180: Jon Warner — The SLAM (Startup Launch Assistance Map) Process

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G Again, that's doxatalent.com BillG One more time. Docsatalant.com Bill G Check it out today. So this show is all about scaling.

Up, about growing things once you've got them started. But every now and then you need to launch a new product or service or even a new business unit. And some of you are even startup phase listeners, getting your work done early to get on the scale up path. So today's show is all about some easier ways to get the startup phase and address that. So whether you're just beginning or you're already growing a business, we're going to talk about specific the startup phase and how you could use it, even an existing business, to launch something new. Listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is a new friend from Southern California. John Warner is a five time CEO and widely respected in the world of entrepreneurship, having founded LED3 startups. He's also a speaker on businesses to businesses at colleges and conferences all over the world. He lectures on entrepreneurship, both the undergraduate and the MBA level. He's done over 40 books now and all around business management. So a book an hour from John. Welcome to the show John.

Thanks very much Bill. Good to be here.

Yeah. John and I became friends through Friends of Friends more recently and have collaborated on some stuff and I thought John's book was an interesting topic for our conversation today. One we don't always talk about that's relevant. So slam is Startup Launch Assistance Map the SLAM process is a process that builds on some other things. We'll talk about it in a minute. But even though we're the world of scaling up, there are many times that well, for one we have some startups in our listeners and two from the folks who are purely scale up. There are times when you want to launch a new product or service or Go into a new market area. And so for that it's useful to know and understand this initial phase before we get into the scaling up framework, the Rockefeller habits and great execution we want to develop and successfully launch whether it's the company or the product. So really excited to have this on. Thank and have you on. Welcome to show again.

Great stuff.

Are you down in LA today?

Yeah, I actually live in Palm Springs.

Oh nice.

Yeah, I mean a very beautiful part of the world in here in Southern California.

Well it's, it feels like Palm Springs where I am today in Northern California. We're at that end of the summertime or just past the summer where it's just hot as hell up here and, and we don't really have super functioning air conditioning like you all do down in Palm Springs.

Yeah, we can't live without it in Palm Springs, I can tell you.

Yeah, I've been. My office is upstairs in the sunny backside of the house and I like on days like today I go hide in other parts. I start outside in the morning when it's nice and have my coffee and do my morning work out there and then I then I sort of move inside of the colder, darker places.

Good plan.

So talk to us about share with our listeners a little bit more about your background. Where'd you come from? Got a funny accent. Tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to write this particular book before we get into the book itself.

Sure. So the quick story. Let me start with a funny accent. I'm English born, I left the UK in my late twenties. I was working with Exxon at the time, a very large corporation. I went down under to Australia with Exxon, ended up running operations down there, ended up as a general manager in that very large system. Got bored with corporate life and I at that point decided I was going to go off into the world of management consulting and had a ball for a decade just working for many, many different industries. That was my first window on the world of intrapreneurship. So in other words, new divisions, new businesses that were being spaw by the larger ones. And I fell in love with that, that whole approach and that whole focus area at the same time I'd begun writing. In fact I was blogging in the 1990s before I guess it was a thing. So I always had the discipline to write and I did that in my consulting life. So every time I sort of discovered something new that I didn't understand that well, I would work that out by researching it and then you know, putting to market something that was the result of my research efforts and it just became a discipline for me. So one of the reasons I've written as many books as I have is because that discipline started really early and I was writing about the business challenges that I was encountering and, you know, where possible solutions might lie. From that, I ended up very much in the startup world. I had an opportunity to start my my own first startup at the time I launched my own consulting business, which I, I grew to about $4 million at the time and had a staff of 10 working for me. And then subsequently to that, I had two other startups, one in the fintech area and then one in the publishing realm, which was great fun. I like to say I'm batting one for three because I got one exit where I actually sold the company and made some money. I had one spectacular failure and one I got at by the skin of my teeth. So that gave me the experience. That's a quick summary, Bill.

