92% of Startups Fail – How To Use PRFAQ To Make Sure Yours Isn't One of Them with Marcelo Calbucci

Here's a sad reality: 90% of startups fail. Out of these 90%, 42 of them go down because they build something no one wants. Most founders throw together a flashy pitch deck and hope for the best, and we all know Hope is not a strategy. It's a gamble at best. Amazon does it differently. They use a simple framework called P.A.F.A.Q. to validate idea, align your team, and get investor buy-in before you build. It's how they launched AWS, Alexa, and today we're breaking down how you could use it too. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth. I'm your host, Mike Sirius. We are diving into how to de-risk your startup and build with confidence before you write a single line of code. Joining me today is Marcello Calbucci, entrepreneur, a former Amazon exec, and an author of the PR FAQ Framework book. He's helped to build and launch billion-dollar products, and today he's here to show us how to turn your ideas into validated and fundable products. Welcome to the show, Marcello.

Thank you for having me, Mike. I'm really excited about this conversation.

Thank you. I'm excited as well, Marcello. This is one— I see that all the time. I see that all the time, how especially tech founders who have a huge background in coding, they assume they have a product. They don't validate anything. They go straight to coding. They go straight to building. They spend 6 to 12 months building that, likely with friends. Only then do you realize that they built something no one really wants, and they just become one digit into that failed statistics. So I think it's going to be hopefully an eye-opening for a lot of founders to really, how, you know, how do you do well that validation? So before we go into the topic, Marcello, we have this question which we love to ask every single guest. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

Understanding what people need and delivering exactly that solution.

So, understanding what people really need. Do people actually know what they need? It's like— No.

Yeah.

So, how do you go about understanding what they need if people themselves don't know what they need?

Yes. So, you have to wear your archaeologist or anthropologist hat and really observe how people do the work that you're trying to solve, right? If it is on a personal level, you need to understand, you know, what exactly are they doing? If you're doing a cooking app, for example, you need to observe like how they choose ingredients, how they shop, how they plan, how they cook, right? Because sometimes people don't know how to articulate their own pain points, needs, or desires. So it's the job of a founder, of a product leader to understand that, better than their customers.

Okay. So if we're saying that understanding what people actually need is how you get the growth to happen, so are we saying effectively that the product is the most important thing to get the growth happening, the right product, that literally, you know, building things people actually need is the most important element when it comes to growth?

Yeah, so I wouldn't say that understanding the problem is all that you need to guarantee that you create growth. You still have to find a solution. And even if you find a solution, you still have to figure out how your customer is going to find you.

Okay.

So it's a 3-step process, like problem, solution, and go-to-market, right? So you need these 3 to align really well for it to work. Every once in a while, You have a startup that is lucky and doesn't understand the customer and their problem, but build something that the market really needs. So when we see that, we feel like, oh, these folks are genius, but it's just luck. Yeah, right. They didn't do the groundwork to do that. And on the other end as well, sometimes you have products that go viral for a reason or another, right? So customers are helping bring more customers into the platform. So the startups can enjoy that benefit. But that can be created as well, right? That's called product-led growth. So you can do that as well in your product if that's your intention.

Okay, I love that. So, so we have— make sure you actually have a problem, so you actually have a demand, you're solving something for, something for people with your product or service, then you make that solution happen and then you still need to market because if you exist but people don't know that you exist, you're still not going to have growth, right? So we have this trifecta of these. Is it linear thing or can you do this in, in parallel? Like, you know, does it need to go one after each other or can they all just sort of get pushed at the same time?

Yeah, they, uh, both the customer discovery, which is understanding their problems, And the solution needs to kind of happen in a serial way. Like you need to do one before you do the other, right? But the go-to-market can be done with the solutioning. Like you see a lot of startups creating beta lists. Yeah, right. Once they already know, like they found a problem and they then find a solution that is viable. So why not start marketing the product already? Yeah, right. It's no different than start marketing a book before the book is available. Right? There is no problem with doing that in parallel as well. And it's actually a good idea. It is recommended because you want to create that demand. And on the customer side, what you're really trying to do is to understand the job the customer is trying to get done, right? It's commonly framed as the Jobs to Be Done framework. So you have a list of jobs the customer is trying to do. You identify them. You know them really well. And then you need to do an ideation around that problem to think about the solution that would address that problem. That's where the creative juices kick in. And you can think about like, how would customers like to address this problem? And by the way, the best way to address that problem is to eliminate the problem, right? So can you do something that is upstream that the problem doesn't exist anymore?

Can I take us back? You mentioned A job list? In a very, like a very, very first step before you actually get the problems. What was that step?

Jobs to be done.

Jobs to be done.

It's a framework created by Tony Ulwick and popularized by Clayton Christensen on his book, The Innovator's Dilemma. I'm blanking on the name of the book here.

