The buyer in your head isn't your market 🎯 Ayse Guvencer

That's the blessing and a curse of being a domain expert because you live the problem, you're frustrated with the problem, you built a solution, you think, well, I know I'm in the market anyways and this is how I solve it, so probably people in my shoes will always solve it that way. That's a domain expert trap that you have because then you skip talking to as many category buyers as possible. What we built seems too complicated for the problem they have imagined in their head, and that's not how they're solving it. They're solving it, whether it's an intern at 9 AM Monday morning pulling reports from 5 different kind of tech sources, or it's some other person doing some other patch-up work. So we had to really dial the product down. But you don't confuse the initial buzz of an early adopter with an established business that really wants your product. That's when the problem starts happening. But you know what I used to do? I used to say, how did you decide? I'm in your ICP. How did you— Because that was market research for me too. That was Seriously, I was like, how am I in your ICP? Can you explain what signals you use? And they would tell me a bunch of things and I'm like, this is wrong. Maybe you should do it this way. They were like, thank you so much. We will do it that way. But I stopped doing that as well. Just because technology made it available to automate things doesn't mean that you should.

This week's Millennial Master is Ayesha Guvanchar, a startup advisor and founder of ELVT Advisory. She's worked at Google and Sage and now helps founders investigate what's stopping people from buying their product. In this episode, we talk about when early customers lead you in the wrong direction, the danger of building around your own experience, and how to get useful feedback from customers who've left. So what did you think initially that you were selling and what turned out to be that you're selling? Later on.

I started with the marketing lens. I wanted to actually scale the businesses, but once I got into early stage companies, I realized marketing is not where should be starting. They should be starting from who's our customer? What do they think about us? Is the solution we built actually matches the problem they had in mind? Doing customer development or kind of working on the product based on feedback coming from customers. So I still do the marketing side, but more and more, this is what I'm mentoring or advising on. And I kind of like that part a little bit better. I tend to be in the target audience of the startups I work with. So I'm either economic buyer, end user, or some type of an influencer. So I can kind of see if the product is really fit for purpose after talking to customers, or we need to make adjustments. That part excites me the most, more than marketing, more than go-to-market.

Well, yeah, because you need to be able to market it and know that you're going to be able to do a good job rather than push a lot of budget into an ad campaign that will get everybody churning very soon.

Exactly.

So what is the project that you worked on that you're most proud of right now? And you don't have to give me the name, but I'm curious to know the transformation and the effect you had on it.

Of course. So last year, I was working with an ex-account executive who was a salesperson at one of those big financial software companies. He was feeling the pain of internally trying to figure out when a customer would churn by pulling multiple reports from multiple different departments, which are siloed, which was a huge frustration for him. So he decided to build it. He was not a tech founder. But with a software engineer friend of his, they built this. And when I first came on board, I understand the product because I am in the target segment. I've done sales before. But when we started pitching it to clients, they were getting a bit baffled. They were not really understanding what the problem the product was solving, not necessarily how it was solving it. And we've done a couple of calls and then I said, let's just What we built seems too complicated for the problem they have imagined in their head, and that's not how they're solving it. They're solving it, whether it's an intern at a 9:00 AM Monday morning pulling reports from 5 different kind of tech sources, or it's some other person doing some other patch-up work. So, we had to really dial the product down because otherwise, we were going to run into the issue of concierge MVP, which is fine for a little bit, but we were running the risk of using our own product to do the work, which then you're not building a software business, are you? You're building a consulting business. So we really took the bells and whistles out of the first round of the product.

So that is a danger that I've written about and spoken to quite a few founders now already. Going for your MVP with pretty much all the bells and whistles that you can imagine. And I'm guilty of that as well in my previous Build Sis lives. So how do you get the right feedback and put the right questions to get to that point?

