How B2B Startups Can Dominate A Market (Without Venture Capital)

all right so this video is for new B2B startups how to ensure you dominate a market so in this document I'm going to be sharing how the underdog so a new startup into an existing Market can become the category King in just a few short years without having to raise millions of dollars in Venture Capital so in this document I'm going to be sharing some talking a bit about the strategy side of things and then towards the second half SL last quarter um be talking about the tactics the actual activities and inputs you can be focusing on to do this and so real life example um I always like to sort of share evidence of um the things I talk about actually happening in real life um so this is the G2 grid so G2 is a um a review platform for software so buyers go onto G2 they um look for different softwares that they want to purchase um and they can see what people think of them and so here's um the G2 grid for email marketing the product category email marketing and so basically they've just got all of the software products in the email category email marketing category um and put plotted them onto this grid so in the bottom axis we can see satisfaction from Niche to high performers and then on the right we can see Market presence um I guess from uh oh so sorry High performers to to leaders um and so I want to draw your ATT attention to this company here called instantly um so instantly is I would actually put them in the sales engagement category um but they're in the email marketing category uh they entered the market only maybe like three years ago um and just for context email marketing is probably one of the the the busiest or most competitive product categories there is in software in the SAS industry very very busy as you can see by all these logos and as you can see in just three short years um they've managed to become one of the category leaders um in in email marketing and it's really important to note I can see you know companies like Apollo here it's really important to note that most of these logos around them have raised Millions if not tens of millions in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and yet instantly is still outperforming them uh whilst being bootstrapped instantly haven't raised a single dollar of investment and so this is a real life example of um an underdog entering a category and coming out on top uh in just a few short years and the reason why I mentioned instantly is because um I've worked with them I still work with them today I've worked with them for over two years um and they've grown from zero to 20 million AR in three years they will be on that now uh completely bootstrapped and there's a testimonial of uh our partnership on YouTube um if you want access to that just let me know so if it's your first time coming across a piece of my content just a quick background on me um so I've worked in the SAS industry for The Last 5 Years I started off in-house um so I've worked at uh multiple startups uh most recent one I was employee number 10ish responsible for things across go to market and um also helped out with um the product road map as well I then founded my own marketing agency consultancy where I've worked with dozens of B2B startups so I've only worked with B2B SAS companies helping um them go from zero to 10 million ARR and Beyond instantly being one of those more recently I'm the co-founder of gross s.com we help early stage B2B SAS Founders hit their first $1 million without having to raise Venture Capital more information about us and K studies on the website I'm not going to be pitching us not going to be talking about us too much um just really more for background context and then at grass I co-founded that with will uh he built and sold a software stup for $2 million as a 21y old collectively we have over 20,000 hours firsthand industry experience so that's just in the Sass industry as practitioners not how long we've been working since you know 18 um and we're both building our own B2B SAS startups as well so we're not full-time YouTube creators um we also build businesses if you want to break down about what we do at grossas how we help companies reach that first um $1 million just comment the word green on this video and I'll send that over to you or you can just go to our website um and and figure it out from there okay so that being said who is this video relevant for so um ideally you're an early stage B2B SAS founder you are about to launch a B2B startup so maybe you don't have a product yet but you know you're about to go to market you want to be as capital efficient as possible um so perhaps you're low funded maybe you've raised a bit of money or you're just completely bootstrapped or self-funded you are willing to delay gratification rather than seek immediate results uh and this is an important one this strategy is longterm it's a long-term game it's a long-term game of chess and strategy um but it has extremely big prizes and so if you're looking for you know quick short-term growth hacks and gimmicks um certainly not the video for you and just in general my content probably isn't um suitable for you and then finally if you are ready for hand toand combat uh things like Automation and scale come later when you validated a profitable business case you know two many times I speak with Founders they're doing $500 a month $1,000 a month 2,000 3,000 $5,000 a month and they're already looking for a way out they're already looking for someone to delegate or out Outsource their work to and it just it just doesn't work like that you know until you start to fill the pool of the market really it's you the founder the co-founders collectively that have to be that driving force in your business and that's what I mean by hand toand combat you need to be comfortable with rolling up your sleeves and just doing the Grump work and there really is no alternative to that unless you just want to raise loads of money uh hire a large team but then you sort of build this company on Sand that doesn't have Good Foundations and then that's when things start to go wrong so if you match this criteria then um definitely in the right place so the core thesis sort of core argument um that I'm trying to to make in this video is that startups don't fail because they are unable to build good products but because they attempt to solve multiple problems concurrently for multiple groups of people therefore they struggle to find traction with any given group and run out of cash before feeling Market pool so I'll get into um what I mean by that so like I said there's a few things I'm going to talk about some like strategy just like some Concepts and Frameworks I want to talk about um that are going to help you understand this strategy of of dominate in a market and then towards the end we'll have some activities and inputs that um you can do on a daily weekly basis to to achieve that discovered CBRE recently absolute um golden nectar okay so he who chases two rabbits catches none so let's get into this