Yeah. So you obviously learned a lot about the world of startups along the way. I love a couple things. So for one, we both did entrepreneurship type things. So I started a division within a company or a group, we call them market groups, and I grew it over 500 million. And I think it was really valuable lesson because. Or opportunity because it really gave me a chance to work through a bunch of stuff on somebody else's nickel with the whole safety net and structure around it. Of course I left thinking I should make more money and all that actually got pushed out, but that's a story for another day and then went on to do. But I think that's a really useful thing. And I also think what's interesting about your background is that mix of success and failures, right? I mean, you want to have a little bit of success to have anything to stand on, but you want to go through some challenges, including some painful failures in order to really be relevant, relatable. Somebody who just sails through with under a lucky star isn't really helpful to.

Everyone as a teacher, and I know it's trite to say it, but you know, we learn. You know, I don't know whether it's twice as much, but it's certainly an order of magnitude more from the failures than we do the successes because we have to dig ourself out of a hole. And that's certainly true of me. My spectacular failure was horrible at the time, but as I look back on it, I learned a ton and it's served me well, you know, in the.

Years since then, you know, every time I have a particularly painful failure and I think about the financial cost of whatever it was, I have a friend who always reminds me that it's just tuition, just paid some tuition.

Education. But it's an education.

It's time to make use of the lesson. He'll say, so that's awesome. So talk to us. So the book is the process, Slam process. And I think as we share, maybe it's best to start off with a story you shared. A few stories coming in. Maybe talk about Greenwash to kick us off. Sure.

So, you know, Greenwash is an example of a company that I was using the slam methodology on, you know, a little while ago, before I even published the book. Book literally came out on the 1st of August. But I was using this whole methodology in the last couple of years. And just by way of context, Bill, you know, this is very much consistent with the whole Lean business startup methodology that people like Steve Blank invented and people like Eric Reop promulgated and of course the Lean Business model canvas that comes out of that. This is an iteration above and beyond it. And I evolved it by working with multiple companies because I found that whole process somewhat limiting for a bunch of reasons. So the slam methodology was a way of doing two things fundamentally. One, making sure we covered all the ground that was necessary. And I felt there were some areas that needed diving into a whole lot more than the business Lean Business model canvas allowed for, but also making the journey a little bit more sequential. So Greenwash is a very good example of a business that was. Came out of a university. It was a student project to begin with and it was in the water industry in this case. And it was a very green project. And at the time they were looking to create literally a product that would give people a solar powered shower that they could use. And we used the slam methodology to see if we could validate that whole idea, to see if it had scale potential. That's where Greenwash started. So let me pause there.

Why don't you walk us through how it went and tell the story of the thing because I think it's interesting. Right, here's something that sounds interesting. Okay, we're going to do solar washing shower facility. Right. And you could think of some. Tell the story because I. It's interesting how they pivot.

Yeah, you will. So. So yes, give you an idea of the product. This is actually a portable product. It's solar powered within a five gallon drum of water which lasts all day, multiple showers, maybe, you know, 100 showers in a day and can be put anywhere. And originally the thought of the whole student team and the professor that was leading that team was that this would be great for homeless people. This might be great in rock concerts, you know, putting it in Coachella and Burning man and all the rest of it, where people needed a shower and might pay for it. Very early on, when we were starting off using the Islam methodology, step one in that whole process is really understand the problem you're solving for, dig into the unmet need and make sure there's consumer demand for what it is you're pitching. And immediately we hit a problem because they were a solution, looking for a problem to solve. And actually there wasn't a problem in the festival market, There wasn't a problem in the homeless market, per se, at least not one they could pay for. So we spent the very early days saying, wait a minute, we've actually. Right. The very first step. Got to go and make sure we understand where this might apply. So we hit a pretty major pivot very early out of the gate. And that was to actually start looking at the disaster market post disaster. So if we take this in a California context, this was the looking at post fire, post flood, where individuals are displaced from their home and they haven't been sent off to some nice hotel somewhere, they are in something, camp somewhere or other, and they wanted fresh water to do a number of things, including showering. So that was a very early lesson that digging into that unmet need, that very step one needed a different approach. I count that as one of our early successes.