Okay. There is a model I really, really love called the Kano model. So you look at 3 things. Is the feature a performance feature? Is it a must-have or is it a nice-to-have? Because when you talk to your early adopters who are super excited to get their hands on shiny things, they're okay with 65% of the product, but they would want more and more and more on top of it. But when you bring that product to a main market, it needs to be off the shelf. They wouldn't tolerate a not fully working product. So we stripped down. Mm-hmm. Everything to say, is this a nice-to-have feature? Is it a must-have feature? Or is it a performance feature? So we just graded everything accordingly. And then we went out of the building, as I always say, went back to category buyers that are not in our network, not family and friends, not people that we know of, and asked each of these unguided questions to get to the solution fit. That's how we dialed it down. So that's something that I urge every startup to do, even when they're already in market. If they're hearing a lot from their customers that they need this feature or that feature, they need to look at whether it's a must-have, performance, or a nice-to-have, because that always gets kind of tricky. And then you end up building and building and building, and it just becomes something.

So how do you know which one's which? Because in your head. You want it all.

Yes, it is very tricky indeed. But if you take a step back and not think about features and think about the problem that you're trying to solve as effectively as possible, then it doesn't become a product question. It becomes a value question. So what is the value you're adding to the buyer using your product? If that's your North Star, then you're going to actually be really careful what you build into it. And as you build into it, you're going to show the solution shape to the category buyers. So that's what we did. We actually stripped the product down from all the bells and whistles, and we just honed onto the problem and started showing the solution shape to category buyers to understand how they would solve that problem, whether it matches with what they had in their heads. Do they necessarily need this automation to be here, or can they live without it? So it's just about customer development because product development is sequential, but customer development is cyclical. So I take this customer development word from Steve Blank, by the way. I don't want anyone to think that I came up with this myself, but customer discovery and customer creation are 2 separate steps. Discovery is where you do the solution shape, the problem shape, the triggers, the circumstances, and then customer creation is actually finding them. So when you bring 2 together and get out of let's build and this feature or that feature mindset, then you focus on the value. Does that make sense?

Okay. And then when it comes to discovering your customers, where initially, if you come up with a solution to a problem you're facing as an entrepreneur, and I know that myself, you will think, well, I'm targeting people like me, but you end up in a very different point by the time you go to market. What's the best route to do that without wasting time and money?

That's the blessing and a curse of being a domain expert, right? Because you live the problem, you're frustrated with the problem, you built a solution, you think, well, I know I'm in the market anyways, and this is how I solve it. So probably people in my shoes will always solve it that way. That's a domain expert trap that you have, because then you skip talking to as many category buyers as possible. You don't know whether the problem you had was specific to your company, specific to your team, or whether it's actually an industry-wide problem, or whether it's worth solving a problem. That's the domain expert trap. So when you skip that layer of talking to category buyers, At different verticals and different industries, by the way. So going back to that sales founder that I was talking about earlier, he was coming from financial services enterprise sales, and he was just going out to enterprise sales for financial services, which is all good and well. But when we started talking to manufacturing and sales, yeah, they had a similar problem, but that's exactly not how those salespeople were solving those problems. So. For you not to lose money and lose time, the earlier you can start talking to as many people within your job description, your job title, complementary job titles, end users, and possibly economic buyers, then you have a full picture. Because if your end goal is selling to enterprise, which every startup Just kind of wants to do that at one point or another. You have legal, data privacy, InfoSec, all those people, right? So you need to talk to as many of your category buyers as possible, but not just a sales title person, for instance. It could be revenue operations he could have talked to. He didn't. It could have been customer success person he could have talked to because he used to interact with that department when solving this problem. He didn't. So you need to keep it a little wide open and not really just say salespeople are my target audience because sales is not siloed, right? They work with other departments too. That's the best way of looking at things.

Yeah, because I'm guessing if you're pitching a piece of software to a salesperson, they're not the ones that are acquiring or buying that solution themselves.

Exactly. They're not. And you need to talk— there are anonymous tech buyers. LinkedIn had a study years ago, so it's not the person who makes the decision, but it's the person that uses the software that influences that decision. You need to find who those people are for your ICP, who influences a buying decision at a company you're trying to sell into, and that's not VP of marketing at a Series B company. That's a shopping list. One could have just gotten out of a raise now and trying to build a growth function. One could have been 12 months out of a raise and product stalled. Those 2 are not the same ICP. So if you're looking at titles, that's a shopping list. You need to look at circumstances and triggers for an ICP.