Yeah, it's called—

So, the idea is your customers are hiring your product trying to do a job, right? Right. And, um, you know, if you're— let's go back to the cooking app. If you're creating a cooking app, the job they are trying to do is to cook a meal for their family or for their friends. So that's a job they are trying to do. Yeah. And there are many ways to solve that job, right? One is you can provide them with recipes and a list of ingredients for them to go and buy. The other way to solve that job is you ship all the ingredients to their house and provide them with the instructions on how to cook. Another way is you hire a chef that goes to your house and cooks everything for you. So there are multiple solutions to the same problem, but the job is the same, right? So you need to identify the job the customer is trying to do.

Okay, so we know the problem, and to solve the problem, that's what we call job. And then you mentioned as well that the best we can do is actually eliminate the problem whatsoever.

Yes, correct. How do you eliminate the problem? Yeah, in some cases, you might identify a problem that is, you know, a problem that if the customer eliminated something upstream, it's hard to talk in a consumer space, but in the professional world, you can imagine there is a department of accounting that you know, you have to fax your receipts every month for them to do expense report and everything, right? And they come to you and they say, "We need a way to scan those faxes faster," right? That's what the customer is doing. And then you realize, but wait a second, if the people submitting the receipt, they took pictures, you would already have a digital version of that. So you're kind of eliminating the need to scan it. Yep. Right? And then if you go one step up and you go like, wait a second, can we integrate with the credit card company? So they provide us information exactly about the expenses that an employee had. So the employee doesn't even have to do anything, right? That is like one level up even.

I see what you mean. Okay. So we thinking from the perspective, how can we remove that problem whatsoever? Okay, I love that. So what comes after that?

Yeah, so once you really understand the problem, you also have to understand the customer, which is who are they, right? Often what you have is one problem with multiple customers, right? And it's important to segment your customers because this is gonna be part of your go-to-market strategy, right? So where are they geographically? What are their professions? What kind of industries they work in. So understanding your customer is very important. So the problem and the customer are what I call the facts, right? The problem, the customer, and the market are the facts. You're not trying to create anything out of that. You're just trying to understand. You're trying to gather your facts and your data and collect as much as you can and learn as much as you can. Right? That's the first part. The second part is coming up with a solution that addresses those needs, right? And that's where now it's not facts anymore, it's an opinion that you're gonna bring to the table. I have an idea for a product, right? And there are many frameworks that you can use to come up with ideas. So design thinking is a well-known framework for that. SWOT analysis is another framework for that. Brainstorming is a framework for that. There are several ideation frameworks that you can use to help you think through what are possible solutions for this problem, right? Okay. And what you have is a hypothesis of a solution. Yeah. You don't know if that solution is going to work. You still need to go back to your customer and say like, hey, if you had this, Would this solve that problem that we talk about? And you expect to learn about that information and iterate and improve it. But it still is not guaranteed because what you're doing is you're hearing from your customer opinions. They're not using your solution yet. You're only going to know once you build it. But to build a solution, it costs quite a bit. It costs months of work, effort, resources, You know, money, everything that is involved to that. So before you do that, you want to have confidence that the solution that you have addresses the customer of the problem and the solution that you have can be found by the customer, right? Either via Google, via distribution, via direct sales, via ads, whatever you're gonna do for customers to find it. You have to have a hypothesis about that as well.

Okay.

Um, all before you start building.

I love that. So to throw some quotes, uh, according to Harvard Business Review, startups that validate their market demand or market need for the solution they're building are 2 times, 2.5 times more likely to succeed. So this is where we're right now in, in this sort of situation. We sort of think we have a problem, we have a hypothesis for the solution. And now, how do we actually go and use PR FAQ framework to get that validation taking place?

Yeah. So let me take a step back and explain what the PR FAQ framework is. So PR FAQ stands for press release and frequently asked questions. It's a 6-page document that was invented by Amazon. right? And it has a very specific structure to it. The first page is the press release. So you're going to write a press release as if the product already existed, right?

Launch or existed, Marcello? So are we doing press release, hey, there's a new kid on the block, check this out? Or are we writing press release like, we've been here for a year, you know, that's who we are? Like, what's the— what's the soul behind that press release?

Yeah. So, so first of all, it's not a press release you're going to send to the press. Yeah. It's a press release that you're going to use for the team only.

Okay.

Right. And you write as if the future was already here. So it's like today we are launching this new product that solves this problem. This is how it solves. This is how you get started.

Okay.