So they shifted that and they found some buyers and started to grow based on that.

Yeah. So the customer discovery then took us wholly into, at the big end of town, the world of FEMA and how they fund disaster response, you know, including equipment and including water supplies. And then took us down a path of saying, let's recruit the expertise on the team that we need to actually deal with all of the players in that space, including the Red Cross, including the various branches of the military, including cities, including other players within the ecosystem at a local level. And then I think the value proposition started to shift because the product they needed to supply ended up being a little different. And actually showering didn't become the primary. That portable water supply became a very different value proposition because the first thing out of the gate that people wanted was drinkable water. That's a whole. Potable water is a whole different thing from showering water. You can shower in grey water. You can't do that with drinking water. So the business pivoted again in terms of the product offering, and we were able to map that out just through going really deep in terms of talking to, by this stage, the customers that were now the proper target for it to go and focus upon. And they got some great feedback very early, including, for example, from the Navy in California that said, as you evolve this product, we would want this at scale and are willing to pay for it at scale. So it was a very big change from where they started.

Yeah, it's really interesting how I served in the Air Force many years ago, and you initially go out and you sleep on the ground and do that kind of thing as you move into an area or do something more like the army or the Marines or something. But then, then as you establish a base or a camp or whatever, then you build a whole facility and behind that, and when the showers come in and the hot food, like life changes, suddenly you're in luxury.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Getting clean and having all of that. And it's interesting that they, they find a particular market segment, I hear, and then they start to deliver similar complimentary items to that same segment. Right.

Yeah.

So it's not merely it's water solutions or so it's. It's drinking and bathing.

Yeah. And washing. So it became a multitude of things that the customer wanted. And of course, that's the key. In the end, validating a startup isn't about the quality of your idea and pushing it to market. It's about what the customer wants and it being fit for purpose. And of course, this is where this much used phrase product market fit comes from. Now, which I always think needs to be used in reverse. It's really market product fit because you want to start with the customer or what does the market want? And the product should fit that. Very often we reverse those and think that, well, we should develop a product in some kind of prototype mode and just push it to market. And sometimes that can work, but more often than not, it's just not quite fit for purpose. And sometimes it's just nothing like what that customer beachhead market wants, you know, out of the gate.

Well, it seems to me there's two different paths that this could have gone, right. Maybe you could speak to it. But one of them is they say, okay, that didn't help the homeless market, so let's figure out how to solve their problem. Let's stay in that market. Instead they said, no, we have this thing, somebody else could use it. Let's find, find out who could value and pay for this. And so they find a different market segment. And then honing in on that particular market segment, as they grow, they find additional things to deliver that customer, which is efficient because finding the customers is a more expensive thing than reselling or serving them with additional unmet needs, Right?

Absolutely. And I think that whole concept of find a market that you can monetize early on, I mean, whether you're a large company launching a new product or you're a. A tiny startup, doing this for the first time is crucial because you do want to go and try and get your revenue flowing. It's important to cash flow in both circumstances. And this is somewhat counterintuitive in my mind. Dominating a small market that wants what you've got may not be the path to riches, but actually all businesses are grown step at a time. You don't become a unicorn company overnight. You grow it by dominating tribes of customers one tribe at a time. Eventually you can boil the ocean, to use the phrase, but that's not how it starts. So I think this is even consistent with venture capital these days that says, tell me where you're going to start your journey, not so much where you're going to finish. We'll figure that out along the way. But tell me where your first hundred customers are going to come from. Your first thousand customers, then your first 10,000. I don't want to know that the planet will eventually be interested in this. Maybe, but not before I know the answers to those questions.

Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. I mean, I think about that. I could think about this a lot of different ways. So one of them, I'm reminded of some of the clients that we've worked with in one commercial laundry service that scaled. We've actually done a couple companies in this category and they realized, well, they have these customers and they drive trucks and they serve them and. And they have facilities and people and a whole process to serve, to clean and improve and repair the garments and related things. And so then they started to think, well, what else could we sell those people? And what else could we get on that truck? How could we optimize that, stop that customer relationship like that, or add stops that are already along the route rather than adding more trucks and drivers, which was the harder part.