so prioritization is a superpower and often a matter of life and death in startups by attempting to solve a range of problems for different groups of people you end up doing an okay job for everyone to justify month-to-month growth but never a great job for an individual group of people result in import organic growth activation and retention that's required to fuel hypergrowth so quickly Riff on this so when you target too many personas or too many groups of people or you focus on solving too many problems you end up just doing an average job um rather than a great job at something and in most cases it's not so binary right it's not like you either fail or you succeed it's it's usually never that clean cut often the case is your your business is still growing month on month you know maybe you're just breaking even every month you're still able to play uh pay your team's salaries um you're still able to acquire customers but you're never really able to achieve that you know that breakout growth that that growth where you truly feel the pull of the market um and you know you become the hot person in town um and so what does that lead to well the the probability of you having that huge exit is just um far lower than if you were able to achieve that that hyper growth so that's typically what happens is it's not like one day you wake up and your company has just failed it's that you're just never really able to achieve that true pool from the market which is going to help you build you know a 10 50 hundred million doll um business it's similar to restaurant stat offer multiple Cuisines you know maybe this isn't in the UK this is certainly a thing where you go to a restaurant they'll offer Thai food Chinese food Mexican food maybe some like Lebanese or middle eastern grilled meats and so for me at least the first thing that pops into my head is well there's no way these dishes are going to be great right there's no way they I'm going to get a good taco here or a good burrito if they're just offering all these cines and so then you think well if they're doing all these things they must be cutting Corners right you know this food must be cheap it must be un healthy filled with oil processed you know fried food just you know not good food and so then you start to think well what are going to be the negative consequences of this like sure I might get a quick fix but I'm probably going to suffer from this um tomorrow tomorrow morning whereas if you know let's say you you craved Pizza specifically well then you would just go to a pizza restaurant or at the very minimum an Italian restaurant because you know it's what they do right uh Pizza is Italian food um and so why you go there is because you've been there before or you you've heard the recommendations right you know Grandma's secret tomato recipe that's been passed down the years for decades absolutely slaps you know their homemade garlic mayonnaise that they have combined with their Wood Fired crusts from the pizza is next level and it's just a mouthwatering experience right if you want pizza you're going to go to a pizza restaurant that has a good reputation or just focuses on that that thing um and it's going to be a far different experience than you know that oven baked pizza that you're going to get from the all you can eat buffet for for $15 right completely two different experience experiences One Restaurant is focusing on um on multiple things and then one restaurant has focused on just doing one thing or like a small group of things really well right as it says here one of these restaurants is known for their Pizza they have several uh several 100 fstar reviews and I recommend it on travel websites as the place to go when you visit town like word of mouth has spread the other restaurant is just somewhere you go when you need a quick fix they have dozens of two three four star reviews you know reporting cold food and poor customer service because they've had to cut Corners right because they just can't simply do everything um to a good standard and so if we bring this into the world of B2B if you're a VP of marketing and you go to a company's website do you care if this product helps Chief Financial officers and they have case studies to prove that they have helped CFOs no like you don't you only care about the product working for you and if anything it could be seen as a red flag it could actually leave a negative taste in your mouth you want a product that solves your problems you want a problem you want a product that is going to help you achieve your monthly goals your quarterly objectives is going to help you get promoted you don't care about how it benefits CFOs right so this is like just a really hit this point home when you spread your focus too thinly whether that be by targeting different personas whether that be focusing on um multiple problems you're just simply never able to do one thing uh really well you want to be known for the company that does one thing really well and this is one of your uh superpowers as a startup is being known for doing one thing really well and so if you can't be better try to be the only you're not going to be able to out compete your competitors and all these different things so you need to narrow your focus and try to be good at really at at one thing do it really well so when first enter in the market it's highly unlikely you will be better than incumbent companies they have been they've had years in the market right so they've had had time to collect Market insights they've um experimented a lot they've learned they've failed they've done things well right they have insights they've been able to hire great talent they have brand affinity and they have a base of loyal customers right so it's really hard to just go head on with these companies um they just they they control the market and you're the underdog but All That Glitters Is Not Gold right for these companies it's impossible to get everything right um often you'll find if you look deep enough you'll find disgruntled customers who are unhappy with maybe their customer support they've received the product progress maybe they've put in feature requests um like several months ago and nothing's happening uh commercial terms maybe they're tied into long-term contracts maybe the the company keeps upping their price uh and sort of squeezing their customers for as much juice as possible because this is what this is what happens with big companies this is how they they they get bigger right they have investors breathing down their necks they need need to hire more people they need to hit their aggressive growth targets and usually it's the customers who who feel uh feel the the brunt of that amongst many other factors right whereas as a startup entering a new market if you can identify these chinks in the armor these can be your uh points of Leverage they absolute um Gold Dust you know when I worked at a startup even though our product was priced more expensive sometimes 2 to three x than other products uh that had been around for much longer decades