Here's what customers are talking about it. That's the press release aspect. And then you have 5 pages of frequently asked questions and they have a certain structure to them. So what the PR FAQ does is you start from the FAQs, you start from the frequently asked questions, not from the press release, right? So as you start answering those questions, and there is a structure to those questions as well, you start to realize things that you don't know, right? So you mentioned on the beginning of the episode that sometimes entrepreneurs, you know, start building and they don't know what they don't know. And that's a problem. The press release and frequently asked questions help you identify what you don't know. So you're not flying blind, right? At least you understand what you're making assumptions and hypotheses about versus what you really know. But also in the process of writing our PR FAQ, you're gonna realize, oh, wait a second, I don't have this information. I should go and figure it out. So let me give an example here. One of the questions might be, how are customers solving this problem today? right? And you're going to have to answer that question. So you go like, oh, wait a second. I'm not sure how customers are solving that problem today. I need to go talk to a few customers, maybe 5 or 10 of them to understand like, hey, you told me you had this problem, but like, what do you do today? And it could be that they say like, we don't do anything, but more likely than not, they either use a competitor from what you're trying to do or they use an alternative. Maybe they use Excel and some macros to do things. You want to learn about that as well. Unless you are writing the PR FAQ, you might not even realize that that's a gap in your knowledge and you should understand before you jump in and start solving. One of the issues with founders is sometimes they solve problems that is just not important enough for the customer. If you're solving a nuisance for the customer that is very small, like they might not want to buy your product because they're like, yeah, I have this problem, but it's not a big deal, right? I just ignore it. Or like, I, I use Word or Excel or Google Spreadsheets or whatever, you know, to address it. Um, so you need to know that before you invest your, your life, your resources, your time into it.

I love that. How do you get hold of these questions? Are these questions in your book? Are these questions, you know, hidden secrets when it comes, you know, from Amazon's perspective? Or are these questions I need to come up about myself when it comes to FAQ?

Yeah, it's a little bit of everything that you just described. So on my book, I have 50 or 60 of those questions that you can draw from, right, that speak to the feasibility, viability, usability, and value, uh, of what you're trying to do. But also there are questions that are going to be very specific to your project, right? Like, you can't come up with that question unless it was in your context, right? Like, if you are an airline and you're trying to launch a new mobile app or a feature within a mobile app, there are questions that are going to be specific for that context. So my book cannot include that. But some of the core questions are like, what problem are you trying to solve for the customer? Who is the customer? How are they solving this problem today? Like, these are common questions that you can find in the book that help you fill out your PR FAQ.

Okay. I love that. So there's a, there's an element of fundamentally applicable questions to any industry, which just like literally from healthcare apps to, to some instruction type of prop techs or whatever, everybody should ask this. And then there's industry-specific questions, which people need to come up with themselves. So if, if I'm this, right, so I have an industry and I want to have industry-specific questions, what is the thought pattern I could use to you come up with these questions? Is it as, hey, let's use ChatGPT and, you know, get some help? Or is it there's some tips you can give, Marcelo, of how people should come up with these questions?

Yeah, that's a fantastic question, by the way, Mike. No one has asked me that before. So yes, you can use ChatGPT to ask for like, which questions I should be answering here? And by the way, I do have a PR FAQ ChatGPT. That is custom to help people with that. People can go to the website and use that. But the core element to figure out which questions to ask is, is it a question that's going to help us define vision and strategy?

Vision and strategy.

So, okay, PR FAQ stays on the realm of vision and strategy, not tactics, execution, technology, none of that, right? So what you're not going to see on the PR FAQ is, uh, which technology we're going to use to build our mobile app.

I get you.

That's not going to be on the PR FAQ because it's a very tactical question, right? However, saying that you will have a mobile app is strategy, right? So is it a website or a mobile app, or is a phone number that people call? That's strategy. So you need to put that in the PR FAQ. So that's a question like, how do customers are gonna find us, right? And that's an example of that.

Okay.

So you have to be careful with the questions because people tend to go too low level, right? We wanna see wireframes, we wanna see mocks, we wanna see architectural diagrams, we wanna see marketing plans. Like these are not important at the PR FAQ discussions. The PR FAQ is what you do in the first 2 weeks of a project, right? Before you commit to do anything. So you spend a week or 2 working on this PR FAQ and then you make a decision that is like, yes, this feels like the right thing for us to pursue. Let's pursue this opportunity. Now you go and you start doing the planning and the roadmap and the wireframing and all the debate about the tactical elements of it.

Okay. So you mentioned 5 pages and And I had this in my mind, it's like, how deep do you go with these questions? And as well, you know, what is the amount of questions? So if you want to write 5 pages of A4, I imagine, and at the, you know, font of 12 size, uh, that's still like a, you know, a good amount of, uh, content which we need to cover. And as well, should we think about the answers we're providing for, for this section as in a client could read this? We could put this online on a website for everyone to see. Or do they have a notion from, you know, this is internal and, you know, it's more maybe leaning somewhere? Or is it more like everyone will see this? We're literally going to put this on our presale page to answer the questions our potential future clients might have.

