Few things can shatter a founder’s confidence quicker than a poorly managed board meeting. At best… … you’ll get glossed over stares and “checked out” investors who secretly hate you for wasting their time. At worst… … you’ll accidentally knock over the first domino in getting kicked out of your own company. Pay special attention to Step #4 in this
“Help me. Help you.” Nope… Not talking about that epic one liner from Jerry Maguire. I’m talking about the inner dialogue your customers experience whenever they try to refer your product to their tribe. One of the EASIEST ways to acquire a new B2B Saas customer is to have your current users refer you at scale. Just ask Dropbox 😉
“You’re not suppose to succeed!” “The numbers are against you from day one.” Those were the words hurled at me across the board room from one of my mentors. Encouraging, right? Up until that point I had so much confidence that failure wasn’t an option. But the truth is – and you hear it all the time – most startups
Are you acting like a 5 year old when demoing your product? Last week my son Max (5) asked me to help him with his show & tell presentation. So I taught him a simple 3 step process. Start with the problem. (Story) Pick 3 benefits & features to highlight (Demo) Ask if they want to play afterwards (CTA) These
Has a customer ever punched you in the face? No? Has it ever felt like that? Every time I’ve had a customer sign-up, stick around for a few months, and cancel (aka churn) it sure feels that way. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been building businesses, nothing frustrates me more than having a customer that I spent a ton
All SaaS companies need sales people. Even products like Dropbox & Slack have sales teams. If you look at the Montclare SaaS 250 list, they all have sales teams. So why do startups push off making this hire for so long? It’s usually because they don’t know what to look for and are scared that a new fancy pants sales
Want to know one habit ultra-successful people have in common? They read. A lot. In fact, when Warren Buffett was asked about the key to his success, he pointed to a stack of books and said: “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but
Have you ever been talked into do something you knew was dumb? *raises hand* Back when I was scaling my company Spheric Technologies, a friend introduced me to his buddy who did outsourced sales. Essentially, a quick fix “easy button” for business owners who can’t be bothered to take full control of the lifeblood of their business. Smart right? 😉
Wow. Every once in a while I re-watch one of my videos and just laugh… This time around, I can’t believe how many times I said “distributed team”??! You could easily play a drinking game on it and end up loaded within 10 minutes. Not recommended btw. For real. Don’t do it. Instead, I wanted to take a few mins
Do you remember the first time you had someone buy something from you? For me it was when I convinced a bunch of bed & breakfast owners in Atlantic Canada to send me cash in the mail to have their property published online. Still not sure if that was legal. Suspect cash collection methods aside… What they didn’t know is