uh they had much larger presence companies or or customers of those companies would still switch over to us because our customer support um our customer support's average response time was 20 minutes instead of 48 hours that they were experiencing with those companies and the 48 hours would just be an email from you know someone offshore um just kind of sending an email that didn't help them at all um just letting them know they were looking into it so they didn't actually come with any solution they were just starting the conversation um and also just our product was was easier to use the time to Value was quicker people were willing to pay 2 to 3x more because of the customer experience was was much better so I'm going to be sharing at the end of this how you can discover these you know chinks in the armor that can become your wedge your lever um to enter a market you know it's you just your probability of succeeding is going to be far higher if you focus on these small surface areas do it really well and then once once you've got that traction that uh that proof of concept that you can do that thing well or you can solve those problems for that small group of people that's when you start to expand you know you need to you need to start small rather than um having all your cake at once and so go deep not wide so in the earlier stages it's better to go deep than it's better to go deep rather than wide the goal should be to Simply solve a problem well for one person right this is the mindset you need to go in it's easy to think I want to build a 50 million $100 million business okay I need to have you know 10,000 customers to achieve that you know but you don't start off with you know the way you approach this is you just need to get one customer and then when you get one customer you can get two customers then you get five then you get 10 50 100 but it all starts with that one customer and so with this mindset you're able to um overd deliver because if you only have one customer then you just need to do whatever you can to Delight that one customer and you're going to build loyalty and then hopefully because you've overd delivered you're able to get case studies and those case studies are going to act as a proofer concept to then attract more customers hey I help this person just like you and the believe the the um from from the the customers perspective the likelihood of you helping them is going to be far greater than if you didn't have uh case studies right so something I want to you to take away from this is if you can't be the best then attempt to be the only and the probability of you being the best as a new product into an existing Market is extremely extremely low so just try to be the only try to do something really really well and if you can't do this if you can't solve a problem well for one person in the early stages then this will cause later issues because in business problems don't just scale linearly they don't just go one plus 1 equal 2 they are magnified they are 1 plus 1 equal 10 right so if you can't solve a problem for one person or a small group of people then what makes you think you can solve a problem for multiple groups of of people right your problems are just going to um expand so this is why most funded companies fail right they they raise loads of money they just hire great uh big teams of people they layer on all these processes but they never really nailed those fundamentals in the first place they never really um solved an urgent problem or they never really solved the problem better than anyone else and so regardless if they have more people or processes at the end of the day if your product isn't delivering a transformation to its customers and your customers aren't happy that you don't have a business you just have um you know something that looks great from the outside but really it's you know this castle that looks great from the outside but really it's built on Sand and eventually it's going to crumble and this is why most funded companies fail is because they never focused on the fundamentals they just focused on you know hiring large teams of people and trying to brute force their way to to product Market fit so an an easy way to illustrate this by you know going deep rather than wide so the biggest area we've got here is an industry right so an industry could be the tech industry um so this includes all companies involved in technology production and services you then have a market which is a layer beneath this so we could have the software as a service the SAS um market right so these are companies that provide cloud-hosted software we then go a layer Depot we have a niche right so this is a niche within the software market so this could be midmarket mtech companies that operate a sales Le growth model and receive more than 100 demos per month so see how we've gone from okay I work with tech companies or even I work with SAS companies too I work with this very specific group of companies and then we go a layer deeper and it's like well okay what personas within those companies do I Target well I Target heads of marketing because a head of marketing is going to have different problems different desires um to ahead of sales or ahead of customer success and so we don't just stop at the company level we need to go a layer deeper to to the people within those companies because that's how you're going to find those juicy problems that people are willing to pay a lot of money for or if they're not the one who holds the budget they're willing to be a big advocate for right and they're willing to push that purchase decision in the business right so narrowing down like this or niching down enables you to focus your efforts and solve a problem or set of problems really well for one Persona and then what you can do is when you've solved a problem really well for heads of marketing then moving over to header customer to customer success or sales is going to be far easier right because someone in their business is going to be an advocate for you rather than you coming in cold um so you know don't try to solve problems for all these groups of people at once focus on one Persona um and then you can expand and so to talk about this strategy in a bit more detail I want to introduce wedges and Beach heads you've probably heard of these but just to um hammer the point home excuse the pun uh so wedge a wedge strategy focuses on a specific problem or feature that is not adequately addressed by current Solutions serving as a narrow entry point where energy can be concentrated the wedge aims to differentiate and gain initial users by addressing a unique pain point in simple terms your product does one thing very well to get an initial foothold so this is a wedge um visualized right so it's a small uh tool where you can direct uh Focus which is going to be your input and your output is Multiplied so a real life example of this is in mines um they use wedges so as you can see here these little metal tools to split rocks that are you know probably several tons right but because