similar problem after you, they can use those things as ingredients to potentially solve their problem in a slightly similar, but different way as well.
15:35
Similar to open source code.
15:35
On Artifacts, how do people find that?
15:39
You can just go to reforge. com and sign up.
15:39
It's right there on the homepage.
15:39
You could also just go to artifacts. reforge. com.
15:43
I have a bunch of mine posted up there, including the original doc I wrote for my hypothesis around Reforge seven years ago.
15:49
It's an interesting blast from the past around that to see what I got right, what I got wrong.
15:55
And some of the lessons we'll talk more about today. Awesome. Okay.
16:00
And we'll link to that in the show notes. Okay.
16:02
Lesson one: inspect the work, not the person. What is lesson two?
16:05
Lesson two: tell me what it takes to win, then tell me the costs.
16:10
And I couldn't remember quite where I picked this up, the language for this up.
16:13
It might be from Bezos, so some listener can probably credit for me.
16:17
But a problem that I've experienced, especially as my team at HubSpot grew or the team at Reforge has grown, is that as the team grows, a lot more of the initiatives and ideas obviously come bottoms up from the organization.
16:34
But oftentimes, by the time it would get to me, the person would've taken an approach or all of these filters would've gotten put in place.
16:42
They would be thinking, "Well, I don't want to propose something that's going to get denied", or, "This might sound a little bit too wild and I don't want to be interpreted that way", or, "Somebody else in the organization told me that this is going to be a lot of hard work." Right?
17:00
And so by the time it gets to the person that is either green lighting the project or funding the project or making that decision, it loses the ultimate thing that you need to achieve, which is, in startups, you basically just have to do whatever it takes to win.
17:18
And so the saying is, "Well, just tell me that first, and then even if the costs seem really high, now we can collaborate on, 'Well, what might be a way to approach this where the costs aren't so low?'"
17:32
But I don't want my team spending time on watered down things that aren't going to ultimately help us win.
17:41
That's just a waste of time and a waste of resources.
17:46
I would rather be having the conversation on, "Well, here's what I think it's going to take to win at this particular item.
17:53
Now we can be having the conversation of, 'Well, how do we actually go do that?'"
17:58
That's the conversation I want to be having.
18:01
But if I've got to be pushing the team of like, "Hey, this is too conservative," or, "This isn't going to be enough," or, "I don't know if it's going to be worth the resources," I don't want to be pushing the team.
18:10
I want the team pushing me, and then we can start to pare it back to figure out how to actually achieve this thing.
18:15
This touches on a lesson that comes up a lot on this podcast is this idea of working backwards from the ideal instead of working forwards and incrementally getting to something, and then it's just like, "Here's the perfect world.
18:24
What would it take to get there?"
18:28
Maybe we'll never get there, but it's a nice forcing function.
18:31
In my hundred or so lessons, I have a different version of [inaudible 00:18:35] that one is, which is define the ideal end state and then iterate towards it.
18:40
That ends up being a little bit tricky in teams to implement because people can very much attach themselves to that ideal end state.
18:45
But the thing is you have to revisit that ideal end state every so often and revise and update and iterate on that as well.
18:51
Because you identify, you define this thing, you iterate towards it, you learn some things, and you're like, "Hmm, that ideal end state isn't quite right," or, "I need to push the horizon out a little bit more, and so I need to update and redefine it."
19:08
So the key on those things is, how do you land that ideal end state to align the team to iterate towards it, but not in a way where folks are like, "Well, the pixels didn't end up like this," or, "We said we were going to build this exact feature, but you said X, but we're actually now doing Y."
19:28
And it's really hard to land that in-between of, "We're not going to do this exact set of things, and this is about directional alignment, but we want you to work towards making this thing a reality."
19:46
And then the second part is just finding the time to take the step back to reupdate that ideal end state.
19:52
I think that's the other component of that, that there's a lot of friction there and it's just hard to find that time in those types of things.
19:57
But I actually think that is a better version of yearly planning than what most people do with OKRs and stuff.
20:03
I think most people would be better served just working in product visuals, saying, "Ooh, how might we want the product or the user to experience the product a year from now?"
20:14
, and giving that to the team.
20:14
That is way more meaningful, I think, for folks, those visuals, than a nicely formatted set of OKRs. Wow. I love that. Do you work that way?
20:28
Do you try to work that way?
20:28
We started working this way about, I'd say four or five months ago.
20:31
We went through a few crazy years at Reforge where everything we were shipping was working and we were just trying to keep up with all of the growth.
20:41
And then of course when all the macro stuff hit a year or so ago, we were kind of in the bullseye of it, being in the L&D space, a lot of our customers in tech, all of these types of components.
20:53
And I think in that crazy period, we had taken multiple shots at different planning processes, and they were all disasters, to be frank. They were all disasters.
21:03
disasters, to be frank. They were all disasters. And we had so many smart people around the table who had gone through these processes before, but I think when you're in that incredibly fast-growing stage, or you're in the earliest stage where you're landing a bunch of new bets that are a bit
21:23
ambiguous and it's more like product marketing fit mode, kind of closer to that end of the spectrum, I think you're much better served by incredibly light planning processes where 80 to 90% of the assets produced are actual visuals of the experience. It doesn't have to be product visuals either. I've started forcing marketing teams to show me what
21:41
It doesn't have to be product visuals either.
21:41
I've started forcing marketing teams to show me what the potential marketing assets might be rather than giving me a Notion doc.
21:47
Or we do a bunch of stuff on the supply side of our network and I'm like, "Well, what is a customer facing asset?
21:58
How might they experience this?"
21:58
Because we're going to have a way more productive conversation over that type of asset than a bunch of words on a Notion doc.
22:09
And so we have started working like this in the past six months.