You said that people, your ideal, the final customers, the open market, will not tolerate a product that is not fully working. And how do you make sure that the product is stable enough when it goes out for the first time? I'm assuming a lot of your, the people you're working with right now have been using wipe coding tools in order to speed up things, which also meant that they could do something much cheaper, but also much easier to break. And this is what I've been hearing recently.

Exactly. That's a real thing, right? But just because you can wipe code doesn't mean you should. That's the first thing that I tell people, but you can get there from here. You cannot just Start selling your product and go directly to enterprise. It just doesn't work that way. You need to start with early adopters, evangelists that are,

as

I said, okay with a half-working product, because they would pilot it with you. They will be design partners, and you will learn a lot from them. But as you go from early adopters to pragmatists, then you need proof points. You need case studies. You need references. Mm-hmm. And to get those, you actually need to be able to work on the product and make it off the shelf. But you never, like what your product looks like today for 10 people is going to be completely different when you have 50 customers, right? So like the iteration, the first iteration, the second iteration, you're going to come to iteration 50, 60, 70 as you kind of scale. But you start with early adopters. It's crossing the chasm, right? You can't get there from here. But when your product is ready, then you will see bigger, larger ICPs buying the product, not just the small 1 or 2 buying committee customers. Then you will know if you're in those enterprise conversations to sell your product, and if they're even sitting on a table with you to listen to you, then you know that the product is probably ready. That's how I, the way I look at it.

Okay. So you have to be in the room in a meeting with them, and that's when you know the product is ready. Otherwise they would not let you in.

Well, it's tricky, right? Enterprise is tricky. Sales cycles, because I sold at Sage ERP solutions, sales cycles are tricky. Before any buying committee comes to the table, they already have a shortlist of brands in mind on first deal consideration sets. But if you're a very early stage startup, You cannot afford a sales cycle that's going to be 18 months and you're talking to 25 people. It just doesn't work that way. So you just start at the bottom, low end, as I call it, low end disruption, right? Instead of Salesforce versus HubSpot situation, so overserved and overcharged. So you start at the bottom by slowly going and working your way up to be able to sell to an enterprise. And during that journey, You learn a lot about your ICP, a lot about your product, a lot about the problem you're solving, and that journey makes your product ready to be completely sold to an enterprise. Don't get me wrong, you're not going to know your product is ready just by being in the same room with an enterprise, but as you're kind of going through the rounds of product and ICPs and customer discoveries, you'll learn more about what kind of problem and how it solves and what the value is. Because enterprise doesn't care about features. They care about values, right? That's what I would say.

So then how do you distinguish a messaging problem, which was your original marketing work, from something that's deeper, a product or a market or a customer problem when you come into a business? Because I think that when your research changes one of these parameters, Something inside the company has to change significantly.

Let me give you one example from one of the startups I'm working. So when I first came in, they were in the middle of another product revision and launch. And I didn't touch any of the products. I just asked for their current customers, their churn customers, and I found other category customers. And I just started calling them and talking to them about— I always come back to the same thing and maybe it sounds like a broken record, but you need to understand how A category buyer is solving a problem right now, whether it's scalable, how painful it is, and how they're necessarily solving it, or whether if they're solving it or not. And what I've realized is that the people that they were going after with their product were just this big of a market, but the people who are in need of their product was this big, and they were completely not looking at that market segment. And through our entire conversations with the category buyers that have never heard of the solution, we just came to realize like, wow, you know what? Like these segments of people need our product more than what we originally thought our ICP was. So, we changed the messaging towards that as well. And the product build somehow is pivoted towards that ICP, which is much more scalable instead of going to a very niche and EDBD picking it and waiting for revenue to come in. So yes, you're right. One small variable changes everything, but you don't know what that variable is without actually really getting out of the building and talking to your customers or talking to your category buyers. This is something that I find is done at the pre-seed stage. And then after that, you just keep on building because you have current customers that want new things, right? But then you become overserving and overcharging clients. So you become disruptible from the bottom up because you're becoming a commodity at that point, because you're not listening to people that are here that don't need all the bells and whistles, but you're focused on your top customers because that's where the revenue is coming in from. And then another company coming below that can basically take care of that overserve and overcharge is disrupting you. So you always are on the lookout. You always talk to your customers or your category buyers. That's, that's, that's, that's the most important thing. Or you should, you should, you should. Yes, you should. You should. You always should.