Way to go. Yeah, yeah.

Getting that more efficient and adding things on. And then I. I'm also struck by like, well, I. So I used to coach leadership stuff. It didn't pay that well in the early days. And then I. And then I Started focusing more and more. So it was general leadership and then more into entrepreneurship and then into scaling and. And one of the insights I had is that the people really willing to spend and work with me and invest the time and the money were the people that had big growth goals. But I also realized those were people, like, I could relate to their goal. Like, I got off on it, I was into it. I was passionate about it. You know, that kind of.

Absolutely. And I think that's also about finding a group of customers that completely fit on both sides of the equation. Right. That they're right you and you're right for them. And if you find that it's a. It's a wonderful thing.

Well, it seems like that company, if they found that they hated working with large institutions like a fema, like a state organization, like a Red Cross, or even the Department of Defense, then they would have a real problem. You know, if they were just completely advocates for homeless issues, then they would want to change the product offering or do something or find a different business model than this one, where clearly they must have liked working with those institutional buyers, large organizations.

Yeah, I think it definitely plays. You know, this is to the. To the point of accessibility and, you know, can we actually get business done? I think at the beginning, though, it's more an issue of is there demand and can I actually monetize the supply of my product or service to that particular end customer? Because it's only a beachhead, I think you're able then to go after markets that are harder to go after or don't monetize quite as well, but perhaps are bigger. So I think it's a juggling act from the beginning.

Yeah. So there's a balance between the two things. We'll talk about your model in a second. The other one that you shared was a tech business in Southern California. Can you talk about that one a little bit?

Yeah, I can. And this is a business that's in the data science world. And in fact, the two founders of this business came from very big businesses, one of which was Facebook, and the other one was Google. And they went out on their own because they thought they could take smart analytics, smart AI and data science to market generally. And I think the issue there at step one, this unmet need, was they were trying to boil the ocean. I think they originally thought that a lot of corporations would want data scientists to solve problems for them. So their marketing was very broad. They were trying to go and solve almost any issues, almost as if they were saying they're super smart people throw us any problem and we'll solve it because we're really good data scientists and we've got fast and powerful computers. That's a really tough message to sell. As we dug into that, what do you do?

I don't know, what do you want? What problems you solve? Big ones.

Yeah. And so I think as they dug into that and we said well let's narrow this to what do people want? They started doing a lot more, more hard listening. And the issue that came back again, again will resonate with you because I think it occurs, you know, in larger scale companies were two things. One was the, the cost of customer acquisition and the other was what's the long term value of that customer? And in fact they then pivoted again so that they narrowed their offering to say, look, we don't solve every problem, but we can solve those two problems really well. We can take a data set from a company and we can concatenate it into a number of databases, build a data warehouse, interrogate that and then create real insights in terms of your customer acquisition and your long term value. And in fact they blended those into a concept they call customer lifetime value as a sort of a blend of the two and ended up building a product, a self provisioning product out of that blend. And that suddenly got them customers very quickly and got them into a SaaS model that they wanted to get into rather than kind of a project mentality. And that's eminently more scalable in terms of doing it that way just by narrowing the beachhead and not trying to boil the ocean.

Yeah, it's interesting. So much about scale is about the focus and I've seen companies struggle. In fact, one company that we coached was with mixed success really, but fairly large right through very, you know, billion dollar valuation. And there they really struggled because as they hit that, as they hit some size and employee count, they started to think, well, we can tackle multiple markets and go after all kinds of things and we can have different product groups and it was just way too big. And you can't go up against the, the Googles of the world like that with a head on kind of thing. You've got to, you've got to get smart and focus a little bit and be like everything to a few people or the most powerful thing to a few, right?

I think so. And I think there's another thing that I think you make a really good point. There are lots of things that Google can't focus on or Microsoft or Samsung or Apple and I think if you can find that niche, you can actually get a long way to quite a bit of revenue. And at that point, you're in the realm of having freedom on your side, then to invest where you want to go, including those companies being an exit play, potentially, as time goes by, as a possible option. So niching actually is hugely beneficial, even in the long term.