they're concentrating the force in in such a small area that force is then expanded and they end up split in a rock that is probably like seven or 10 tons right just with a small hammer and some some wedges so some examples of this in um the SAS industry so uh twilio I'm not sure if that's how you pronounce it they started with an API to do SMS now it's a 10 billion uh dollar public company that is the go-to communication platform right so they started with one thing stripe they started with payment apis for startups now it's one of the default payment providers for online businesses so they just started to do they start basically they made developers lives easier for implementing um payment infrastructure in in startups they just focused on that one thing and then they expanded I believe they actually started their first group of customers were in their YC batch and now basically if you start an online business you you don't even think of anything else you just go straight to stripe a beach head so a beach head strategy focuses on a specific well-defined Market segment as an entry point to gain a strong initial presence it aims to establish a strong Market presence and build a foundation for expansion so in simple terms you sove a small group of people well before expanding and this term comes from military Doctrine where invading forces focus on a small geographic area which is known as a beach head to overwhelm the enemy and quickly capture territory before launching further attacks so this this example here is is of the D-Day invasion where Allied Forces focused on the Normandy beaches within France right so this was the the invas of Europe right and their Beach head were these Normandy beaches inside France right so they tried to invade France from all these angles all at once where they the forces are just going to be spread too thinly so they narrowed their focus small geographic area overwhelmed the enemy gain a foothold and then expand into the territory right so the exact same example uh sorry exact same uh concept for for um business as well and so some examples Amazon start selling books now it represents 37% of the USA Ecom Market Uber started as a premium service for affluence and Fran residents now it represents 25% of the Global Taxi market so they focused on these this small surface area and then now you know dominating the world so typically wedges are focusing on a problem uh so they're for uh like product features and capabilities that solve that problem Beach head is focusing on um a market segment or or a niche that's kind of the the difference between the two so let's say you execute these strategies well well when do you then expand you know when do you go Inland and so there's no definitive metric to monitor this the simple answer is when you feel like you've hit the ceiling with where you're currently focusing then you can expand so this can often be measured through volume metrics such as net net new logos Pipeline and month for Monon growth along with efficiency metrics such as conversion rates customer acquisition costs or or your C payback sorry and overall magic number so you expand when you feel like you've hit your ceiling basically when growth is starting to slow down you feel like you've um penetrated that initial segment of the market enough or you feel like you're solving that problem well enough um you know case studies um are coming in then you can start to expand right if you expand too early then again you're getting into that sort of mediocre territory where you're doing everything okay but nothing uh great and so let's get on to the the tactics then so activities to complete to to dominate a market so the objective is to identify problems within your Market Niche so you can begin to hypothesize what is required to solve these problems right so you've got your current state the problems that your Market has so this from the perspective of your market so let's say heads of marketing for example where are they currently what problems do they have and then um where are they trying to to get to uh which is their desired State the journey between these two states from A to B can be referred to as the transformation so where are they today what problems do they have where are they trying to get to what transformation is required to get them there and that's going to help you then hypothesize um what your product needs to be so I'm jump Jump Ahead here so you can build a product hypothesis with regards to how your product can be this change agent and what actions must be completed for customers to achieve their transformation so in product terms these actions here so you can see the vertical lines actions these can be your product capabilities and another lens to look at this through is the jobs to be done framework what job um is your product being hired to do and what steps are required for that job to be considered complete so to really simplify this I'll use myself an as an example so I want to run a marathon this October um and I want to run that marathon in 3 hours 30 right and so I don't want to just like run a marathon I want to do it in a set time now my current self cannot run a 3-hour 30 Marathon right that's the 3-hour marathon is 3 hour 30 is my desired state where I am today is my current state now what's separating where I am today and this three hour 30 marathon is a gap okay and there are a series of actions I need to take to be someone who is capable of achieving a 3-hour 30 Marathon I can't just wake up one morning and do that right I need to get my nutrition in check I need to run four times a week and all these other actions and activities I need to take right and so in the context of B2B the more clear you get on that you know the current state the desired State and the series of actions that are required well then you can build a product that becomes that change agent you know some somebody could build uh a running app I actually have a running app that guides me through that training program that helps me take those actions that are going to get me to that desired state right so hopefully I've I've simplified that okay and so one of um okay so sorry it's important to develop a market hypothesis before a product hypothesis otherwise you risk your resources being incorrectly allocated so how can you know basically you need to understand your Market before you can build a product right because how can you know what product I.E solution is required if you're not yet clear on the problems that product is is trying to solve or or who even has those problems right and so this is the common mistake Founders make is they skip straight to product but how can you build a good product if you don't even know why exists or who it's for or what problems it solves this is what this is why companies typically build products that nobody wants or they struggle to to get it off off the ground or they they spend thousands of dollars or several months building the wrong features and capabilities because they never spent the time to think about what those