22:09
We found it way more effective.
22:14
Now how long that can last and how long that can scale: huge question mark, right?
22:19
All of these processes, OKRs, all these kinds of things, they've been created for a reason in scale.
22:24
But I think where we're at as a company, you know, 75 people, still landing a bunch of new product bets, trying to iterate ship quickly, keep the coordination costs down low, all those types of things, we're finding this method to be far more effective.
22:38
And it doesn't matter if it can't scale because you're going to change it anyway. Right?
22:41
The way I thought about planning always, it's just the best idea you have at the time, "Let's just do it this way." Yes.
22:48
In terms of org and strategy.
22:48
Like, "This is the best idea right now.
22:51
We're going to rethink it anyway in six months if things are going well; especially if they're not going well." Yeah.
22:57
And that's why you want to get it out as fast as possible. Right.
23:00
Whereas I think in a lot of planning processes, you get those things out really fast, and then 80% of the process is churning on the last little bits that ultimately don't matter in the end.
23:11
And I think that's the piece that feels just awful to the team, and it makes these things drag on for a really long time; it's also what gets people really attached to the plan and more upset when you ultimately do change things, like you were saying.
23:29
So I think that's why you need to find methods to just get those big chunks out incredibly quickly and then move on, right? Like, "Hey, move on.
23:41
Start shipping, start iterating towards that ideal end state."
23:41
Because that's going to help you update whatever that new ideal end state will be in the future.
23:50
There's all these bonus lessons that are coming up as we're going through these lessons, but just to close the loop on this lesson, it was 'tell me what it takes to win and then tell me the costs.' You've nailed it.
24:00
What is lesson number three? Ooh.
24:00
Lesson number three is one that I've learned the hard way, and I'm still trying to improve that myself.
24:07
And this one's very much for founders, which is just, 'problems never end, and that's okay.'
24:19
Here's what I've personally experienced, and I've talked to a lot of founders about this as well, where I think historically I've gotten really caught in this trap where at any moment in Reforge, it's like, "Ah, if I just solve this one thing that's X problem, everything's going to get easier."
24:38
That might be landing some big hire, some executive hire, figuring out some major lever or defining some strategy.
24:49
But the reality is that the opposite is true.
24:49
The more problems you solve, you just end up taking on bigger and bigger problems over time.
24:56
And hoping it gets easier is the thing that just sets you up for this frustration, this anxiety, this stress.
25:02
And I think switching to that mentality of getting rid of that hope and more of like, "Hmm, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder thing," I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress.
25:23
And so this was one that I've also felt for many, many years, but had a tough time finding the words for, and then Ray Dalio had this passage in one of his books that just hit the bullseye.
25:38
And so his passage, which we've actually worked into the cultural values at Reforge, is, "Every day there's going to be problems.
25:43
Some big, others small; sometimes in waves, sometimes slowly.
25:48
But they're never going to end.
25:48
The more successful we are, the bigger our problems will be, and how we react to those problems is up to us.
25:52
To achieve our goals, each individual must be a problem solving machine."
25:58
He calls it the 'problem solving machine.' .
26:01
I think there's some adaptations in there- He calls it the problem solving machine.
26:01
I think there's some adaptations in there, but I thought that captured it so well.
26:03
And when I find myself getting caught in this, oh, if we just solve this one thing, life will be so much easier.
26:14
I kind of return to this statement.
26:14
Not only to remind myself that that's not true.
26:14
But to try to switch my framing around of how to think about the problem.
26:20
But learning this, it's a grind.
26:26
It's a hard mentality switch for I think a lot of founders.
26:31
This reminds me a number of things.
26:31
One is just I heard someone describe basically any leadership job as your professional firefighter, you're just putting out fires all day. It is true. It is true.
26:41
Those are the things that bubble up.
26:41
The things that are going easy, the things that are going great do not bubble up.
26:48
And so as a result, yeah, you end up being like this catcher for all of the problems.
26:54
And I think that's why a lot of people end up in these management and leadership roles and then they just hate them.
27:00
They're not good at them.
27:06
And they're not good at them because they don't like it.
27:06
Both of those things end up being true.
27:12
And a lot of that has just been driven by our construct of how people think they have ...
27:12
what they have to do in order to progress in their careers is like the only way to progress in my career is through management.
27:23
And there's three components of that.
27:23
There's title, most people view that as a higher social capital thing.
27:29
Most people see that's the only way that I can get higher compensation as part of that.
27:35
As well as getting more compelling roles in my career.
27:42
So this is also something that we've recently changed in the past six months at Reforge.
27:47
Which is through a lot of the macroeconomic changes, we massively flattened the org.
27:47
We converted a lot of managers back into what we call Captain IC roles and- Captain IC. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah.
27:58
We have this framework called players, coaches, captains, and we talk about a little bit of the differences.
28:02
And it helps distinguish the different type of leadership between senior IC and a manager.
28:07
A manager is more of a coach, they're kind of coaching from the sidelines.
28:12
And IC is like leading from being on the playing field.
28:17
And those two things are very different.
28:17
We kind of put that in place.
28:17
We changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade off, whether you just want to keep growing as IC and stuff.
28:28
There's more of these captain roles internally than there are manager roles internally.
28:32
We've created the same titles for all of the levels, so people don't feel like they're making a trade-off on that external signaling factor.
28:45
We give all the strategic problems to the captain level IC roles.
28:45
The managers and coaches are purely around hiring, coaching, positioning players on the field.
28:51
Identifying problems, but then handing those problems off for others to go solve.
28:57
All of these types of things.
28:57
But one of those things that's really bothered me for a long time is that you end up on this manager death cycle.
29:10
When people think that's the only way that they can progress or the only way that they don't have to make these trade-offs, you end up with a lot of folks in those roles who are neither good at them or don't really want to do at them.