Tell me then, Ayesha, when you figure out that something is wrong, what with the messaging, with the marketing, with the product, with the features, how do you break the news to a founder? Without breaking their ego?

I am not a very confrontational person, first and foremost. So I wouldn't bulldoze my way in and say, well, this is wrong or that is wrong. Usually I ask a lot of questions, right? Why is the CAC too high? Why is sales cycles too long? Why are we not acquiring? What is going on with retention? So I just basically break it down by business problems. Not opinions saying the product is like this or the messaging is like this. I just, I'm very factual. So when you talk about why the bottom line is the way it is, then you go into a workshop mode and then you start whiteboarding everything. Start with the product, start with pricing, start with distribution, start with promotion because SaaS has 7 Ps, right? So, and usually marketers look at promotion. But there's place and price and people and processes and all of it. So you look at end to end. So you don't talk about egos. You're not trying to tell them they've done something wrong. You're trying to pivot the mindset, essentially.

But you know that they have, you're just not telling it to them directly.

Yeah, but I mean, I'm that kind of a person. When someone tells me I did something wrong directly, I take it really well. But not everybody does. And usually it's their baby, right? And they are the tech founders. I'm not. I probably wouldn't be able to build something like this. So I have huge respect for what they've done already.

And were there any parts throughout your work where you came in too late? When it's too late to be able to change something?

Okay. So the way that I look at it is When I first started doing this, actually, like a lot of this conversation sounded like marketing fluff to a lot of founders, which positioning, they think it's a tagline on a homepage. Product market fit, it's just kind of like something that you do once and then just let it go. Positioning is just a basically sales deck exercise. So I just flipped it in my head and I started working at it as it's an operating system, right? So building an operating system, which I call the bootloader. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, your kernel is your market, your customers, your segments. So, that has to load first. And if it hasn't, then the driver that comes on top of it, which is the solution shape, is contaminated, which means your CAC is higher, your sales cycles are higher, people are churning. I don't even call it churn. I call it rejecting the product, essentially. So, like, the layer by layer by layer you go, the top of the layer, the MVP, when you come to the product, it's hard to pivot. It's more painful, but it's not nothing. It just requires a lot more fundamental kernel and driver work. But yeah, I've worked with one startup where I came in a little too late, but at that point I said, let's stop marketing, not waste money, but go back to actual customers and the churned customers we have and understand what the issues were necessarily. Like, I sat in sales calls trying to understand Whether it was a sales problem that people weren't understanding it, or they just didn't need the solution, or they went from 50 clients to 100 clients, and then the solution shape actually shifted and they haven't realized it and the product stalled. So I think what I'm trying to say, it always comes down to talking to customers, talking to category buyers, and getting away from the computer, getting away from white coding for a little bit, and really— That's the easy part.

You can hide behind the building and perfecting something without facing reality.

Yeah, but then that reality hits when you have a cash flow and a runway problem.

When you need to use the bank statement and the cards.

Exactly. When that cash flow, your runway starts shrinking because you think a VP of sales or a VP of marketing can fix the issue. That's not the issue. The issue is a couple of layers down at the kernel, not at the top product level.

And that's what changed then your view about at what point do you get Invested and involved into these startups.

Exactly. I like working with early-stage startups because they cannot afford full-time resources. They just don't have the funds for it, but they're the ones that are in most need of being able to find the right ICP, find the right segment, go out with the product that solves a real problem. So that's where I can also influence the product a lot as well.

How can they show traction if they haven't really developed fully a product?

A lot of startups start with design partners and pilots. So those are paid pilots. Those are paid design partners. So they already are showing traction by going out early into the market and having design partners or pilots to learn more about the product, more about the solution, more about what they need to build. And that's traction, right? That tells you a lot of things. That tells you there is a market for it. People are interested in it, but you don't confuse the initial buzz of an early adopter with an established business that really wants your product. That's when the problem starts happening.

When is creating a new category a very expensive distraction?