features and capabilities actually exist what what problems they solve and so some activities to avoid that happening then so the first one is voice of customer research so this is a method used to collect feedback from customers so first of all how do we well how do we do this right so step one is you need to schedule some interviews so select a Vari group of customers I like to speak with customers who recently converted as their motivations and challenges are still fresh as well as customers who have renewed so ideally they've renewed uh an annual subscription or if they're on a monthly subscription they've they've been around for several months because there must be a reason they've stayed right so new customers because you want to know why they converted and existing customers because you want to know why they stuck around and that's where you're going to get the juicy insights nobody understands the value of a product better than the ones willing to spend money on it right if people are willing to spend money on your product they're willing to invest time they're willing to sacrifice or risk their reputation in their company to advocate for your product then you want to know why they're doing that right um and so here's an interview request you can send to these people I how do you even get people onto these interviews to get them to say yes to frame it in a way that benefits them um let me know if you want this sop that we share with grossest clients quick tip offering incentives uh to these people um is going to intend uh going to increase your attendance right um you know just reaching out to people and asking for time usually um isn't that successful so conducting the actual interviews people are saying yes okay so you want to introduce yourself uh ensure you have prepared open-ended questions beforehand so it's a productive use of time right you want to on these um research interviews you want to do a lot of listening and not much talking right you really want to give your customers the stage to um to talk about how they're feeling and their views and their opinions right because the more you talk the more you kind of force them down these paths um red herand are going to start to appear and a lot of bias is going to enter your research and that's where you know you start focusing on the wrong thing so you really want to just let them sing like a canary um and trust me people are people are people love talking about themselves um and so it's not that hard to do remember to record every meeting with a transcription tool such as read AI because you're going to you're going to refer back to these meetings right whenever you launch a marketing campaign and new product launch um changing your website your sales argument going back and referring back to these meetings is just like gold dust so don't make this this isn't just like a one-off exercise store these you're going to be referring back to them if you're wondering what type of questions to ask these people we have a list of them uh in in the Gras uh just let me know I I'll send you send them across okay so that's like one to one interviews another option is one to many surveys so interviews are the best option because um you know you're there you can dig deeper you can ask them why you can ask them to expand on their um on their answers but not everyone wants to hop on a call and give you 15 30 minutes of their time and so one to many surveys are another data point that you can bring into that to supplement uh your data so got some questions here um if you want access to them just let me know so you've you've had a bunch of interviews you've done a bunch of surveys um now you need to turn that data that sort of I wouldn't say it's raw data but that information you've received you need you now need to turn that into insights that can be actioned right really really important it's important you're just not storing this information in the spreadsheet you're actually reviewing it yourself or with your team and you're connecting the dots okay what does this tie to how can we action this that's where um the the magic happens so as we can see here we go from data to information to knowledge to Insight to wisdom so just um something I like to do I like to categorize any responses in my research into these buckets so motivation what motivates them to make a purchase value what do they need to see and hear and anxiety what could prevent them from purchasing this is just something you should keep in the back of your mind while people are speaking um you can also if you you know if you're a messaging nerd like me you can also start to plot your customer personas on a limic map which will help um when brainstorming ways to increase brand affinity and emotional resonance right so I'm not going to go too much into this this is more like um the psychology of marketing but just to give you like a real example here is um so in America it's very popular to have um like uh I guess you would call them like far right uh businesses so they might sell uh hunting gear they might sell guns uh stuff like that right um and and so how you communicate to those type of customers that are attracted to those websites is very different to how uh a business that sells dog beds is going to communicate to their business right you know in um in the the first business it's going to be all about like dominance like hunting um they're probably going to have pictures of like the American flag and and you know people in cool equipment all of these things right so how you even down to the words you use uh in that business is going to be very different to the the type of words and Graphics you use and the collateral you use in the dog bed business right so just to give really two like contrasting businesses there um it's important to think about that like what do your um what do your customers care about how should you speak to them what word should you use you can be really really tactical um about this okay so that's customers uh moving on cold audience research so this is a method to use um use to collect feedback from people who are not existing customers but fit your Market hypothesis so they're not paying you they're not customers but if you're targeting heads of marketing then um you approach other heads of markting Mar in to speak with them so to increase the efficacy of your research you need to combine multiple data points speaking exclusively with customers can lead to Red herin because most people don't actually know what they want and it's possible that their current customers aren't going to be the customers you need to reach product Market fit inherently as an early today startup your customer base and therefore sample size will be low so regardless of the formal points you will need more data so expand on this it's as as a startup you you sort of um go through these different phases right and typically as a startup that that first group of customers are um they're they're sort of innovators they're people who don't care that your product you know isn't the