29:20
And oh, by the way, you've also taken your star IC players off the field in the process of all of that.
29:30
And then they go and just repeat the cycle.
29:30
They create meetings and processes and all those things because what managers are supposed to do.
29:35
And then they coach their team as that's the way you progress in this org.
29:39
The whole thing repeats itself and it ends up being a really big mess.
29:43
And so I think a lot of these principles are not new, especially in software engineering.
29:49
I think that's where they've been around the longest.
29:49
But we've applied it to every single function within the organization.
29:54
And I think we'll take further steps in the future to even compensate the captain IC roles higher than the managers to essentially really provide a counteracting force.
30:06
And people have to make a negative trade-off to become a manager, to make sure that people who end up in those roles are the ones who truly want to be there and truly do that type of work.
30:16
And be the problem catcher, that type of work as part of it.
30:24
I feel like this also just a very common theme now across companies.
30:24
I feel like if you haven't written about this, I think just sharing this in depth would be really useful to a lot of people.
30:31
Because I think a lot of startups are trying to think about this.
30:34
I think a lot of folks have really come to this realization through some of these hard times where a lot of pressure gets put on prioritization and budget cuts and stuff.
30:41
I would go as far to say as I think this is where the world is headed.
30:46
All of this AI tooling is going to give these super ICs, these captain level ICs even more leverage in solving problems and their creation abilities as part of that.
31:00
And so I think in the future, what we're going to see ...
31:05
and I'm not the first one to say this, there have been others like Scott Belsky and others that have written about this.
31:09
Which is just, I think the future is actually companies that are ...
31:14
they're much smaller teams where all of these AI tools are giving one person a wider set of creation abilities.
31:22
And as a result, you don't need as many people to solve the same size problem as you want to. And that's great.
31:28
There's less coordination, there's less all of the things that people end up hating their jobs over.
31:33
Whether that's writing updates and reviews and all of that type of stuff.
31:39
I think it's a very positive thing and as a result, we're going to see happier people, happier companies, and more creative output as part of it. And so I don't know.
31:49
I think the future favors these super IC types over the manager types.
31:57
I'm so curious if that's how it ends up playing out.
31:57
It all makes sense that that's where things would head if AI gets powerful enough.
32:01
But there's also these incentives that just drive companies to hire.
32:06
It's like, oh, right, we could do more.
32:06
Why don't we hire more engineers?
32:06
Oh, we could build this team. We could go faster. It is so hard.
32:10
This is something we've also put in our cultural values, which is our second cultural value is small teams do bigger things.
32:20
And we have some guidelines on there of we only add somebody to the project when we feel like it's absolutely necessary, we know what the right next steps are, all those types of things.
32:31
But I think if you could sum up the last two years is that we basically funneled a ton of capital and people into things that were kind of working, but not fully working.
32:36
And I think that's where a lot of companies found themselves.
32:43
Including Reforge, we funded some of those things and we had to unwind them. Which makes sense.
32:47
As a company, you're looking for new things that will grow and become huge opportunities.
32:52
So I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
32:56
It's like we're just going to plant all these seeds, we're going to try stuff, see if anything blows up.
32:59
And then we double down, like in a good way. I guess so.
33:04
I was going to say- [inaudible 00:33:06] really normal.
33:06
I think a lot of people dislike all these companies investing in all these new ideas and random things, when that's really how you build another business line or you find and unlock for growth. That's pretty normal. Totally.
33:17
When we went from one product to multi-product at HubSpot, we seeded multiple bets at once.
33:21
And only a couple of them ended up making it through the filter, which ended up being the CRM and the sales tool as part of that.
33:34
And then there was projects we ended up killing and unwinding as part of that.
33:38
But the key about each of those bets was that we seeded each of those bets with a very limited amount of funding in a very small team.
33:45
There was still the constraints involved.
33:45
And I think where the mistake ends up happening is you kind of have this thing that's working but not really.
33:58
And because you've got all these other people sitting on the sidelines or this cash sitting on the sidelines, you end up piling that stuff in there.
34:02
And when you tend to add those things to stuff that are only kind of working, it gets worse, it doesn't get better.
34:07
And that ends up creating a lot of issues. Which is that a value?
34:11
What is it that you have about small teams?
34:15
Yeah, just small teams do bigger things.
34:18
We felt like we needed to like- Small teams do bigger things.
34:20
Encode this in us to be a forcing function for us going forward.
34:27
All right, all these bonus lessons.
34:27
You're just full of lessons, Brian.
34:27
Okay, so I'm going to close the loop on lesson three, which is problems never end and that's okay. Yes. All right, lesson four.
34:38
All right, now we're getting into the product and growth lessons.
34:38
This one I actually learned at HubSpot, which was the year is made in the first six months.
34:43
And where this really comes from is that I think especially when you're going through planning or thinking about growth and milestones and hitting those goals and looking forward in that way.
34:57
This is particularly relevant as everybody's probably going through yearly planning right now.
35:03
Is that I've seen a lot of plans where you realize in the first three to six months you kind of have a line of sight to what the constraints are and what you can actually do and the limitations of those things.
35:16
And so in the first three to six months of a year, your growth goals end up being kind of realistic, kind of on target.
35:25
But then you're like, oh, I've got to hit this ambitious target, so I'm going to build this inflection point in the back half of the year to hit that goal.
35:35
The reality is that's just not how it works.
35:35
To make your year, it's really about the first six months and the things you accomplish in those first six months.
35:42
And the reason is for quite a few products, most products, this isn't true for all products.
35:47
Is that the buying cycle or the decision window for a lot of customers is so long that by the time you get to the second half and you do the calculation of like, well, if we put this thing in place and the time it takes to impact a customer and then the time it takes for that customer to make the buying decision, you're already into the next year when you put those things in.
