Four Patterns I've Noticed Across Hundreds of Launches
I received the first copies of my new book last week, and that’s a rewarding moment after what feels like approximately 3,756 steps in the process.
This is my second time publishing a book, and what I like most about the endeavor is that it forces me to step back and think about aggregating experiences across all of our clients. Many times we are deep in the weeds with one specific client’s challenges. And there are always nuances and special circumstances to take into account. Yet there are a lot more similarities than differences when you gaze across hundreds of launches, and so this kind of broader synthesis can be really valuable.
Incidentally, it’s also the kind of thing that those of us in our second half of life tend to get better at as detailed in Arthur Brooks’ fantastic “From Strength to Strength” (1) (h/t to book coach extraordinaire and thought partner Sara Stibitz for that recommendation), so if you are noticing some lines on your face that weren’t there before, and you’re interested in writing a book, I highly encourage you to do it. I think of it as a way to give back. Many of the people who read this newsletter (or buy the book) will never hire my firm to work for them and that’s okay. But I can share some advice synthesized across a large number of clients for free/low cost that hopefully helps them along the way and I feel good about that.
So what are those broad strokes generalizations? I’m going to cover four experience-based generalizations this week (meaning these are things I feel in my bones vs. have been surprised by data on) and then we’ll see how those compare to the data-driven conclusions after we finish a report we’re working on aggregating data across hundreds of launches.
In no particular order, these lessons are:
Do fewer things, better.
Make the cash flow make sense—without volume.
Tech + service succeeds where tech alone fails.
Design for the data you need to get better.
Do fewer things, better
In some ways, deciding what to build first and what resources to devote to those things have more influence over your success than anything else. Virtually every founder who comes to us has an enormous vision (and if they don’t, it’s probably a feature, not a product). That’s a good thing and you should hold onto it.
And yet, you likely can’t build it all at once, at least not well. If you try, you’ll end up sacrificing quality or dramatically extending your time to market, and neither of those are things you can really afford to lose. And so, you need to focus on a part of the vision, but this should be selected intentionally vs. on a whim or based on what the highest paid person finds most compelling.
I spend extensive time on this in my book, but for a 10,000 foot view, here are some questions you can ask yourself:
What’s the most compelling entry point for your audience? What’s a problem they absolutely have to solve, to the point that they are willing to pay for it (either with actual dollars if that’s your model, or with their time to set up and use an account, if your model is a value-add)? Note that this might be different from your ultimate goal. Many products have successfully started with one niche offering and shifted as their base grew.
What’s a complete package you can deliver? This might seem contradictory to the previous question, but it’s not. Here we mean a complete package for solving a single use case. Too often, in our excitement to get something out we deliver only half a solution for one thing and half a solution for another and expect users to be as excited as we are. The user doesn’t see your vision. They only see what’s in front of them, and that has to provide meaningful value for them to become an advocate of your solution. Deliver a complete solution for one use case, not a partial solution for many use cases.
What are the required basic functions? Too often, products are tripped up by clunky onboarding, weird billing issues, or frustrating login attempts. Are these the sexy functions you’re going to list on your sales page? No. But you’d better get them right or people won’t put in the effort to experience your flagship options.
If you follow the above guidelines, you can pare down that huge vision into a few things you can do well to generate initial traction, then build from there.
Make the cash flow make sense—without volume.
Whether you’re a startup or innovating within an enterprise organization, making a project cash flow gives you a lot more security to live out your roadmap. Projects that are cash flowing or better yet, profitable, are much less likely to be shut down prematurely. If cash flowing isn’t in the cards, the more you can offset the burn rate, the better position you’ll be in. Even if your business unit is willing to fund a project with negative cash flow initially, that may change as business conditions change. The more you can work towards positive cash flow from the start, the more runway you’ll have and the lower your risk of being shuttered.