finished article um they just kind of want to support you or they want to be on the edge um and typically they're like quite grow hacky the sort of people who are always looking for new methods to do things right that the characteristics of that group of people is going to be very different to the characteristics and attributes of the customers you're going to have at 1 million AR or 10 million AR and so listening to that former group that that early group too much probably isn't going to get you to a place where you need to attract that later group of customers so just something to consider um you know you go through these different stages uh and so how that the features the product you build and the message you develop is going to have to also change to attract those later stage uh customers and then what I mean by sample size well if you only have five to 10 customers then that's not a it's not a good sample size to start you know um putting your head down and and building your road map upon you need different opinions you need a larger sample size to remove any uh bias and so why you need to speak with strangers avoid Echo Chambers message validation you know if somebody isn't using your product and so therefore have less product awareness well they're going to have a different perspective on your product and that's going to be really interesting to hear objections again if they're not a customer um maybe they wouldn't become a customer so it's interesting to understand why are you pricing your product uh incorrectly um do they understand your product value proposition you know all of these things are really interesting to hear new use cases this is probably the best um uh one of the best moments that can happen where they say something or they explain their their daily work flow and they're like oh actually this would be really useful in this area and something you just never thought of didn't cross your mind um you know that can open a whole new realm of possibilities and then Market validation um you know potentially they say oh this could actually help my teammate in in this department um and so it opens again a whole new door and so fighing these people to interview um I recommend doing this through Linkedin using their sales Navigator product so you can add these um filters both firmographic so company industry uh company size and then uh demographic uh job titles uh Department seniority that kind stuff and so if you want to go after heads of marketing you could just add some filters uh heads of marketing at companies between 50 to 250 employees based in the UK and you're going to get thousands of people that you can put into a list um and reach out to and so requesting the interviews um there's there's two ways you can do this you can do it uh automatically so there's a tool called expandi where let's say you had a list of 2,000 heads of marketing you could set up a campaign that's going to automatically connect with with them and send them a message uh or um you can do it manually and manually connect with those people and send them a message you know it's really dependent on your situation um I know some people are a bit cautious of using automated tools I'm kind of getting to that stage at the moment especially um you know if if if a lot of customers come from a specific Channel then you should really be protecting and reducing the risk on that channel um but I've used expandi before it's a good option you know I've connected with probably hundreds if not thousands of people using it um so it's just going to save you a bit of time again the type of message what should you send to these people to get them on an interview you know it's it's a completely different context because they are strangers they don't know you and so asking for their time is is a much bigger ask um if you want access to the SOP just just let me know and then again the type of questions you should ask um I recommend reading this book called the the the mum test which just goes through uh how to approach resarch how to avoid introducing bias to your research um and just becoming a better um interviewer when when conducting This research okay so that's cold ordinance research approaching strangers that broadly fit your Market hypothesis and uh collecting some data and just by the way this is simple stuff right this isn't groundbreaking this isn't black magic but I can't I couldn't tell you how many Founders just pay lip service to this stuff they think they they don't need to do it they think they know their Market well enough um and honestly that the the answer to that is you're you're just wrong you can never have too much data you can never speak with enough C enough customers you know Founders doing Millions tens of millions hundreds of millions in Revenue are still speaking with customers every single week and so the honestly the it's it's dangerous to think that you don't need to speak with people or you already know what you need to do you already know what your product needs to be I promise you this is a dangerous mindset you need to do the basics well it's all about building those foundations um that people think they're too important or too busy to do this is the stuff that helps you build um a million dollar uh business okay another data point you can get then is message mining so this is research and instances of your target personas voicing their challenges desires and fears about your product category it lets you spot useful message patterns and swipe the precise syntax used by your target audience so you can speak to them in a Common Language and Target pain points they care about this is a secret weapon right this takes time it's manual but it's an absolute secret weapon I've personally use this to help companies startups that were just failing with marketing you know couldn't acquire customers um at a good cost to helping them just completely you know throw their competitors out of the market and the reason why is because I took the time to understand what their Market cares about how they communicate their problems and I literally just swiped those words and I used those words in their marketing and the end result is you end up achieving message resonance rather than looking like your ads or your emails or your content sounding like every other vendor in the market you you just sound like one of them you become one of them and so the first step to this is find her in the the water in holes right so if you imagine in the wild uh you have these water in holes where all the animals congregate around because they need to survive right um the internet is also filled with these water in holes where your your ideal customers are congregating in big big groups of people and so if you can find the watering holes you can find these concentrated groups um of your ideal customers yeah okay so um in most cases you want the information you're consuming to be as close to the source as possible right so something really important is that you want to find these watering holes rather than say YouTube or blogs