36:14
This is really true for SaaS, where the buying windows could be anything from a few months to up to a year long, depending on what type of market that you're tackling.
36:27
And so if you don't do the things in the first six months, the options you're left with to actually influence the numbers in the back six months of the year is incredibly small.
36:40
Incredibly, incredibly small.
36:40
Now, this might be different for a consumer social product where the friction is very low and there is no buying things, and maybe I can pull some levers like paid acquisition or stuff that have really short time windows.
36:57
But even in those products, when those products tend to be more influenced by things like viral loops and working on engagement and retention, the amount of times it takes to build and ship those things and then have it propagate through the user base and actually impact your numbers ends up being longer than most people think about when they're thinking through the next year.
37:12
And so anyways, if you want to hit your year number, it's all about the first six months.
37:21
Otherwise, you're being a little bit unrealistic with these very back weighted, second half plans.
37:33
Something you didn't mention, which is also just reorgs.
37:33
You often just rethink everything halfway through.
37:36
It's like, oh shit, the world has changed.
37:36
And so you're probably not even going to get to that back half the way planned. Yeah, that's fair.
37:41
I think it's just a human tendency to essentially overestimate how fast ...
37:45
not only how fast you can do something, but how fast it will take in effect.
37:51
Especially this becomes even bigger, the larger your customer base becomes.
38:01
Because the larger the baseline you're working with, the larger the number you need on the new thing to actually show a meaningful impact.
38:07
And so I think it's just very easy for us to overestimate those things when we're going through that type of forward-looking thinking. Awesome. Okay, lesson four.
38:20
The year is made in the first six months. What is lesson five?
38:27
Okay, this is probably one that I think about the most.
38:27
And comes up the most often, not only in Reforge courses, but investing, in advising.
38:34
Which is growth is a system between acquisition, retention and monetization.
38:41
You change one, you affect them all.
38:45
We've written about this a ton, you've written about this to some degree.
38:45
But I think people underestimate how deep this lesson goes.
38:50
And it's not just about understanding your system, which is the growth model.
38:59
Understanding that if you do change one thing, you have to change the other one.
39:04
But it's also understanding when you have a problem in one area, sometimes the solution is in a different part of the system.
39:10
So a lot of times retention problems are created because you're acquiring the wrong folks.
39:16
Or a lot of times monetization issues are stemming from engagement problems.
39:22
And so what I've often found teams to really do is that they identify the problem, which is like, hey, we might have low revenue retention or low revenue conversion or something like that.
39:37
And they go straight to trying to work on levers within that specific part of the system.
39:37
But without taking the step back to say, well actually what part of the system is creating this problem?
39:49
It might actually be something within it.
39:49
Maybe we just have terrible pricing pages or something of that nature or terrible dunning flows.
39:55
But I think oftentimes the actual solution, the actual lever to move that problem ends up being in a different part of the system.
40:01
And so this system type of thinking is probably the number one thing that I think separates great folks who work on growth from your average good folks.
40:15
I think the average good folks get all of the simple levers of how to reduce friction, increase reward.
40:21
They might understand things around growth loops, all that type of stuff.
40:28
But system level thinking is I think the thing that separates the great from the good.
40:33
Even more so in marketplace and network products because the system dynamics are amped up multiple time degrees. Yeah.
40:39
I'm curious if there's an example that comes to mind either at Reforge or at HubSpot.
40:46
I'll share one from Airbnb that you made me think about.
40:50
There was a team at one point on Airbnb that was just focused on retention, guest retention.
40:55
They're just like, how do we get people to travel more and come back to Airbnb more?
40:55
And they did all this work, all this analysis.
41:00
And they just found it's related to how good was their trip?
41:05
And so it became a thing that they're like, okay, there's not much we can do as a retention team, we've got to focus on trip quality and host quality.
41:09
And that actually led to creating a team and putting more resources into let's improve trip experience.
41:14
Which was mostly around host response rate, reviews, things like that.
41:19
And so it was just like, okay, this team should not exist.
41:25
We should not have a retention team, we should work on trip experience.
41:28
So examples, I think early HubSpot sales days, the renewal figures on our early paid product were only okay.
41:37
And I think the team we initially wanted to work on, well, what feature could we add to all of these things?
41:43
But when we actually went into customer combos, what we found was that a lot of the people that the sales team were selling to ended up being either not the persona that we ended up building for or they were selling a use case that we actually hadn't designed for.
42:05
And that's because look, salespeople are there, they're cranking, they're just trying to close deals.
42:09
Which is like that's what their role there is for.
42:09
And so at some point we had to redesign the incentives for the sales team.
42:15
I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I think we did something as drastic at some point as saying, hey, if you sell this type of persona or this type of company, you will not get comped on it.
42:24
And that immediately changed behavior and we started selling the right.
42:30
So that was an example where engagement and retention problems were created up at the top of the funnel.
42:40
Similarly, I think in early Reforge days where we had a lot more in-person collaborative dynamics as part of our programs, we had this application process.
42:48
And we learned over time that there were different behaviors and mindsets of coming ...
42:55
or desires for what somebody wanted out of a program that actually created those peer-to-peer compelling experiences.
43:01
And so sometimes people wanted to come into the program and all they wanted to do was network with peers and they didn't want to engage with the content at all.
43:20
And then sometimes we had the opposite and they just wanted to be on their own little solo journey and not engage in stuff.
43:24
And so over time, we iterated on that and we started to learn, what are the right questions to ask in order to create this better down funnel experience?
43:35
Now over time, we've evolved the programs as COVID hit and we got rid of the in-person component.
43:39
And all of these other changes that rendered those lessons not relevant in today's environment.