Yeah. What is it that they can't do? I have a couple companies right now competing in these things, and their exit opportunities are like, sell to Google is on the table. And so they're doing things that Google is not well positioned to do today and are doing badly. And I'm like, well, we can start to gobble up that piece and then maybe they'll be interested in us. And that gives them one of the options.

Yep, exactly.

You also shared, sort of studying how this looked in a fairly large company. That's an interesting comparison. Talk to us about the Amazon Web Service aws.

So Amazon's a nice story because Jeff Bezos has always been an advocate of the lean business model canvas methodology, uses it to this day in the organization. But I think the poster child for success in using a lean methodology and being agile and then doing what we've just been talking about, which is sort of niching down, is that I think he's deployed it supremely well with aws. That business, as you'll remember, was very late to the party when it came to web services and going to the cloud. And he actually wanted to be different, wanted to be unique. So his management team was sent away for something like eight or nine months to dig into the unmet need. And the team would come back and say, well, we think we know what the customer wants. And he said, well, if you really corroborated that, have we really got something that's unique and different? And I think he used that time to go and create an offering that really did stand out at the end of the day. And I think the results stand for themselves. That's a $6 billion business today. It's one of the fastest intrapreneurship businesses ever created. I mean, how many companies can get to 6 billion in less than seven years? Now, admittedly, he's a behemoth in terms of he could capitalize that journey, but the success was at the customer level, and it's become the default way for companies to go. So I like it as an example, just because I think they built that internal startup on such a solid foundation of doing something unique for the customer that nobody else was doing at the time. They've been copied since. But he was first out of the gate with a range of new services.

So it's a great thing to think about that that intense, focused understanding and validation which ultimately will include iterations and pivots and adjustments. Right. That you cannot foresee. This is the thing I remember years ago I had a couple of really promising young managers working for me in another business and they were like, well, we planned it out. We thought about. I'm like, okay, so you've got a plan. That doesn't mean it's going to go like your plan says. Right. There's endless quotes around this from no plan survives contact with the enemy to Mike Tyson's version of the same with everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face. Right. We model it out, but until you validate, iterate, tweak it, you like you got nothing.

That's right. And that's why I think validity is such an important thing to test with your customers. It's not about the quality of your idea first and then the customers view second. Go get the customer's view first and it's actually a much cheaper way to go. It doesn't cost this much in today's world to check with your target customer what it is they want and then get that feedback at scale.

Yeah. So when I looked at the model in this process, so the slam process has a part to do the first bit here and then begin to execute. We're going to focus on this first part that is your validation and business model building. I was reminded of the business model canvas. And so talk to us about how this is different, what's different about it before we pick it apart.

Yeah. So the business model canvas, which I've been using for a decade now, since it first came out, is very powerful. But it's got a couple of things that are problematic with it. Number one, it's a series of nine panels which lack sequence. So you can discover the sequence slowly but surely. And it is iterative, but it does confuse a lot of entrepreneurs. What happens as a result of that is very often the right hand side of that canvas, which is really all about the customer, gets used, but then it gets abandoned. I think that's a shame because that's the point at which you really want to use the rest of it. So I think the work was there to deploy, but it isn't deployed in practice. Then I think it missed out a couple of key steps. I think those key steps were fundamentally being really well aware of your competitors and how you stand out from them. And then the second was really understanding the ecosystem that you're trying to enter. So unless you're a brand new product, unless you're Steve Jobs and you're apple and it's 2007 and the world's never seen what you're about to launch, which is pretty rare, you really want to pay attention to the ecosystem that suppliers, economic buyers, influencers and competition. And I think understanding that was never dealt with within the context of the Lean Boss business model canvas. So what slam does is, tries to correct for that. It provides a sequence on the validation side in eight steps, now on the execution side in a further eight steps. And then it provides those missing gap areas, particularly around competition and particularly around ecosystem. So they're covered as part of the journey.

Yeah. So in the beginning you're looking at the unmet needs, the market segment, which one you're going to go after, right?