or even like content on social media those types of content are optimized for engagement right they just want more views they just want more clicks they're not optimized for Value in a lot of cases and so the the more private The Watering Hole the community you can find the the better the insights you're going to find because people are willing to be more vulnerable they're willing to say things that they wouldn't be comfortable saying on on social media so that's why you want to avoid these like you know search engine optimized blog articles and YouTube videos that are just surface level you want to find these private places so um you can go to public forums private communities and review platforms so here's me uh doing some lead generation research in a Discord Channel you know 725 conversations uh quora uh and Reddit right and then you just go down the rabbit hole this is why it takes time um you just sort of find one piece of content read through it take notes that then leads you down another Corridor you know when you get you go on YouTube and you end up watching videos about random stuff you kind of want to do that but in the context of researching your audience just go from one step to the next and then after like an hour or an hour and a half you'll really start to build patterns with regards to to what people are saying and the gold is out there you just need to know where to dig like here's a a real life example of me doing this on G2 where I was looking at competitors uh of the product I was researching so I filtered to two three four star reviews because I wanted the um I didn't want just positive feedback and so this person is talking about a cold email tool they they reviewed and they're saying it only allows you to add one email inbox at a time which is very expensive to uh compare to its competitors right so this is I think I closed the loop on this but this is Juicy right because this is a pain point this person is having with the current tool and so if I'm a competitor of this tool I can then use that that's a in the in the armor I can then use that in my messaging like hey you can add multiple inboxes and we don't charge per inbox you know obviously in a better way of saying that but that would be the core idea of the messaging that I would use in our email campaigns in paid Marketing in content right so we've gone from an Insight a problem that someone's having that we've discovered which then we can leverage in our marketing um to Target if this person's saying it hundreds if not thousands of people are going to be feeling the same and then eventually you can build your own Watering Hole your own Community where every day there are dozens of conversations about what people are doing what problems they're having what workflows they've created right and so you create this kind of this Loop um where you know you just have this never ending Loop of um uh product ideas uh message validation right and so this is kind of the end State initially go cold um go out to the internet find these water and holes and then eventually you can start to create your your own and so what you're asking yourself is you know what words do people use to describe their problems how motivated are they what happens if they don't solve these problems and how do their problems appear in order of importance because what we're trying to do in marketing is we're trying to focus on the biggest problems right what are those problems that when we talk about it perks people's ears up it gets their interest it makes them feel some kind of way those are the things we want to work um to to focus on and how are people describing those problems what words are they using you know as as marketers as uh startups we tend to over complicate things we like to create these labels these buzzwords for things whereas well that's not how these people communicate you know they don't use these buzzwords to communicate their problems and so we want to communicate in the exact way they are so we're going to sound exactly like them we're going to sound like a friend it's going to it's going to resonate with them rather than immediately sounding like a pitch or or a vendor that's where the the the edge is and so just to elaborate on a and give a framework for categorizing your findings um so this is the Mech lab's conversion sequence hortic uh it's based on thousands of hours of research and gives a horis to increase the probability of conversion so it looks confusing um but it's not that confusing I'll break it down so at a high level this sistic tells us that people are most likely to buy when they are motivated which is the m they understand the value proposition which is V they are incentivized which is the I friction is minimized which is a detractor and risk is Ed which is this anxiety right so these are um what these variables correspond with so the probability of conversion equals 4 m 3v + 2 IUS f takeway 2 a right so we want to reduce the anxiety we want to reduce the FR uh the friction but we want to increase the motivation the um Clarity of the value proposition and uh incentives and so when conducting the message mining process consider what buckets the message fits into as this is going to determine um what stage within the buyer Journey it relates to right so just to expand on these and I've got a message mine in form you can use here that when you're doing this research you can just paste the information into the form and it's going to uh bucket it for you automatically so to expand on this how do we you know how do we tie certain messages that we're finding to motivation well this is where they're talking about desired outcomes I want to achieve this these are the benefits I'm looking for the pain points and challenges they have and purchase prompts for Value propositions when they're talking about features and benefits like nice to have deal breakers right your product's value proposition what does it need to consist of anxiety the things they're scared of right uncertainties objections perceived risk maybe it's your pricing maybe um you're not sock to certified right which is um um a certificate you get to to show how you you know how you protect data right which is a big deal if you're going up midm market right you'll see most startups now come out of the gate with with sock 2 these things matter right and in most cases they're not going to message you they're just going to bounce from your website and go to someone who does have sock 2 just a a real specific example and so if we refer back to this review this user was a sharing their frustration related to to features and pricing right and so this would go under the value proposition bucket right because it's desired it's related to Features um and so this is something you would leverage in your messaging right so to to to really close the loop here you would put this into your form you would connect it to value proposition and then when it comes to your marketing if you're creating a product marketing ad or um you want to highlight uh you want well you just