Dan Martell - October 09, 2017


The Scaling Credo for Bootstrapped Startup Founders


Episode Stats

Length

6 minutes

Words per Minute

193.5098

Word Count

1,294

Sentence Count

64


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.660 Too many, are these lights higher than normal?
00:00:11.580 The scaling credo, maybe you're frustrated
00:00:13.520 because you have too many options to focus on growth.
00:00:15.880 Your team keeps doing things but there's no progress
00:00:19.120 or you don't feel like you have a clear strategy
00:00:21.680 for growing your business.
00:00:23.160 I wanna show you a different way of doing it.
00:00:25.200 One that brings you crystal clarity in your business,
00:00:28.800 creates predictable revenue, and even more importantly,
00:00:31.860 happy customers.
00:00:33.200 Crazy idea.
00:00:34.640 I learned this a long time ago from a friend of mine,
00:00:37.480 Clay Collins.
00:00:38.440 I don't know if you've ever heard of the company Leadpages.
00:00:40.680 A lot of people use them, multi-million dollar company.
00:00:43.120 And I had the just crazy fortunate circumstance to get a
00:00:47.080 call from Clay one day on my platform Clarity.
00:00:49.360 So I built this company called Clarity,
00:00:51.060 which was a marketplace to get advice from other entrepreneurs
00:00:53.600 over the phone, and I get a request from Clay.
00:00:56.360 So I'm on the call, talking to Clay,
00:00:58.260 and he's asking me for advice around scaling his company,
00:01:01.600 or no, it was actually around should I raise or not.
00:01:04.460 You know, he had a few investors that he was talking to.
00:01:07.300 They had created a significant amount
00:01:10.780 of monthly reoccurring revenue, and he wanted my advice.
00:01:13.640 But what was really neat was just asking him
00:01:15.540 how he grew the business and how he scaled it,
00:01:18.120 and trying to kind of figure out what were the patterns
00:01:20.820 that he applied that allowed him to get
00:01:22.320 to that level of growth.
00:01:23.680 And it wasn't till like many years later
00:01:26.360 that I heard my buddy Taki Moore talking about
00:01:28.760 like something like the five traits of growth
00:01:33.040 or something like that and I took that,
00:01:35.240 these five and I'm gonna teach you them in this video
00:01:38.040 and at the end I'm gonna talk about a myth
00:01:39.600 because a lot of people get this wrong
00:01:41.040 so stay right till the end but Taki talked about
00:01:44.480 the five that he extracted from Clay in building lead pages
00:01:48.120 so I wanna walk you through those real quick.
00:01:49.720 The first one is to pick one target market.
00:01:53.160 I think too often when we're building a business,
00:01:55.580 We know that there's three or four or five different types
00:01:58.520 of customers that we could go after,
00:02:00.520 but it's literally the discipline of nailing a niche.
00:02:04.720 One target customer, one ideal core focused customer
00:02:10.900 that you can add the most value to.
00:02:12.740 I know that there could be like,
00:02:13.800 well, we could also do it for X, Y, and Z.
00:02:15.800 Those are the moments where as a founder
00:02:20.800 you have to have the discipline and say,
00:02:22.280 you know what, we're not even saturated in this one customer.
00:02:25.040 So the first thing you need to nail is just one target market.
00:02:29.940 The second thing is one product, okay?
00:02:32.480 And when I say this and it's funny because you're like,
00:02:34.020 well, I only have one product, what do you mean by that?
00:02:36.660 It's if you're building a software and all of a sudden
00:02:39.320 you start with like the freemium consumer version
00:02:42.560 and you know there's this enterprise version of your product
00:02:45.500 that you could build, I'm talking about one product.
00:02:48.160 Maybe it's one price, one plan, one focus and just do that.
00:02:53.260 Too often, startups in the early days,
00:02:54.960 they're trying to focus on pricing optimization
00:02:57.860 and feature segmentation for their, you know,
00:03:01.600 the different plans and their features.
00:03:03.300 I think that that's just a bunch of wasted time.
00:03:05.280 At the end of the day, you have one target market,
00:03:07.240 one core product that you're just focused on.
00:03:09.840 That'll let you learn faster than trying to do
00:03:12.480 too many things for too many people.
00:03:14.040 The third thing you need to absolutely nail