Yeah, it's an internally confidential document.

Okay.

You're going to have answers there that are financial answers. You know, you might have people's names there. You might have, you know, details about your differentiation against your competitor that you don't want out in the world, right? What I've seen done in the past is some people want to publish their PR FAQ and they redact, they cut a few things from the PR FAQ so they can publish that with just some of the aspects of it, but not everything, right? And you wouldn't publish the business plan that you use for your business or a product requirement document that you use for your business or the OKR for your business. So you probably won't publish your PR FAQ as well.

Okay, I love that. Okay, so that, that's— that gives us as well a very good confidence in what we're doing. Hopefully, once we're finished with that, we feel a lot more confident about how we're going to spend our time. We get some direction, we get some answers. We probably as well understand what we don't want to build. So it gives us focus. So it's all very, very positive. And now this press release, like how do we approach the press release? Let's say I never wrote a press release. I don't even know what goes to press release. Yes.

Yeah, that's right. So you start from the FAQs and in the book I provide a more specific direction on how you start with the FAQs. And I say like start with the questions that are facts and data about the market first. Because you don't have to think too much about it, right? If you're doing something on the travel industry, you get the data, you answer the questions about that, you interview travelers, you put the questions there and the answers there. Then you answer the things that require creativity, right? Like how we're going to solve it, how customers are going to find it, what data do we need to build this solution. And once you do that, you start to see your product vision taking shape. So the press release is almost like the summary of the product vision, right? And there is a structure to that as well. This press release has exact 7 paragraphs. In the book, I explain how you write each one of these paragraphs. And it doesn't have to be super creative. It just has to be practical, right? In the first paragraph, it's gonna be introduction. The second paragraph, you're going to talk about the problem, like the problem that the industry is having, the customer is having, that is an annoyance or a need or a desire. Then on the third paragraph, you're going to describe your solution. Now with our tool, customers don't have this problem anymore because they can do blah, blah, and blah. That's the idea. Each paragraph has other elements to that that you can write. So the advantage of doing that is when you sit down with your team members, with your executives, with your peers or other stakeholders in the organization, and if you're just a founder, if you sit down with your co-founder and they read that press release, they immediately go, "Oh, I get it." Right? And they like, you set their mind on the right place. So that when they start reading the frequently asked questions, they get it, what they are talking about. And the conversation that ensues after that is fantastic, right? Because you set the context, you set a lot of information there. So you can have very meaty conversations on the topic.

Okay. So you mentioned 7. We got intro, problem, and solution. What are the fourth, fifth, and sixth and seventh?

Okay, so the 7 paragraphs are— the first paragraph is the lead, you know, where you're just going to describe in a few short sentences, you know, who, what, where, when, and why. The second paragraph is the problem, you know, a quick description of the need, the pain point, or the desire from the customer that they are having today, and it's not being solved well. Yep. The third paragraph is the solution, like how we're going to solve that problem for the customer. The fourth paragraph is an internal quote. So it's a quote from yourself saying like, I'm really excited about launching this product today because we've been talking with these customers. And if you are the CEO of a company or the founder of a company, you're quoting yourself. If you're a product leader, you might be quoting yourself or quoting an executive. But it's someone from the organization, as if you were selling to the press, but you're not, right? Okay. The fifth paragraph is the how it works. You briefly explain the solution, you know, that customers can use. Yep. The sixth paragraph is the customer quote, uh, and the customer quote is one of the most fun ones to write, right? So what you're gonna say is you're gonna imagine your ideal customer and them explaining like what problem they have today, and then explaining how your product solves their problem.

So it's like a fake review or something like that, like an imaginative review of your product.

Okay, that's right. That's right. And the 7th paragraph is how do you get started? Like, so you could be like, customers can get started today by uploading their information to this website or by installing this app or by going to this store. Like you give a quick explanation about that.

Okay.

Right. So these are the 7 paragraphs of the press release.

I love that. Do we, do we— what's the size of the paragraph? Are we saying they, they all, they all should get enough or equal amount of attention, meaning they all similar in size, or is one of these more important? So we actually going to add more words in one of any of these paragraphs.

Yeah. Usually the problem paragraph, paragraph number 2 and paragraph number 3 are the bigger ones.

The bigger ones.

Yeah.

Okay.

So your press release might be anywhere from 350 to 500 words. And by the way, on the website, I have several examples of PR FAQs that people can download and read to get a sense of what this is and what the final product looks like.

