Understanding Your Market Place and Strategy | Brandon Drew

I'm not going to spend too much time in the marketplace. As you can tell from the top, we have a couple of key focuses that we're going to try and go over today. I'm going to try and spend the most of my time on the revenue and business model aspect. But again, kind of going back into what I was talking about a little bit earlier is you need to know your marketplace. Everybody should know the Ansoff Graph and the Growth Share Matrix. If you haven't, break out your old business books because this is kind of like business, again, 101. Everybody in here has a company right now. They should be sitting in the top left quadrant, right? That is market opportunity. That is innovation. That's where we sit. What we're trying to do is make it to the— change our vector and get over to the right area where we're going to be the superstars. Emerging market, and then eventually, hopefully, you drop down into this lower bracket segment where it's a high-growth, mature marketplace. You don't want to copy. You want— please. Is that the same as the McKinsey matrix? Which matrix? The BCG, Boston Consulting Group. Yeah, exactly. And there's a couple of these that are going to be up on these slides that are iterations of each other from other groups. So I've kind of tried to put all of them up here because some people might know them by other names and whatnot. Looking through the gaps. One of the biggest things as we're entrepreneurs in here, and I know you guys are probably all going to be raising capital. How many people in here, I should have asked this earlier, How many are raising capital right now? Okay. My personal opinion, and I'll probably get some shaking heads from investors, is you should never take an appointment with an investor unless they're within your market. If you have to spend more than 5 minutes trying to describe to them what market you're going after, you're wasting your time. All they're doing is discovery on you. So a little bit off topic, but I always like to put that out there because that's stuff that we've learned over a long period of time in spending 12 to 18 months pitching VCs and/or angels. So this is where we get into the blurry lines of client acquisition and product strategy. Parts of it go hand in hand, right? I'm not going to get on a long tangent of how to build a product, but one thing that we have to keep keep in mind is if you're trying to acquire clients, you have to keep— and I try and keep it to 2 themes, right? Frictionless and stickiness. Now, kind of counterintuitive, right? Frictionless meaning you have to have an onboarding process that is seamless and easy to use, right? You don't want to have the client to be— prospective client to be walking through a bunch of hoops in order to try and onboard and try out your product. It's a very competitive landscape out there. It doesn't matter if you're an enterprise or consumer. There's probably 2 or 3 versions of your type of product out there already in the marketplace or mature markets, right? So you want to create a really frictionless onboarding process in order to get as many people piloting your product as possible. A great example is why have a user sign up using an email and password when you can use OAuth and use existing LinkedIn, Facebook, or whatever else to onboard that person, right? And if you're— depending on your space, then you can get really creative. Like if you're building a human resource tool, use LinkedIn and have all that information ingested into your system, and boom, you're off to the racetracks already. The stickiness actually comes in is once you get them in there and actually a client— and we'll get to this in terms of the funnel discussion— is how can we get as many hooks in them as possible? And hooks meaning, I like to refer to it as a banking model, right? You go into a bank, you sign up for a checking account. Next thing you know, you're getting upsold on a savings account. Next thing you know, you have a credit card. 5 years down the road, you might have a mortgage, a car payment, life insurance, whatever else. If you were to go over to— if all of a sudden you get pitched by Citigroup or somebody and they have, you know, a point more on their interest rate, are you going to move all 5 accounts just because of that? No, because they have their hooks in you and stickiness. Now, it might sound a little bit nasty, that environment. I'm not a big fan of banks. I left Merrill Lynch for a reason. But it does have a lot of tangents to our industries. You want to create as much attributes and products and services that are tangent and/or vertical in your services that they won't ever want to leave. So again, kind of going back, we have an idea and a dream. Your product, you're going to go through many, many different variations of your MVP, MVP 1, 2, and 3. And then what we get to is what I like to call best in class or BIC. So you always want to try and get from an MVP to a BIC. And that kind of goes through that matrix that we had up above. We have to always build into our products the metrics that is going to be necessary in order to capture these clients, right? So I'm going to get