43:44
But those are two quick examples that I can think of off the top of my head.
43:53
We're now in a place where we've started layering on marketplaces to Reforge, and so this system level thinking is coming up more and more daily.
44:04
Because as you know, every conversation we have about demand that we end up talking about supply.
44:09
And every conversation we end up talking about supply, we end up talking about demand because that's just how it works. Good old marketplaces.
44:13
I think just that lesson alone is really powerful.
44:18
It's just how much the people you bring in impact every other metric and how everything looks.
44:22
Like a story I often here is just paid users are just innately ...
44:27
everything's going to be worse, basically.
44:27
Retention's going to be worse, people that you're driving through Facebook and Google Ads and you just cut that out.
44:30
And like, wow, retention went up. Wow, look at us go. Yeah.
44:36
I mean, I think we both mentioned it in here, but we have this concept in Reforge that we teach around calling it good friction.
44:40
And I think a lot of people are taught to always reduce, reduce, reduce friction.
44:48
But actually oftentimes, the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to create those experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel.
45:01
It's all the incentives internally are not aligned to doing that.
45:09
Because almost every time you add good friction in a product, in the very short window it's like conversion will go down and stuff, and you have to wait for those down funnel things to propagate.
45:19
But people love quick wins.
45:19
People love looking at those short-term metric boosts and are often rewarded and applauded for it.
45:26
And so I think those types of things are actually hard to implement and even advocate for inside of organizations and products.
45:32
And I think that's why you tend to see these things get chipped away at over time.
45:41
I think an example of that is how you actually, at Reforge, I noticed, you turn away a lot of people.
45:46
There's tons of applications and you've just learned, here's who is going to have a good time.
45:50
And we'll reject anyone that ...
45:50
even though they're so excited about joining Reforge, they're going to have so many ...
45:54
people are going to join, you're going to make all this money.
45:54
But you just know they're going to have bad time, they're going to have bad reviews, it's going to create bad word of mouth.
46:01
And so I think, to me, that's a really good example of that in action. Yeah. Okay.
46:05
Lesson five, if I can summarize, is basically that growth as a system between acquisition, retention, monetization and basically changing one impacts others.
46:12
So think about if you see one thing happening here, is there another part of the system that you may want to work on? Bingo. Nailed it.
46:20
All right, lesson number six. Lesson six. Ooh, I like this one. Do the opposite.
46:25
So I think a story from very early Reforge days.
46:34
So when we started Reforge the norm in the education space online, that thing that everybody was talking about at the time was essentially these short form, self-serve, low-priced, available for everybody courses.
46:48
And that was the thing, I don't know if you remember the term [inaudible 00:46:58] or massively online courses. That was the rage.
46:57
It was like, ah, this thing is going to revolutionize our world.
47:02
And there was just so many people going after that.
47:09
And so when Andrew and I did the first growth series, we essentially did all the opposite of that.
47:17
We didn't let everybody in, it was for a small group of people, it wasn't purely online, we did some stuff in person.
47:24
We priced it super high, it wasn't purely self-serve.
47:30
We had these live components.
47:30
We essentially did the exact opposite of what's out there.
47:30
I think if anybody was looking at the time, it was just very counterintuitive.
47:36
It was like, who's going to really actually be interested in this?
47:42
But of course the first one that we did, we had an amazing response on the first one, and then the rest is history.
47:48
With Reforge and then cohort based courses became a thing and all those things.
47:56
But I think the real lesson in here is that if you want to gain traction around something, you often should be looking at what everybody is doing.
48:03
And the purpose of looking at what everybody is doing is not to necessarily understand those best practices, so that you can repeat them.
48:15
Your goal is to understand them so you can ask the question, well, what is the opposite?
48:19
Because in every kind of major trend that everybody's pointed to, there's almost always an opportunity on the other side, on the 180.
48:25
A couple other places this applies is that if you're trying to figure out a new ad channel as an example, a new paid acquisition channel.
48:38
One of the best things that you can do is you can look at what all the other advertisers who are advertising to your audience are doing, like look at their creative, all that kind of stuff.
48:48
And then basically figure out how to do something completely opposite, completely different.
48:53
And that's how you will stand out, that's how you will get the CTRs and that's how you'll get the performance.
48:59
But most things have these gravitational forces where everything converges.
49:03
There used to be this meme where every SaaS product had the same exact character design that Slack had.
49:11
And I can't remember, I think maybe Intercom had it.
49:11
Anyways, that was the thing.
49:18
And so you can visually see this.
49:18
But this dynamic I think actually takes place everywhere, whether it's in a strategy within a category, a design of a product, ad creative within a channel, a specific growth tactic as part of it.
49:34
A third quick example is that about 10 years ago when I probably really started to write a bit more on my blog is the playbook at the time that was really developed by HubSpot was that you would do a lot of high volume short content.
49:48
At one point, the HubSpot team was I think pumping out like 10 articles a day. It was something crazy.
49:54
And that worked at the time because they were early in the game, they had the domain authority to rank for each one of those.
50:06
And a lot of people followed that playbook.
50:06
But then I and a few others in the space started writing really low volume, very long content.
50:11
And I think as a result, it stood out and it performed much better among the noise.
50:20
And most of my email subscribers probably came from all of those early things because it did stand out.
50:28
And this is a constant game because of course, as you figure something out and you do the opposite of some piece, some other people are going to start to copy you.
50:37
And then you got to take a step back and be like, well, what is everybody doing?
50:37
And how do I flip the pendulum back to the other perspective?
50:42
But the major lesson here is if you're trying to get traction in something, whether a new product, a new growth tactic, a new channel.
50:51
The goal of learning what everybody else is doing is not so you can mimic them, it's actually to figure out how you can do the opposite of it.