I love that. So you can get an example on your website. So we'll have it in the show notes, of course. So people can actually read this. So this is a very good overview and as well, very tactical way of how to approach validating before you actually build anything. So I have this question, Marcello, like before you actually learned this framework, how did you approach market validation? Like why this, you know, sorry, Gemma, like why this became so big for you? Cause you went like, you know what, I'm going to write a book. Like I'm going to become an expert on this. Like it's clearly had a huge impact on you, right?

Right? Yeah, that's right. So, so before I joined Amazon, I was an entrepreneur for 18 years. Like, I was a founder working on many startups, and I used many frameworks like Business Model Canvas, uh, OKRs, you know, PRDs, all kinds of documents to capture, you know, vision and strategy. Uh, I even wrote press releases, uh, for my startups in the past, but not on this format. And when I joined, what I realized is the PRF— when I joined Amazon, the first few press releases, PR FAQs that I read was very weird. You're not familiar with that style of document and the style of meeting that Amazon has, but then you start seeing the tremendous value that it brings to innovation. So what I realized is that more founders and product leaders could use and could benefit from this framework. And what it does is, it's not really a customer discovery framework. It's a framework that helps you discover what you don't know and helps you capture and think critically about that, right? And create a coherent story so that you can articulate that idea from beginning to end, right? Your PR FAQ is not ready until you read it and you say like, this makes sense.

Okay, so it effectively— it's, it's trying to remove your blinders around the things you're actually trying to build. It's trying to put you in a position where you, you are face to face with the things you don't know. So it's just sort of like, hey, you know, let's get these blinders away from your eyes. You know, here's some other elements you probably have no idea, so you should look and do some research around that. It's a very healthy way of starting, right? And does it help with an actual product iteration and market misalignment? Like, let's say we launched something and, you know, there's some market fit, but it's not great. You know, I could do better, but we already live, right? Can I do the PR FAQ process then? Or is it just when you have nothing at the very beginning?

Yes, you can do it then. Let me just take a step back because you said something that I think it's important. The PR FAQ helps you see your blind spots. Yes, it does, but also help you think critically because writing has been scientifically proven to help you think because it activates a different part of the brain, right? So as you're writing, you're discovering what you don't know. So you're gonna have to go out and do some research, but you're discovering also how this, this story unfolds. So it helps you think about what you want to discover. Right? And sometimes you don't need to discover because you already know, but it's helping you flush it out from your brain into the paper. Right? Now, the question that you ask is, can I use it after I launch a product? Yes. Every time you want to change vision or change strategy, you can use a PR FAQ. So that could be the vision or strategy for the entire business or the entire product, or just for a feature. Maybe there's a set of features that you want to change how you're doing. Let's say you have a product that has a list of customers and you're implementing tagging or label on these customers. You can write a PR FAQ about that to discuss why is this valuable for the customers or not. You're focusing on a very specific use case, problem that they have with your product already. And you're trying to create a solution for that. So you can do that.

Okay.

But the other scenario that you can use the PR FAQ as well is to realign the team, right? Often what happens is teams are not clear on strategy and vision. So people are moving in different directions. They are making different assumptions about the strategy. So writing a PR FAQ helps bring everyone together to say like, oh yes, this is what we're doing.

Okay, I actually love that. There's a couple of things here, Marcello. So one, you said writing engages different parts of your brain, which allows you to just connect up on different level with the content you're writing. 100%. But for me, it's actually pen writing. So the question I would have, doesn't matter if you, if you try to build the FAQ and press release by hand, or can you just keyboard type, or is it just up to the people, basically the science behind it, which you mentioned, do you know if you have to do that by hand writing or can you just use keyboard?

You can use the keyboard. I read some articles about pen writing being more powerful than keyboard writing for sure, because it activates even more parts of your brain. So you're correct about that. But the process of writing the PR FAQ is a little bit more complicated than I'm describing. On the book, I explain it, right? So there is 3 different phases. To it, right? Okay, so the first phase is the information collection. Like, you're collecting as much information as you can about the customer, the problem, you know, possible solutions, market, uh, alternatives, um, search, uh, engines and how people are finding it, what people are searching for. Like, all those things, you're making notes. Um, and personally, I like to make notes on, on a piece of paper as well. Just like you, right? So I make all those notes on a piece of paper, but then I transcribe them to the computer because the second phase is collate. Like, how do you organize all these notes? Like, how do you create association? And in the book, I even recommend, like, if you want, you can write those notes in cards and then spread them out and try to organize them, right? So the cards with the same theme are next to each other. But doing that digitally sometimes is easier. And the third phase is the compose, is when you write, actually. So you can write using pen and paper if you want to, or you can write using the keyboard. For me, I always use the keyboard on that case.