Exactly. And I will, maybe this will be a little blunt. Yes. But any startup that's starting off as obsession of creating a new category should check themselves whether they're delusional or not. Because creating a new category is not just putting the product out there. Creating a new category is having to educate the buyer first that there is a problem like this, and then putting the solution behind it. That's too much money, too much resources to be able to do for any early stage company. It's hard.

What's the best example that somebody can relate to when we're talking about creating a new category?

Creating a new category. I can give you an example from maybe 2 startups that I worked with in the past. They were trying to solve a problem, like they were trying to automate something that nobody thought it was automatable, right? But they didn't create a new category. They basically resegmented an existing category and showed a different way of doing things. It was a completely novel solution, but I said, let's not go out to market and spend our resources of trying to educate people. Let's re-segment a part of that market. It's a novel solution. It's a new solution. People don't know about it, but we can approach the status quo of not doing anything. So that's non-consumption, as I call it, right? There's a whole green field of people not doing anything about the problems or not aware of the problems. That doesn't require you to create a new category. That just requires you to find people who are okay with the status quo and might not even be aware there's a solution for it. You resegment it. You don't create a new category unless you have all these resources. One example I would give, I'm working with a material engineering company. here, which is also teaching me a lot because I'm a software person. But we are basically switching one way of doing solar to a completely new understanding of what solar means. So that requires creating a new category, but that is available to us because we're moving from a grant side of things. We're moving from big manufacturing companies that are already in the market that will give us the resources to be able to change the way solar is even looked at. That I have a luxury of, but if you are a software startup starting very early stage, don't be delusional and try to create a new category. You don't have the resources to first educate the people and then put the solution in front of them. Just resegment an existing market. That's what I would do.

That leads me then to a pretty big difference between marketing and advertising.

Oh yeah.

And you are in the business. of on the marketing side. And from everything you've told me so far, there was no mention of advertising. It was about going and speaking to people directly and finding a niche within a niche or a segment within a segment and trying to reach them. What's the best way to do that?

But there's not one way of bringing a product to market. For this particular current startup that I'm working with, we're not only Advertising at Google or Meta. We're actually trying to get into benefit systems of big tech companies, right? Benefit packages, partnerships, affiliates. So there are multiple ways depending on where your ICP is or depending on where you want to go.

So then what's one of these popular go-to-market or marketing claims that it can sound super useful, but it can also burn your runway super quick?

God, there are so many because I get—

Let's bust some myths.

Let's bust some myths. So I'm in everyone's ICP, it seems like, and I just get all these emails about sending 17,000 emails to my prospects. So the myth is if you reach as many people as possible, as how many frequencies as possible, they're about to actually get back to you and want to talk to you. That's one myth. It's not about the amount of people who reach out, it's the quality of people you reach out to. And I think one, another myth is SDR agents, the automated outbound that everyone gets now, also diluted the waters.

I have 5 of those a day. Yeah.

And if I can figure out my InMail in LinkedIn and configure it to actually automatically like reject those, I would, but I'm getting emails, but I'm getting those from not just startups. I'm getting those from established companies and I'm like, Who's running your marketing? So, and that gave a bad rap to actual what sales is. Sales is orchestrated. Sales is not something you just fully automate, right? And you cannot signal the hell out of the buyer. So one myth I want to bust out is ABM, signals and intent. You cannot intent the hell out of a buyer. The buyer journey you think doesn't start when you think it does. It starts way earlier without you even knowing about it. And you're still trying to attribute based on how many touchpoints and all of that. It just doesn't work that way. There's no marketing funnel. It's highly nonlinear. It's an open system and you need causation. We've been looking at correlation. So signals and intent is not some— I cannot signal the hell out of a buyer to know they're definitely in the mood for buying something.

So you can batter them with as many emails and messages or calls. If they're not ready or they don't need it, then it's pointless.