want to do some product marketing in general you know you're pushing out a newsletter some content some ads some emails and you're you're racking your brain like okay what should we highlight what should we highlight what should we talk about well boom okay yeah I remember this this person was complaining about this specific feature that's something we do better let's talk about that so that's closing the loop here is you're finding this insight and then you're categorizing it and then you're leveraging it in your messaging okay so final I think data point is competitive Clarity so if you want to truly create a category lead in product then in most cases you will need to walk the unbeaten path you will need to do what others aren't and the edge is often discovered by not copying people by not doing what everyone else is doing but synthesizing your own research right actually going out there and finding your own insights and capitalizing on them right this is why this stuff is really important because most people aren't doing this they'd rather just go to chat gbt and go hey what the heads of marketing care about um you know how should I do this how should I do X right people are just relying on regurgitated information but if you're willing to spend the time and put the effort in to you know uncover these insights yourself then you're just going to carve out a lane um by yourself right and so a quote by Peter till all failed companies are the same they fail to escape competition now I'm going to I'm going to slightly contradict myself there and say that you know you've probably heard of the phrase still like an artist um and you know I can sit here all day and say don't copy competitors um you know you're going to lose if that happens but the truth is is that everybody takes inspiration from their competitors everyone um it's just you know there's a reason why most SAS products they use blues and purples their logos look the same that the companies are only two three syllables everyone takes inspiration from each other right and this is just well known and you know you'd be a liar if if you denied it and so the best way to approach this is not just copy people uh one for one but look at what they're doing and reverse engineer it like what are the building blocks that help them get to this thing okay they've launched this specific ad don't copy the ad but understand who are they targeting with that ad what angle are they using within the ad what format are they using if they're using video okay maybe I should launch video ads so very different to just copying that ad but maybe you take away that video ads are the best format to use on on Facebook or maybe um they're Target in a certain sized business okay so maybe that's you what you should go after so you're not onetoone copying but you're just reverse engineering the sort of building blocks of what they're doing and then applying it to your own situation and the beauty of this is for this you don't even have to look at competitors in your category you could just look at a high performing SAS company that's doing well in a completely different they're targeting a completely different Market but you break you reverse engineer what they're doing and then you apply it to your own situation something I've done personally is look at e-commerce Brands who are typically really on The Cutting Edge when it comes to marketing and then just apply that to to B2B so in a startup building a technology motor is expensive right it's going to take a lot of time a lot of money you're going to need to hire really good Engineers you're going to need to have a unique insight to begin with right you know what is that that moat going to be and you might achieve that over time but in my opinion this isn't the best path to go down as an early stage startup right especially if you're low no funded because inherently you're not going to have a lot of money in the short term my view is that you should focus on finding efficiency at the goto Market level that's how you beat your competitors is you're you're better at distribution you have a better brand you identify with your Market better than everyone else um you have a better Community you have better uh product Channel fit um you know due to your product characteristics due to your pricing model I think that's what you should optimize for over time as your team grows you build a better product you get more insights that's when you can build a technology mode so I don't think you should be aiming for that um at the beginning I've got a worksheet here competitive Clarity I have an example of me going through live of a SAS company how I would do competitive research if you want access uh to that um just let me know okay so I think we're almost at at the end here so do these activities effectively and you'll have multiple data points that can be used to form a market hypothesis so you can expect to find a superable wedge by identifying what problems are Urgent and worth solving you can find a suitable Beach head and Achieve message resonance Faster by focusing on a smaller group of people and their problems so rather than doing an okay job for everyone or multiple groups of people focus on doing a really really great job for someone or a small group of people you'll get better results for early customers because you're focused on their problems and overd delivering you'll experience better efficiency in marketing and sales because you have a stronger more potent value proposition because you're focusing on a clear set of problems and you'll generate a proof of concept right this is kind of the the the the Milestone the outcome you know proof of concept that wow okay this product I have built actually delivers that transformation actually delivers the promise that I'm making on my marketing right if you can't generate testimonials and case studies you can't have evidence that your product deliver as a quantifiable business outcome then you've still got more to go right you again you you're you're still in that nice to have territory right so you want to strive for building a product that can generate business outcomes and you have proof that it does it because that's going to allow you to attract either more of the same uh personas and and Niche or expand into to further niches right so that's it forish data points that you can collect forming your own insights that are going to allow you to identify that small entry point point in your market and just solve a problem or focus on a small group of people do something really well which is then going to allow you to expand so next steps from here uh recommended resources so I've got a two-hour workshop on how to beat an entire SDR team for $700 a month the new way of doing cold email in 2024 something I've started recently just more casual um is uh startup chat so this is a playlist uh just 10 minute Rambles uh on specific topics just something more casual and conversational if you want to work together you can visit grass.com book a cool and we'd love to speak to you see you