Okay. I feel like I wouldn't know what you collect the data upon. So is Is that like, I look at the questions first, I don't write anything, but I know what I'm trying to answer. Then I go look for the data, I get all the facts, then I have just scattered amount of facts, which I'm trying to group and put some structure into it. And then I use that to actually write out the FAQ section, right? And it's almost like an iterative process. Like I try to write, I go like, okay, well, I'm still missing something. Then I go back to step one. I look for more data, you know, put the data in groups again and then write. Feels like you probably would be doing this multiple times, isn't it?

That's, that's right. Yeah. But the way most people do research is the first thing is they go to Google or they go to ChatGPT and ask questions. Right. And then once you answer those, those questions, by the way, these are not peer-reviewed questions, just like questions like, is it possible to do X? And then you read an article about it and like, oh, there are 3 interesting points about it. But once you read things, you also like come up with more questions that you want to answer to, right? So you end up doing more research, more Google search, more, uh, asking more questions to ChatGPT. Um, so every one of this becomes like a bullet point in a long list of like things that you say like, I want to capture this. Yeah, right. Um, and some of that you don't even know it's going to be relevant or not to what you're writing, but like you're capturing, capturing, capturing. So when you're doing a PR FAQ, you're probably going to capture anywhere from 100 to 500 bullet points of things, right? Like you run into a document that points to another document, it's like, oh, you want to capture that as well, right? That information. So, uh, you end up with a lot, a lot.

It definitely sounds like a lot, like a deep rabbit hole type of situation, but Effectively, you want to do that because with every discovery, you're increasing your chance of success or you're de-risking your startup because of that research which you're doing right now.

Yes.

So you don't want to just jump over and be lazy in that process. Okay. I really loved Marcello, the fractal element of this framework, which I would love to understand more. So you said you can do this on a feature, you can do this on the whole project and the service, and you can do that on a business. So let's say I'm doing this on a business. Let's say, you know, the business is what it is. I want to pivot some cultural elements. Would the questions be different then? And but, you know, the press release is the same. Effectively, where I'm going with this is that a feature or a service, I see that being a product sort of like similar. But, you know, writing this or using the framework for a business that feels like, you know, it's a little bit different. Like, you know, either the questions would be different or approach would be different somehow. Can you give us some insights into that?

Yeah, if you're a very, very large business that has, uh, multiple products, uh, multiple programs, multiple services, then it might not make sense to have a PR FAQ for, for the business. But if you are a startup or a smaller business and you might have like one or two products that are complementary and a few programs that are part of that as well, then you can have a PRFAQ that is like, hey, this is why we exist. Like, this is the problem that we are solving in the world, right? And then other products can write their own PRFAQ within the business to describe how they are part of that solution. So you mentioned product features, but you can also use the PRFAQ for programs. For services, for policies, and even for processes. Like anything that you can change, you know, to solve a problem can be a PRFAQ.

I love that. That's a very good way, right? So that's almost like a slogan for the whole framework. It's like anything is a problem, you can solve it, you can use the framework to unpack it. I actually love that. That has such a such a wide applicability, right? So I asked the question before about the product strategy and iterating or pivoting on wrong products. So that's clearly applicable as well. You can just reuse that for pivots and, and realigning yourself. And then that leads to that internal element you talked about, realigning the teams. So I'm a product owner, or it doesn't matter, maybe I'm a team lead, maybe I'm a head of engineering, you know, these titles probably doesn't matter, but effectively I'm sitting in some type of like executive position to some extent, and I'm seeing that people are not pulling the same direction. So you could use OKRs and things like that to realign the team. But what we're saying that actually doing PF IQ process will be great for everyone because you'll get the answers, you know, you'll get the press release, you'll give it to the team and you'll go, can you read this? Which means everybody gets on the same page instantly, right?

Yes. And I would say I love OKRs, by the way. I think OKRs are great. But OKRs are not very good at answering why and setting the boundaries of how you build something, which is the strategy, right? Strategy is a process of setting boundaries and making decisions of what's in, what's out, and what we're not doing and what we're doing. So OKRs can't capture that, number one. So that's why PRFAQ should come before OKR. The other advantage as well is In any team, you're gonna have people joining and people leaving. You know, you're gonna have new employees joining the organization. You're gonna have people that will not work on this project joining the project. And the first thing they're gonna ask is like, how do I get started? Uh, and the best way to get started is like read the PR FAQ first, right? That's the first thing you need to do because at least you're gonna understand the vision, uh, and the strategy, which combined make up the direction that this team is going to.

I love that. I mean, the new starters and the fact that they just plug themselves into your teams— there's so much of broken telephone type of situation I see where someone sends something, that someone passes that information to someone else, that someone passes the information, and you have these communication nodes, and at every node there's something is expressed differently and people receive it, uh you know, with their biases in different ways. And the more people you have, the more diluted the message is. And sometimes it's just totally not what the message was when someone started. So when people come into the teams, they talk with many people, uh, they're not on the same— very often they're not on the same page where they should be. I love the fact that they can just go back at any point in time to PR FAQ document and go like Let me just read this one more time. Okay, I'm back in. That's excellent. Why more companies are not doing this? Is this like a secret which just became known like in the last year, Marcello? It's like, that sounds like excellent, right? So much value. Why market is just not adopting this at scale?