to the funnel and how to— the different channels that you have. You have to build in the— whether that's Google Analytics whether it's using a platform like Looker where you can mine your SQL databases and create visualizations. Always be thinking as you're building your product, what can we be doing so we can build better intelligence within our product so that when we actually start onboarding our clients, onboarding prospects, we actually know how they're interacting with our products and services. We also know how many people we're actually converting from one pipe to the next pipe. That's gonna be key and clutch. A basic CRM system does. Salesforce, multi-billion-dollar organization. Why are they worth billions? Because they're basically showing businesses how they're making money, where they're making money. That's a very powerful thing to do. One of the things that is a little bit scary as a startup that I find more times than not, and I've actually— I don't want to say I'm a professional in this, but this is one of the key things that when I get approached by a startup, or a young company where they're having the hardest time with is that they have a product or a thing. It's not fully baked. It's maybe an MVP 0.5, not even a 0.1, not even a 1, right? And what they're doing is they have maybe 5 to 10 people that are coming up to them. They're saying, we love this, but we also want this, this, this, and this. And then what ends up happening is you get stuck into this pro-service rat hole where you're doing Customize work for a pretty big logo because they promise that you can put them up— you can put them up on your NASCAR deck and say, we work with so-and-so. But what you'll find is that after about 6 to 8 months of working with that, you've done all these customizations for this one client and you haven't progressed your product. If anything, you've burnt a lot of your burn rate month over month because you're not profitable and you're no further along with your vision of your product. So what you need to do is be very diligent when you're getting into these engagements and make sure that you have your product strategy, right? You have that written down, what you guys need to be doing. Don't deviate from that, but be very mindful of what they're saying, what they want. Is it something that's going to transcend across all of your different potential clients? Is it something that's missing in the marketplace? Or is it something that is just going to be a custom integration to their weird wacky system that's all spaghettied and shoestringed up with duct tape and gum? You know, that's where you have to kind of be extremely passionate about what you're going to be developing into. So be very careful about getting into pro-service holes. Another aspect of the stickiness is the more integrations— and again, this is my belief— more integrations you can do with other ancillary services, the better you can be, right? So that's that LinkedIn aspect that I was talking about. Why reinvent the wheel? If somebody's doing a tangent service to you, partner up with them. It creates great marketing opportunities as well. So this is where we get into client acquisition. Again, this shouldn't be— this shouldn't blow anybody's mind away. This is basic funneling, right? So what we want to do with client acquisition is you want to create a giant ecosystem of people and awareness that they know what your product does. And then getting back into that metrics segment, You have, and we're gonna get into the next slide, your giant funnel coming through here with all the different various channels and stuff of people coming in. You have a metric where you have inbound leads or whatever else, however you wanna manage it. Hopefully you're gonna be not doing it in an Excel spreadsheet and you'll nut up for either a HubSpot account or a CRM account from Salesforce or somebody else. You can see how many people you guys are ingesting in terms that are trying your product or actually interested by signing up for marketing, whatever else. That value proposition then rotates them over into understanding what your product does and how they can benefit from it. Getting them to try the pilot program. And through every one of these, and this is where again it becomes, you have to be very diligent. What you need to be doing is looking at how much are you actually converting from one gate, and I call them gates. And you might have people that are sitting within this gate for 6 months. As long as they don't pull themselves out of that, keep dripping on them, right? But what you want to be doing is looking at how long they're sitting in each one of these segments and how many are converting to the next and what your loss ratio is, right? And that is where you guys will start to be able to make more mindful decisions about the direction of your product and where you're taking it. So you need to get into customer qualification where they're actually qualifying against their own ROI, total cost of ownership, and I'll get into some of those metrics in a minute. To customer delivery and actually a full-time client where you can actually have them also be an advocate for yourself as well.