51:02
That's the ultimate goal of that behavior. I love this one.
51:08
I feel like you need to write a book, Brian.
51:08
I feel like there's so much depth to each of these lessons that we don't have time to cover.
51:14
This makes me think about, I'm reading Rick Rubin's book right now, the Creative Act, I think it's called.
51:18
And he has a similar concept of just experiment as you're making things and just try the opposite.
51:23
Just instead of where there's quiet, add noise.
51:28
When something's blue, I don't know, make it yellow. Yeah. Totally.
51:33
And I think- You can see this now, too, with all the AI stuff is you see a new gravitate ...
51:35
everybody's kind of trending towards a similar set of things.
51:41
And I think the real winners are going to be the ones who kind of look at that and be like, actually, we're going to set that up as a guardrail of what we're not going to do.
51:50
I actually thought there was an ...
51:50
I did a LinkedIn post about this because I saw LinkedIn doing this.
51:53
The playbook right now with AI is, oh, I'm going to use AI to generate a ton of content for content marketing to rank and- I'm going to use AI to generate a ton of content for content marketing, the rank in Google, and all that kind of stuff.
52:04
I thought it was actually interesting, LinkedIn has this new feature where they're actually not using AI to generate the content, they're using it to lower the friction to more UGC driven content, which ends up being a more unique, and ranking more highly.
52:23
So they actually looked at that and said, "We could probably generate a ton of content using AI, and just use our domain authority to rank for these things."
52:29
But they're like, "Oh, actually we're going to use AI to try to figure out how to extract more of the opposite of what everybody else is doing, which is actually human generated content."
52:41
So I thought that was another interesting recent example of somebody I've seen doing something very clearly distinctly opposite of what everybody else is doing.
52:51
What's interesting here is, it's not like you need to do the opposite, it's not like the opposite will work.
52:54
It's that this is just an interesting area to find new opportunity. A hundred percent, yeah.
53:02
And it makes me think about podcasts a little bit.
53:02
There's always this feeling people don't have any attention span, they want short things, TikTok clips, all these things.
53:10
And then there's Lex Friedman, who talks for seven hours with Balaji.
53:10
That's the number one technology podcast in the world.
53:15
Yeah, I'm not hooked on Lex, but I'm hooked on Acquired, which is three to four hours [inaudible 00:53:22].
53:21
That was the other one, exactly.
53:21
I was just going to say, Acquired is they release an episode once a month, it's very long, they don't have any guests.
53:25
That's the opposite of what usually the advice is, have guests, get on each other's podcasts, all these things, and they're the third top [inaudible 00:53:37].
53:35
Yeah, we're kind of experimenting with something similar, we just released a podcast called Unsolicited Feedback.
53:39
We kind of looked at it, and we were like, "There's already a ton of great interview podcasts like yours."
53:48
I was like, "We could do another one, but how is that going to work?
53:48
How is that going to stand out?
53:54
How can we do different?"
53:54
So we tried to figure out...
53:54
We explored areas that would be the opposite, and so the format of the podcast is totally different.
54:02
We do bring on a guest, but we don't interview them.
54:02
We actually bring in two or three product or feature releases from the past couple weeks that have been out there, and then we pretend that we are the VP of product at that company, and we just analyze it, and break it down, and talk about what we like, what we don't like, half the time.
54:21
We give unsolicited feedback on it.
54:21
And I don't know if it's going to work yet, it's gotten some good traction so far, and it's been a lot of fun to create.
54:31
But it's just another example of trying to find the white space. Amazing.
54:39
How do people find that podcast?
54:39
That's awesome, let's make sure people know how to find it.
54:41
If you just Google Unsolicited Feedback Podcast, it'll come up.
54:46
You can also go to reforge.
54:46
com/podcast/unsolicitedfeedback as well, you can find it on our website.
54:52
But we're on Apple, Spotify, all the main pieces.
54:52
But yeah, we've had some spicy episodes so far, so hope you all enjoy them.
55:01
What's a good one for people to start with if they want to dive in?
55:04
Well, we just released today one with Elena Verna, breaking down Airtable's surprising shift from PLG to enterprise.
55:11
So there's definitely some hot takes in that one.
55:11
So that's the most recent one, that's a fun one.
55:16
But we've covered Zoom's product strategy, Slack's most recent announcement, a few others.
55:22
People should go check out that episode with Christopher Lochhead, where basically his pitch is that the most legendary companies always create their own category.
55:30
Some people agree with that, some people don't.
55:33
I'm on the disagree side of it.
55:33
But that being said, that's what HubSpot did.
55:33
Which is they did create a category around inbound, and the way that you get traction around those things is you define the opposite, and you play off of it.
55:44
So their whole messaging was, "Hey, everybody's doing outbound marketing.
55:49
Here's the problem, there's a better way, it's called inbound marketing."
55:53
And then they set themselves up for that.
55:53
But you have to do that in category creation, because you have to start with the thing that people understand, and then pivot off of it to teach them what the new thing is.
56:03
And that was something that HubSpot did amazingly well.
56:09
But even Dharmesh, the founder, talks a lot about category creation.
56:09
And he's like, "Look, even though we did it, it's rarely the right answer to go do it."
56:14
So I probably shift on the other end of the spectrum, which is I'm not sure.
56:21
I think it can create a lot of value, but I'm not sure I agree with the ultimate premise.
56:26
Yeah, there's many camps, we're going to dig deeper into that topic on the podcast coming up.
56:32
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57:24
There's the built-in AI tools, the on canvas collaborating, a centralized workspace, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover, and that's not all. Find out more at wix. com/studio. All right, lesson seven.
57:36
Lesson seven is use cases, not personas.