That's right. And that's going really deep on that, as I said earlier. So you want to make sure that's in the eyes of the customers. I like to distinguish it, Bill, between market research and customer discovery. This is not about having a product in your hot little hand and asking people what they think and they tell you, well, I'd prefer it was in blue rather than black. It's actually not having a product on your hand at all. So this is before you do any of that. And it's really asking what people, what people's pain points are, how they might gain, it's hiding that product away and really asking them what keeps them up at night. That's what you want to do in the unmet need space. Well before you've got to. What effectively is box three on the, on the slam map, which is develop your value proposition or your product or service.

So for the visionary entrepreneur types, the ideators, the innovators out there and our listener, and I know we have a lot of those.

The.

I think a lot of times that idea comes from an intuitive understanding of a problem. But then we get too focused on our solution, too enamored of our own idea and not critically thinking enough back about the market and the problem area. So we get overly attached to our own idea, overly sold and in love with the whole thing. And, and then, and then we lose the sight of solving the customer, which is where the money is, right?

Absolutely. And you've got to get over that. You know, you've got to fall out of love. If you've created a product you Know whether it's an MVP in some cases. Sadly, I see very evolved products. They might even be quite elegant, but they lack customer corroboration that it's what they want. You're far better falling out of love with that idea and, you know, getting back into the discovery world.

It. Yeah, it's interesting. So then second step in your flow here is your own team who's going to work on solving this problem.

Right, right. That's right. And it's not the team, you know, let me go and hire functionally, as you might do in a larger organization. It's really what team do I need around me to solve this particular problem, which is a different ball game. And I think that team is also very flexible. The more early stage that startup is because you don't have a lot of money on hip to go and put lots of people on. So people are going to wear multiple hats. So it's not only direct people that can solve that problem, but who can I use fractionally when it comes to, you know, legal matters or financial matters or even marketing for that matter? And then who can I use on an advisory basis that can help me solve this problem and get from A to B? And B in this case just might be a milestone, it might be a funding milestone, it might be a sort of customer acquisition milestone. So I think team in this case is crucial and it's why it's the second step. Once we have an unmet need, you want to recruit the team that can really solve for that need before you do anything else.

So whether you're a startup or are doing something within an internal innovation, you're first looking at this customer, then you're saying, or this problem out there in the world and then you're picking the team to go to work on it, recruiting the team, developing the team. And in fact, when I think about who gets funding, whether it's internal or external, it's that combination of the two, or we've got a great problem, an interesting problem, a big problem, a growing problem. And then I think these are the people that should go to work on that problem and I'm willing to invest in that, move their time to that, do whatever, and then that team starts to put together a product or service. Right. That fits exactly.

And that's the order of it. I've got a great team to crack this problem and it's credible at that point. Point, because it's following that unmet need. And that's before you've put the value proposition on the table.

But then you go through, all right, now you've got to prove, does that in fact work? Does that solve the problem? Are they interested in this? That might be where you might prototype or create concepts or test components of an idea.

That's right. And then make sure that you're standing out from everyone else. I mean, it's likely in your customer discovery that people are trying to solve the problem, you know, in any way they can, you know, including with, you know, duct tape and anything else that they can. Your job is to go and say there's a more elegant way to do this than anything else you found so far. So you are in a period of testing and then continually iterating on a loop.

Yeah. What I think is interesting is that next you've got market size calculation and that's not back at point number one in your sequence here. You're looking at how big is this market, how's it growing? What do we need to invest? That kind of thing after this, right?

Yeah, not so much how much do we want to invest? I think what you're doing is you're doing a validation check that there's enough customers with that pain point in that segment to build a successful business. Again, I would argue it's the same for a startup as it is for a major corporation launching a new product. You're just doing a reality check and you're using tam SAM SOM techniques to do it. What's the total addressable market? What bit of that is really serviceable and what can I obtain as a startup company or as a divisional vice president with a new product on here? So it's really just a quick sizing exercise to say this is big enough. Sometimes it isn't very big. And we know they become lifestyle businesses. There's nothing wrong with that. If you want a million dollar business or half million dollar business to support support you and your wife that might be in that business, well, fine, but that's not very investable. If you want to go and get institutional capital and you want to grow this to 100 million and the market is only, you know, 10 million in total. So I think that kind of reality check in terms of that step and.

