Ray DeckAcclaimed advisor to hundreds of founders and builders. Investor, teacher, founder, advisor

Make customer impact your North Star

Name: Make customer impact your North Star
Uploaded: 2025-05-07T19:02:41+00:00
Duration: 59 s
Channel: Ray Deck
Description: In this concise business‑advice segment, the speaker references Bain & Company's motto—"impact, fun, profits"—to argue that lasting success in SaaS and…

7 May 2025 · 1 min

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In this concise business‑advice segment, the speaker references Bain & Company's motto—"impact, fun, profits"—to argue that lasting success in SaaS and other product businesses begins with creating genuine impact for customers. He critiques the common founder mindset of building a SaaS that simply generates passive revenue, emphasizing that without first understanding how customers want to buy, what they need to buy, and the problems they face, a company will spin its wheels and fail to achieve sustainable growth. By prioritising client impact, companies can then enjoy a fun, rewarding culture and ultimately deliver profits for shareholders.

Chapters

Make customer impact your North Star. There's a motto at Bain Company, which is a major management consulting firm, that is impact, fun, profits, the order in which they look at the importance of their engagements. They want to be impactful, they want to be fun, rewarding for their internal stakeholders, and of course, they want to create profits for the shareholders. When you have all three of those things, it creates a lot more power, but only works if you start with impact. I've met a lot of people who like built a SaaS because what they want is a SaaS that quote unquote makes money while they sleep. Or they're creating other things because they think this is like the way you get, you know, product-market fit, or they're going to create a business that just generates wealth for them. But really, where you need to start is going to be how do you create more impact for your client? How do they want to buy? How do they need to buy? What do they need to buy? What are the problems they have? And how can you meaningfully solve those problems? It's only when you do those things that you're going to build a successful business. If you don't do those things, you will generally not build success, and you will wind up spinning your wheels.