These considerations are admittedly different depending on your funding source. If you’re self-funding from existing business revenues, or bootstrapping, it’s probably immediately obvious why this matters. Very few products achieve immediate hockey-stick growth. ‘Friends and family referrals’ is not a viable growth plan. If you’re venture-funded, your investors recognize that you’ll need help for a period of time, but exhausting your runway more quickly than expected is a route to potential trouble.
How can you creatively offset expenses, even if it’s not how you plan to build your business long-term? Can you help your own organization gain back some efficiency (be sure to measure the impact of this)? Do you need to charge an implementation fee? While every choice has tradeoffs (increasing fees can decrease adoption), consider also that cash flow problems are not automatically solved by volume—in fact, increased volume can make cash flow even tighter if you have underlying profitability problems you haven’t addressed.
This concept applies even if your project is not directly revenue-generating. You can replace ‘ROI’ with cash flow in most of the above and it still holds true. The more ROI you provide, the more likely you’ll get the chance to complete the vision.
Tech + service succeeds where tech alone fails
People want tech solutions, but they also often don’t want to mess with setting them up or operating them. We’ve had numerous clients in the B2B space begin with the assumption that they would provide a pure SaaS solution, and ultimately end up providing tech + service.
This does several things for your business:
It puts the solution at the intersection of high tech + high touch—a sweet spot for customer satisfaction.
Being high-touch early allows you to learn a great deal more about your customers/audience than you would if you were high tech only. Data can tell a lot, but those qualitative conversations with early adopters yield priceless insights.
It often significantly increases the price you can charge. SaaS products are expected to be inexpensive. It can be difficult to amass enough users to power your runway at $19.99/month. Professional service fees are much higher, if sometimes non-recurring.
Why is this so effective? A pure technology solution is only as valuable as the person wielding it. You’re at the mercy of your early adopters’ patience and ability to figure out the system. By offering tech + service, you have greater control over the success of the implementation, without having to build extensive tutorials that no one wants to watch anyway.
The other advantage is less obvious but even more powerful. As a tech only solution, you’re compared against other tech solutions to determine what’s a reasonable expense. As a tech + service solution, you’re more often compared against hiring a new employee or allocating a part of an existing one—a completely different (and more expensive) cost profile. You therefore get to showcase even more value by doing what you do best.
This might be a temporary part of your business model, or it may be permanent. Even if you ultimately revert to primarily a tech-focused business, starting with tech + service can speed adoption and growth.
Building an internal solution? This applies to you, too. While dollars may not be changing hands, offering a service component to speed adoption and ease the change process can have a dramatic impact on your success.
Design for the data you need to get better
Approach every release with the mindset that it’s a step in the journey. There is no be-all, end-all release. It will be a constant evolution. To evolve effectively, a team needs data to drive decisions. There is some value to off-the-shelf solutions that give you general info (clicks and time on page and the like), but at some point you will likely run across a question that the standard packages can’t answer.
At that point, it’s almost always a good investment to write something custom to get it. There are lots of reasons that good data leads to better, faster decisions. I won’t reiterate that here. But the question is, what data do you need to make those better decisions?
To figure that out, ask your team the following questions:
Two weeks after we release, how will we know if this is on track to succeed?
If this doesn’t succeed, what will be the reason(s)?
If this doesn’t succeed, how will we know which of those likely failure points is at play?
It’s tempting to assume that every release will be the final form of that solution, but that’s rarely true unless the product itself dies. Building in data awareness helps your product continually improve. It’s also how we achieve those “5X the industry average” type stats. You can do this too.
Back enthusiasm with strategy
A great idea can feel so urgent that it’s tempting to charge forward without giving much thought to what you’re doing or how you’re doing it. That urgency is a good thing; it will power your grit when things get more difficult.
The urgency is also a lot more powerful when it’s combined with a research-backed strategy designed to set you up for success. Building a great product is to some degree an endurance game. You want to buy yourself enough runway to figure out what makes the product work.
Hopefully that helps you avoid some extra steps and headache along the way.
Onward & upward.