Yeah. So maybe I want to imagine that is because there wasn't a book about it and now there's a book about it.

I love that.

I just wrote the book. Book. But in all seriousness, I think there is a little bit of resistance to adopting PRFAQ. Because what happens in most organizations is people use Google Slides or PowerPoint to define vision and strategy.

Yeah.

And those are not very good tools. Yeah, right. Because on Google Slides and PowerPoint, you cannot capture a coherent narrative. Like you can pretend that you have a vision strategy, but what you have is a story full of gaps that is told in bullet points. And people leave some vision strategy meetings feeling really good about like, yeah, let's do this. Like this sounds brilliant. But then like the months that follow that meeting, they start to realize how much they don't know. And there was so much friction and dysfunction and stress on the teams. What they don't realize is they are not on the same page. They filled out the gaps with their own assumptions and their own stories that they made up in their mind because it wasn't part of the original document. And so, because there were so many people doing slides and PowerPoint, people don't feel like they need to write. And they also feel like people don't like to read. Right? The reality is it's not a lot of writing. It is not a lot of reading, but it provides so much alignment and value and direction for the team that is totally worth it.

It's one of these, another good practice of Amazon where you come in a meeting and everybody reads the, you know, the notes of a meeting before they start actually talking. So I feel like if you're coming into some type of alignment, or talking about what's going to get built in the next quarter. Everybody should just be silent for 20 minutes and just read PFAQ and then have a conversation. That just feels good. But again, like you mentioned, not everybody does that. I do want to pick on slides, Marcello. So, so many pitch decks I've seen. I've been involved in building pitch decks, which, you know, trying to raise pre-seed, seed, Series A and Bs. And no one ever brought a supporting— in my experience, no one ever brought a supporting document which would be PR FAQ style of that type of document. And all the disadvantages of slides which you just mentioned is there in a pitch deck as well. So how can founders looking to, you know, raise money actually utilize this framework to just do better in pitching competitions?

Yeah, I think there is a place for slide decks and PowerPoints, right? So if you are just conveying information to people, if you're not asking for feedback, if you're not collaborating, slides are fine, right? If you're giving a talk at a conference or you're presenting to 100 employees, you know, something like the slides are fine for that. Um, for pitch decks, I think the best approach is— I— presenting a PR FAQ to an investor might not work as expected because some investors don't want to read, right? And you are trying to convince someone to invest in your business. I would still try and bring a PR FAQ to one of these meetings in print form and/or, you know, provide a digital version if you're doing a Zoom call with an investor. But if you write the PR FAQ first and then do the slides later, you don't have the gaps, right? Your slides are just a translation of the PR FAQ in this case, which is totally fine, right? You thought through, you know, all aspects of the customer, the problem, the market, the solution, the go-to-market. So your slides don't have the typical gaps that most pitch decks have because they started from, you know, the presentation instead of starting from the document.

Yeah.

And so what I say in the book is the PR FAQ is the source of the information that goes into your slides, goes into your OKR, goes into your roadmap, goes into your PRD. But you start from the PR FAQ. Even the other people not gonna see it. So that's a good place to start.

I love that. So in general, how I think about pitch decks, you got clarity, you got execution, and you have a proof of market demand. When you come to pitch, as flashy as they look, you have something on these slides, you're pitching, you're having, you know, your presentation, then you'll get the questions. right? And, and any investor will basically stress test your idea with very aggressive questions. And that process of doing PFAQ before you do the slides will actually prepare you for that pitch so much better because it will hopefully unveil the, the blinders you have, the unknowns for you. And you just, you're just gonna come with a lot more clarity and confidence around that. And according to Forbes, startups with well-structured documentation are 60% more likely to secure fundings. So even if you don't use that directly, the preparation you'll get from that will have huge benefits in that pitch process itself. So I love that. So it just feeds into everything then, Marcello. It's like, it's almost like step 0. It's not even step 1. It's just fundamentally speaking, if it's like putting shoes on before you run, like, uh, like, you just do that. Like, it should just be baked into any type of, you know, startup-ish process, isn't it?