57:36
So the trope I think is always to talk to your customers, know your customers, and it just puts a lot of emphasis on understanding the person or category of person.
57:52
And then this typically results in creating some type of persona definition and segmentation that the team orients around.
58:04
But I actually think most of the meat that is actionable, that helps you define, not only what to build from a product perspective, but how your growth motion and growth model should work, is actually defined in the use case that you're going after, and the different uses of your product.
58:22
Some people kind of relate this to jobs to be done, we think about it a little bit differently internally in Reforge.
58:27
Which is a use case is simply a combination, and starts with, what is the problem that you are trying to solve?
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What is the value prop that you're trying to create against that problem?
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What's the alternative for the user?
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And then most importantly, why are they choosing you over the alternative? That often goes mixed.
58:45
Those components once you define them, what the extend into are the things that actually start to help you on the growth side of the equation.
58:50
Which is once I understand what the problem is, I can start to ask questions, "Well, what is the natural frequency of somebody encountering that problem?"
59:01
That starts to define your retention metrics, which then starts to define your activation metrics, and it kind of works all the way downstream.
59:12
You can also ask the question, "Well, what is the natural frequency of adoption of a solution around this problem?"
59:18
A lot of people don't think about that.
59:18
Especially in SaaS tools, which is for most SaaS products, your persona, your target customer, it actually only in market for that once every fewish years or so.
59:31
And as a result, what most people end up focusing on is just trying to capture that small sliver of those that are in market.
59:39
And they don't think about, well, how do I capture the attention and build a relationship with folks that aren't in market yet, but are going to be eventually?
59:51
And that was HubSpot's biggest thing when they developed the whole inbound marketing playbook and content marketing, is that most people thought of HubSpot, they just thought of them as a blog.
1:00:03
They didn't even know that they was a SaaS tool, if you asked our audience.
1:00:08
But what that created was the moment they were in market for that tool, where was the first place that they were going to go?
1:00:13
They were going to go to HubSpot, and they were like, "Oh, I already have a relationship with this brand."
1:00:16
And that ended up reducing quite a bit of friction.
1:00:20
The reality is that most products today are actually adopted by multiple personas, and that leads to trying to solve for multiple use cases, multiple problems across these personas.
1:00:34
And I think that is the way more detrimental thing, than narrowing in on a single use case that might be adopted by multiple personas.
1:00:40
So it's kind of flipping it on its head.
1:00:46
So that's how we define everything in Reforge, is essentially, what are the different use cases that we are trying to build against?
1:00:51
And then we might go ask the question, "Who has those problems?
1:00:58
Who has those use cases?"
1:00:58
And most of the time we've actually been surprised that there are people in the market that have those problems, and that have those use cases, that we would not have identified through any sort of persona research, but we can make those people successful.
1:01:13
We can capture those people as part of the process.
1:01:18
So the framework you use for this use case, just to summarize, which is really interesting, I imagine it's kind of like this one pager template you use.
1:01:23
Where here's the problem, here's the value prop that would convince someone to try this thing, here's the alternatives to what we have, and here's why they would choose us over the alternatives. Yeah.
1:01:36
We call it the use case map, and this was actually developed originally in our Retention Program with Casey Winters and Shaun Clowes.
1:01:41
But it's essentially what you described, it's essentially a set of rows, and there's a specific order.
1:01:45
I might get the order slightly wrong right now, riffing off it live.
1:01:51
But it starts with you define the problem, you then have a simple statement of who might have this problem.
1:01:55
You then say, "Well, what are their alternatives to solve this problem?"
1:02:00
That leads into the why, why are they going to choose you over the alternative?
1:02:08
It's kind of calling out differentiation essentially.
1:02:08
And then it flows into, okay, well, what is the natural frequency of this problem?
1:02:13
Which flows into all of your retention and activation metrics.
1:02:18
You can also ask, "What is the natural frequency of adoption?"
1:02:18
Which starts to help you understand more around your acquisition metrics, what percentage, how many people might be in market for this in a given year, and what we might need to do to actually sequence and capture all of that value.
1:02:35
So that's kind of how that whole thing flows.
1:02:35
And then some people start to layer on and solve multiple use cases over time.
1:02:42
But the biggest thing that we find in Reforge, when we have people go through this exercise, which is the next thing we'll talk about, is that they end up mapping out eight different use cases.
1:02:52
And we're like, "Whoa, that's way too much.
1:02:52
You're obviously trying to solve for too much here."
1:03:00
Before we get to the next lesson, just to keep plugging some Reforge stuff, is there an artifact or a course for people to go check out on that specific thread?
1:03:09
I think there will be an artifact on this soon, if there isn't live today, but we can get one live.
1:03:13
But this actually is so fundamental, it's in almost all of our growth courses now.
1:03:18
But the one we go deepest on, is our Retention and Engagement Program. Awesome.
1:03:22
Okay, so lesson number seven, use cases, not personas. Correct. Awesome.
1:03:31
What is lesson number eight, Brian Balfour? Okay.
1:03:35
If there's one line that I probably repeat the most in a Reforge course, it's this one, which is solving for everyone is solving for no one.
1:03:40
I think this extends to everything in life, and I have a couple interesting examples from this.
1:03:46
So let me start with the product and the marketing one, because I think that's the one that...
1:03:52
Of course I think everybody might be nodding, like, "Of course, of course we can't solve for everybody."
1:03:59
But that's honestly where a lot of product and growth mistakes I think come from.
1:03:59
It's not about being specific about who you're solving for, it's about being specific about who you aren't solving for.
1:04:10
I've found that is the thing that ends up being the one that helps being the better guardrail for a team, because for some reason when all you do is define who you are solving for or what you're solving for, going back to the use case thing, a lot of people start to justify or rationalize a bunch of adjacent use cases, or a bunch of adjacent people.