For our listeners, break down tam SAM Song.

So TAM is total addressable market and that's really the universe of buyers in the segment that you've identified. SAM is serviceable addressable market, which is really what's reachable, meaning that, you know, let's say you want to reach all the smartphones and you've only Got an app on the iPhone. You've really got to go and cut the universe down into those with an iPhone. It's not everyone else in the market. And then obtainable is really what you can obtain given the resources and the constraints you've got in the business. And that might be employees, number of salespeople you've got. It might be capital. So these are estimates that you can, you can make in terms of the market sides using that methodology.

Yeah. So we're slicing it down. We're getting very realistic. It's not a lot of point in saying there's, you know, a billion people with this problem if you don't have a prayer of reaching them. And then your go to. Or at least that's the. That's the first cut of it, not the subsequent ones. Then you're looking at go to market and business model.

Exactly. So go to market. And it's quite late in the piece. You know, you'll see a lot of startup companies thinking that the marketing plan is something to develop early. And, you know, I say not because I think go to market isn't like a marketing function. It's where do those beachhead customers I've identified at step one and that I've been corroborating with customer discovery, where do they hang out? And this is not about saying that I'm just going to go and broadly market, you know, pick this up on Facebook or, you know, SEO is going to solve all my problems, depending on who that customer is and what they pay attention to. You are going to develop a strategy that's likely to work. So it might well be that's you're going to reach them by email. It might be you're going to reach them at trade shows, et cetera. So what you're evolving then, is something that's consistent with all the work you've done before that step. And at the same time, in step seven, you're developing the monetization model. What business model is likely to work? Partly because the customers have told you, I want to pay for this on a monthly subscription, I want to pay a capital cost, et cetera, Whatever it is, the business model, and there's many out there, but it's corroborated by the customer's view of how they want to engage with you, not you pushing to market with a price that may be slightly less than your competitors, which is really a very blunt instrument to go to market with.

Right. And then there is all of the competition piece. Right. Who. Who are. Who's Competing with you, who's influencing you, who is proving your market support, supporting it like that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is the ecosystem. I like to draw this as a map. In fact, you can watch the way the market operates in money flows and in communication flows terms. And it's really got those four elements you mentioned, Bill. So you need to understand your competition. Influencers are both positive and negative. This is actually what's called earned media rather than paid media. Can you get people to get you in front of customers without spending a lot of money doing it? People who believe in your cause? Back to greenwash again. They had a lot of people saying to them early on that we want a green solution and we'll advocate on your behalf for nothing. You also want to understand who your economic buyers are. It's people who buy products and services, not institutions and corporations. And you want to know your supply chain. You want to know who you're buying from and are they aligned with your objectives. So the clearer you are about that, the better. And that's why it's part of the validation map. In fact, it's the last step in the validation map.

We're describing an improvement on what you may have been familiar. And then of course it leads into the execution stuff, which is more than we have time for in our show today. But I thought this was an interesting thing to focus on for the show. If you want to see this, you're going to go to slamprocess.com and then look at the free resources. You'll see these diagrams. When I work with teams through stuff like this, I like to use a lot of post it notes and essentially fill a wall. But rather than whiteboarding alone, if I use something like larger post it notes, the team can create their ideas and nodes and then move them around and pull them on and off without doing a lot of erasing and redrawing. So a faster approach to doing that. But you're going to go see all of this in essentially Diagram 1 and some expansion in Diagram 2 in that free resources section at slam process.com John, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today and, and walking us through the thing, sharing some of these examples of this. I think this is really helpful for a lot of listeners who are working on launching something, whether it's a new product service or a business unit or starting a whole new business. I think it's a helpful thing to, to spend some time with today.

Very good. Well, Bill, I appreciate being, being on the show.

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