Yes. And I agree with you. It's step zero. It's before you even start. And that brings up a good question, which is, sometimes you write a PR FAQ, and your decision is not to do it. Right? Because in the process of writing and discovering and learning, you realize, oh, this problem is not as big as we thought it was. Yeah. Or this problem doesn't even exist, or the solution is too costly to implement. So one of the benefits of PRFAQ, you avoid like going on into dead ends, right? Like it's not like 6 months later you discover that customers didn't care about that problem, like you mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, or the solution is going to take 5 times longer to build than we initially thought. Right? So you're using the PR FAQ early on to make a decision if you should go or should not go in that direction.

I love that. It's just, yeah, not engaging with things which will lead nowhere. How often does that happen in your experience, Marcello? It's like when people do this, and I imagine you have many successful use cases and use cases which just stops in your consulting practice. It's like, what's the statistical sort of measurements? Like, how often people get like, oh, I did that, thanks Marcello, I realized there's really no, no opportunity over here?

Yeah, uh, I don't have data about it. My, my estimate is that more than 50% of the time, uh, writing up your FAQ leads to a no-go decision.

Okay.

Right, either not launching that startup, uh, and no-go doesn't mean like I'm not gonna do anything, it means like That one didn't work. Let's think about something else, right? So a friend of mine, for example, he's a founder. He spent a year considering which business to start again because he wanted to build a new startup and he wrote a handful of PR FAQs. 4 of them went nowhere. One of them, he ended up building the company.

How successful was he? Oh, he is?

He was very successful. The company was acquired for almost $200 million recently.

Nice. That's a good use case for the framework itself. Any other real stories which comes to your mind, you know, right now as a fresh one to give to the listeners as how well you can utilize the framework and, you know, what you should sort of expect if you do that right?

Yeah. Can you repeat the question?

Any use cases where, just like this one, where applying PRFAQ framework led to great success?

Yeah, I mean, on Amazon, every product, you know, that Amazon has launched over the last 20 years was backed by a PRFAQ.

Like literally everything.

So everything.

Okay.

And most features within products as well. So Kindle, Alexa, AWS, you know, the fashion store on Amazon.com. Like everything is backed by a PR FAQ. I also seen startups using the PR FAQ as part of their annual planning, right? So, you know, folks write 3, 4, or 5 PR FAQs and then they do their, their annual planning and use that as the basis to have vision and strategy conversations of like what they want to build the next year.

I love that. I mean, if it definitely feels like it should be like a global type of framework, but it's like you mentioned, maybe it's not getting adopted at scale, at the global scale, because there was never a book, which raises this question, why Amazon never wrote a book? Like why, uh, why you wrote that, Marcello? It's like, did Amazon allow you to write that book? Did you ask them? Or is it just like common knowledge? So, so there's no real, you know, conflict of interest. You just went ahead and you wrote it.

Yeah. I talked with Amazon about it and they were, they were fine. They were excited about me writing this book. But the same thing with OKR, right? So OKR was invented by Intel and adopted by Google, and neither of them wrote the book. Yeah, you're right. And by the way, the book for OKRs was written by John Doerr in 2015, 2016, and OKRs have been around for 20 years.

Yeah.

So now we talk about OKRs, that's like everyone knows OKRs, everyone uses OKRs. But for 20 years, only very few companies use it. So I think PR FAQ is going to be similar to that, right? It's going to take another decade for it to get widely adopted. And it takes practice as well. It's not going to be the first PR FAQ that you do that's going to turn out good, right? It's going to be 2, 3, 4 times before you feel like, oh, I get it. I get it how to do this well and how to maximize the value from this framework.

Okay. I love that. I would love in like 10 to 5 years to actually see that becoming so big as OKRs and see what the market actually takes it. 'Cause this is like press release plus FAQs. Maybe someone comes up with a third thing, which even makes it even bigger or whatnot. So this is all exciting, Marcello. So let's say I'm listening right now and I'm like, I'm a founder and I know this would help me greatly. How people can find more information about this, how they can get in touch with you and see if you could help them?

Yeah, I think the first thing if you want to get started with this is read a few PR FAQs. So go to my website, which is www.theprfaq.com, download the example PR FAQs, read them to get a sense of it. And then on the website, you're going to find templates and resources and articles and even the link to buy the book. If you want to. And, and that's a great place to get started, like, to see if this is going to work for you or not.

I love that. We'll have that in the show notes as well, just for your convenience there, listeners. Just scroll down, see that. So great episode today. I really, really enjoyed that. There was so many flashbacks for me, Marcello, going through my own journey as a founder, all the failed startups I had and you know, couple of them being successful. When I reflect back, I wish I would knew that, especially with the failed ones. I wish I would knew that. They would have saved me so much time, so much energy, and so much money as well. So thank you, Marcello, for a great episode. And to our dear listeners, if you have a value in the show, make sure you share that with your founders and startup networks. Make sure they know about PFAQ and can utilize that. For this success. And as well, subscribe, reviews. We love your questions. Stay safe until the next time. See you online.