Brandon Drew breaks down how startups acquire clients, covering product strategy, metrics-driven decisions, and repeatable frameworks. He shares practical lessons from his own experience and takes questions from the audience.
Chapters
How you guys doing today? Good. That is, I gotta tell you, I've been doing a couple of presentations over the last month. That's the most energetic I've actually seen a crowd, especially when we're talking about a fun topic like client acquisition and spreadsheets. So hold on to your seats because this is gonna blow your mind. So my name is Brandrew. Thank you for the great introduction. I'd like to kind of start off with a little bit of a background on myself. Yes, this was my background of where I'm at right now, but I like to kind of Caveat that. I've been doing startups for over 15 years now. And I was talking to a gentleman before, he was, how many successes are there? How many wins did you have? And that's kind of a relative question, right? Because even through your failures, you always will still be winning as long as you learn from those mistakes and you keep transitioning and transitioning and transitioning and pivoting. And that mentality has to go back into your organization as well. What we're going to be talking about up here today about client acquisition is going to be a learning curve. You're going to be bouncing off the walls. Trying to do one thing, it's not going to work. You have to be able to pivot right away and not get upset when you're making mistakes. Going back to my early start of my career, I actually went to Cal Poly. I don't know if for any of you guys that are here local to California. Started my first product. I actually got out of college with this. They probably should pull back my degree. I built a backpack karaoke machine. Yes, folks. You could sing karaoke as you walk down the street. That's awesome. The name of it was called the Pac-Yoke. And I think whenever I do make my millions of dollars, I'm actually gonna try and bring that thing back to life just to show my friends up that I was right. So anyways, so I like the format of I'm gonna talk a lot and I need you guys to ask questions. I don't wanna be this, I'm gonna get an hour down the conversation and my throat's dry and I've always I've just been yapping away. So feel free to stand up and ask any questions as we go. I'm going to take some pauses along the way as well, just to make sure that everybody is up to speed, so you don't have to wait till the very end to ask questions. And I apologize in advance for the tininess of this presentation. I did this purposefully, because we're going to be handing this out to you guys, so you guys can have a copy of it for yourself. So I'm going to stand over here so I can see this up. So one of the couple assumptions that I made is that you guys know your market size and what you're going after. And if you don't, you absolutely need to become an expert in this field because we can't start this conversation unless you are so immersed in that field and that marketplace that you understand it frontwards and backwards better than anybody else. One of the other topics that I like to go into, and again, one of the discussions I was having early before I stood up here, is client acquisition is a small function of your organization. It is so dependent on other aspects of your organization, mainly product strategy. What are you doing that's making a difference? How are you going to be identifying with those target segments and that marketing segment? And how are you going to be diversifying yourself outside of your competition? Now, I'm a big proponent of not looking at the competition and trying to figure out where to take the product. You should look at the competition to get a lay of the landscape. But the reason why you guys are all here right now And correct me if I'm wrong, is because you guys are innovators. You guys are seeing things a little bit differently and you guys are seeing an opportunity and a gap in the marketplace. And that's what you guys need to capitalize on. That's where your product strategy comes in. Product strategy is taking that product and identifying the marketplace and that consumer base, whether you're an enterprise or a consumer. You have to be able to focus in on that. So what we're going to try and go over today is how do we create a repeatable framework Really focus in on— and this is a little bit of, again, going into my background. I actually have about 5 years in finance working at Merrill Lynch— is really, really, really drive on metrics. One of the hardest things I think for entrepreneurs to do is because you are so passionate about what you're doing and changing the world or changing whatever. That's the reason why we're here and we're not working for IBM or Hewlett-Packard, right? The problem with that passion is it can blind you. And what you really need to do is kind of pull yourself away, not get emotional, and look at the metrics and key attributes that you can actually define and keep your emotions out of it and make business decisions solely around the metrics. And through all this, you have to have an amendable roadmap. Every one of you should have your product strategy written out or how your product's designed, what you're going to be solving for. In some shape or form, whether that's a pivotal tracker, PowerPoint, even whiteboarding sessions and taking a photo of it with your phone, because some of those are the most powerful meetings. But you have to be able to, based on the metrics that you're classifying of what is successful and what is not, be able to make changes and iterate super fast. None of this— and this is the big— this is where I get into Whatever I say today is not gospel. This is just my point of view. Again, this is coming from my experiences of making mistakes. This is from learning with other people as well as learning with other entrepreneurs that I work with. None of what I'm saying today is rocket science. This is just business basics, right? This is what we should have gotten out of our Business 101 class. So I just want to put that out there, but I want to also challenge you guys. How many of you are being very diligent and religious in following these basics and these tenets. And that's what you have to do from a day-to-day basis. Some of the stuff I talk about today, even through all the people I've worked with, day to day we have sit-down sessions once a week, our weekly stand-up. Are we doing what we're saying we're doing? And are we executing? Are things sliding out? Day after day after day we do this. And you have to be diligent about it. Thank you.