1:04:29
And it's kind of like, "Well, yeah, it's like 50% what we're solving [inaudible 01:04:39], 50% not."
1:04:40
And so you have to define, you have to draw on the lines around it.
1:04:40
And so there's an actual HBS case study done on this from early HubSpot, which is early HubSpot, they kind of built this marketing tool.
1:04:50
They sold it to a bunch of people, they were having retention problems, they went and did all of this research.
1:04:56
And what they found was actually they had ended up selling into four use cases, that on the surface feel very similar, but actually in reality are very different.
1:05:07
And the four use cases was they had this mid-market...
1:05:07
They call her Marketing Mary, a VP of marketing, who was looking for a solution in an all-in-one marketing solution, because she didn't want to aggregate a bunch of point solutions.
1:05:17
They then had this enterprise...
1:05:23
I think he was called Enterprise Eddy or something like that.
1:05:23
Enterprise who was looking for a more compliant marketing solutions, secure, all of these types of things, still solving marketing, still trying to solve inbound marketing.
1:05:35
So on the surface seemed the same, but when you got down into it was kind of different.
1:05:38
They also had this very small business owner, that looked like the SMB customer.
1:05:43
But there's a very big difference between an owner of a 20 person company using your product, and that business actually having a head of marketing using the product.
1:05:57
And their needs ended up being very different beneath the surface.
1:05:57
And then they had this technical marketer, who wanted to get in there, and customize, and all that kind of stuff.
1:06:02
So they ended up focusing on that mid-marketing, Marketing Mary persona and use case around the all-in-one.
1:06:13
But the bigger thing that they did was they said, "We are not going to serve these three use cases."
1:06:18
And going back to what we talked.... This was before my time.
1:06:18
They aligned all the sales comp behind it, they aligned the success, they aligned all of the marketing around it.
1:06:28
And whenever these folks came up in the funnel and kind of indicated that they were in one of these use cases, it was like, "Ah, HubSpot is not for that."
1:06:33
But I think this is where most teams get stretched, and where most debate comes from, is that if you haven't clearly defined who you are not solving for, you can almost always make a case for how this person or this use case fits the thing that you have defined.
1:06:53
Now, the thing that I've realized is that this actually extends into a bunch of other places, hiring culture being one of the biggest ones.
1:06:59
And I've seen so many super generic culture statements, and they end up being generic because they are trying to accommodate for everybody.
1:07:11
And so they just get watered down, and watered down, and watered down.
1:07:16
But culture is really about being super opinionated, and actually acknowledging this is not a place for everybody.
1:07:22
And you've got to encode those values that actually say, "This is a place for who, as well as for who it's not."
1:07:29
And so this is an artifact that we have live, you can see ours.
1:07:34
And so half of our values are defining the value, but actually half of the values doc is saying, "What does this not mean?
1:07:40
What are anti-patterns to these values?"
1:07:47
Because those are the things that actually help us understand more of, who is the right fit for the type of company that we are trying to build?
1:07:52
And who is not right for those things?
1:07:52
And those things get implemented in hiring, and in all of these other places.
1:07:58
The last piece is, I've noticed this actually extends to almost all life as well.
1:08:03
I'll give a really strange example.
1:08:09
This is something that I've brought up before but not a lot of people know about me, is that before my life in tech, I was actually a wedding planner for a few summer summers in LA.
1:08:21
My uncle is a wedding planner down in LA, and I went and worked with them for a few summers, and it was actually a phenomenal experience.
1:08:27
I got exposed to so many things I probably wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise.
1:08:32
But one of the things that I learned in that, reflecting on that experience, is that the most miserable couples in the wedding planning process were the ones that were trying to solve for everybody, their fiance, both sets of parents, the friends, that annoying Uncle Eddie that you might have.
1:08:50
And that's where all the stress of the process came from.
1:08:57
And the people who tried to accommodate all of those things are the ones that didn't have their best experience for what's supposed to be an amazing and magical day.
1:09:08
And instead, I think in that process, my uncle would try to get them to essentially say, "Who's the most important group here? Is it your family? Is it your parents?
1:09:17
That's okay if it is, there's nothing wrong with that, but let's focus on that.
1:09:24
Or is it your friends, or is this really an experience for you two?"
1:09:29
And because what you design and build around, the experience that you build around for a wedding really determines.
1:09:36
And then when all of these edge things came up, you could ask the question, "Well, is this really for you?
1:09:42
Or is this for this group of people or set of people that you've distinctly said, you know what, we know they're going to have a say, but we're specifically not designing this experience for them?"
1:09:52
So anyways, I think this happens also in relationships too and work-life balance, where people are trying to solve for all the things, friends, the career, the kid, the family, the spouse, the hobbies, all the things.
1:10:10
And at the end of the day, everything's a trade-off in work and in life, and not acknowledging those trade-offs, and not actually specifically saying what you're not solving for, I think that's where a lot of my stress and anxiety has probably come from.
1:10:30
This one really hits home.
1:10:30
My wife often tells me that I'm trying to make too many people happy at once, and I have this people pleasing tendency.
1:10:35
And she's like, "You're not going to make everyone happy, and so don't cause all these problems by making sure everyone's doing great."
1:10:45
Well, what have you done with that?
1:10:45
Have you gotten better at identifying the groups, to be like, "You know what?
1:10:50
I'm making this trade off, and that's okay."
1:10:55
Mostly I'm like, "No, I'm not.
1:10:55
Leave me [inaudible 01:10:58].
1:10:55
I don't have this problem."
1:10:55
But no, there's definitely some of that.
1:11:01
So it's just realizing that that's something that I try to do, and then I'm like, "Okay, I don't need everyone to be happy. It's going to be okay."