It is. It's, it's like a process improvement plan. That's what I call sales, right? Because you're trying to give someone some value to solve a problem that they have. It's an exchange. People don't want to be sold to. People want to be able to know that you understand the problem and you have a solution for it. But you know what I used to do? I used to say, how did you decide I'm in your ICP? How did you? Because that was market research for me too. That was market research for me. Seriously. I was like, how am I in your ICP? Can you explain what signals you use? And they would tell me a bunch of things and I'm like, this is wrong. Maybe you should do it this way. They were like, thank you so much. We will do it that way. But I stopped doing that as well. But like, just because technology made it available to automate things doesn't mean that you should.

So what is the earliest practical test? A founder can run this week to discover whether they're trapped inside their own buyer assumptions?

Okay. I talk about this quite often in whatever I write. So pick up your current 5 customers and your churned 5 customers. Don't talk about your solution. Talk about the value you provided or the value you didn't provide or why they actually came to use your product and what they didn't find and why they left. Find 10 unguided questions. Don't guide the conversation. Just keep those 5-second uncomfortable silences and learn. That's what I would urge this week. Just do that.

Speak to people, speak to real humans, even though they're not your customers anymore. How do you get them to pick up the phone or to talk to you after they churned? That's also tricky, something tricky that I found in the past.

It is, but you know what I've done with this startup? We looked at the churn list. And we said, if you can give us 15 minutes, we're going to give you a €20 Amazon gift card. So you need to provide value for people to provide feedback. So that's one way of doing it, which is something that was really easy and quick for us to put together basically for 20 churned customers. Some of them said no, because they had really bad experiences. Some of them are like, yeah, we will be more than happy to. And they were really more than happy to. People like giving feedback. They want to be part of it.

They love a freebie.

They love a freebie too. That's true. But what I've done is I also talked to 10 category buyers and they weren't my friends. They were more than happy to give feedback with no monetary exchange. So that also happens.

Okay. Now, Ayesha, I'm going to turn the tables on you. Are you applying your own customer discovery method to your consultants? And what have you learned from it about your own ICP?

Okay. That's really interesting, right? Because I started this journey thinking I would be doing pure marketing. And sometimes I find myself looking at martech stacks, auditing them, sometimes talk to my people and talk to customers. So what I do to keep me, myself on my toes is I attend a lot of like startup meetups. I attend a lot of accelerator challenges. I was actually mentoring 2 startups at Tech Ireland's AI National Challenge, and they just got into the finals, which is kind of pure joy for me. So I do those kinds of things a lot, and I talk to a lot of early founders.

So you go out there?

I go out there. Like, I follow my own advice. I go out of the building instead of sending an email or instead of sending, oh, this is what I've discovered about your rock. No, no, I haven't discovered anything until I actually talk to you. Looking at your website doesn't tell me anything, or just because you raise money doesn't mean you're looking for a consultant, right? Like, I'm not a transactional person. I'd rather provide some value upfront. And that happens with getting outside of the building and going and networking where the startups are or where the VCs are or where those national challenges are happening. That's usually what I do.

And there's no instinct there, you think? It's only the customers or potential customers.

Uh, no, there is instinct as well. Domain experts are a blessing and a curse because you know the problem, you know there is a problem, but you built the solution. You have a gut feeling because it didn't exist. That's why you built the solution.

That's the risk of entrepreneurship.

It is risk of anything. It's risk of changing a tagline on a homepage copy. That's a risk as well. Talking to the wrong salesperson, that's a risk as well. But the gut feeling still matters. The instinct still matters because you built it. That's why I come back to the same thing. Like, I have huge respect for tech founders. They're brilliant. I wouldn't be able to build what they built. I can just contribute what I think it should work like because I'm a target audience, but I don't have that build myself. I have huge respect for it, but that gut feeling sometimes blinds you into just seeing it the way that you solve it and assuming and assuming and assuming, and assumptions kill businesses.

Okay. With that in mind, if anybody tuning in has to remember one question before building another feature or rewriting the homepage or the tagline, what should it be?

One question. I would go back to, is this a must-have performance or a nice-to-have? That's what I would go for.

Okay, then we're gonna circle them back right to it. Thank you so much, Ayesha, for sharing some of your no-nonsense wisdom into what works and what doesn't work anymore today. And this has got me thinking as well that I need to go out and speak to a few more people rather than just send emails.

Definitely. Thank you so much for inviting me. This was such a pleasure.

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