00:03:16.080 is one conversion tool.
00:03:17.480 So in the software space, there's really kind of
00:03:20.380 three different types of ways to get somebody
00:03:22.920 onto your product.
00:03:24.980 There's free trial, so freemium to paid.
00:03:27.980 There's an inbound sales process where you do a demo
00:03:31.700 and get somebody on board or you do a more involved
00:03:33.700 enterprise sale and you're kind of like presenting
00:03:36.660 and competing against other solutions
00:03:38.400 and you have territory sales reps, et cetera.
00:03:40.400 That's probably not for most of you guys.
00:03:42.260 But regardless of the process, have one conversion tool,
00:03:46.000 one path where you take your target customer
00:03:48.940 in a focus product and get them into becoming a customer.
00:03:53.220 Buying with a credit card on file.
00:03:55.680 So the fourth thing is you need to have one channel
00:03:58.340 for traffic or growth.
00:03:59.580 So what I mean by this is like some people they go,
00:04:02.120 well I want to do inbound marketing,
00:04:03.560 I want to do Facebook ads, I want to do social media,
00:04:05.960 I want to do YouTube videos, I want to do LinkedIn,
00:04:08.460 I want to do whatever, I want to go to events,
00:04:10.400 I want to be on stage, I want to speak.
00:04:12.300 And you think that that's a good idea of doing all these
00:04:16.840 different traffic channels, but what happens is you don't
00:04:19.880 really know which one's working.
00:04:21.080 You don't focus on it.
00:04:22.280 Many people are like, okay, we're gonna start the blog,
00:04:24.080 blog started, blog post done, brrr.
00:04:26.780 But you don't actually revisit it.
00:04:28.480 You don't go and say, hey, are these blog posts actually
00:04:30.680 getting distribution?
00:04:31.660 Are anybody reading them?
00:04:32.920 Are they getting engagement on social media?
00:04:35.000 Are they good?
00:04:35.760 Would I want to read them?
00:04:37.460 And that's the pain of not focusing on one traffic channel
00:04:42.460 to grow.
00:04:43.440 Finally, the fifth thing you need to consider,
00:04:46.200 of the scaling credo is one year.
00:04:49.200 One year of focus on the items above.
00:04:52.300 Just one 12 month period of saying, you know what?
00:04:55.440 I believe this is our core customer.
00:04:56.740 We're gonna go deep on those things.
00:04:58.280 So focusing one year and putting all your energy,
00:05:01.520 all that power, all those resources behind those strategies
00:05:05.460 is really gonna get this thing to move forward.
00:05:07.720 So real quick recap.
00:05:09.760 One, you have to pick one target market.
00:05:13.060 Second, be sure to have one product.
00:05:15.600 Don't try to split it up into four different plans.
00:05:18.000 Focus on one product.
00:05:19.380 Third, make sure that you pick one conversion tool
00:05:22.540 that gets somebody from new, signed up for your product,
00:05:24.840 and becomes a customer.
00:05:26.140 Fourth, you want one channel of traffic or growth,
00:05:30.420 and that could be paid, that could be free,
00:05:32.180 that could be PR, whatever it is for you
00:05:33.920 that feels natural to you, pick one.
00:05:36.160 And fifth, focus on it for one year.
00:05:40.060 Now, here is the myth that I want to share with you guys
00:05:42.400 is most founders think they die or don't succeed
00:05:46.940 because of starvation, meaning they don't have enough ideas
00:05:50.780 or they don't have enough opportunities
00:05:52.240 to grow their business.
00:05:53.320 And what I've discovered over coaching hundreds
00:05:57.080 of entrepreneurs personally,
00:05:58.220 done 1,300 clarity calls,
00:06:01.220 talking to entrepreneurs one-on-one on the phone,
00:06:03.520 is that most of them die from indigestion.
00:06:05.460 They take on too many things, they have too many projects,
00:06:08.060 they have too many ideas, too many features to build,
00:06:10.620 too many customers to serve and not focus on the core of the
00:06:15.820 business.
00:06:16.320 So that's why it's called The Scaling Credo,
00:06:18.120 those five areas of focus.
00:06:19.920 I hope this video finds it and covered well.
00:06:22.320 Leave me a comment and let me know what you think and I'll see
00:06:25.320 you next Monday.
00:06:26.520 If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:06:28.920 for other growth marketing videos.
00:06:30.320 I'd also encourage you to join my newsletter for other free
00:06:33.520 training, exclusive contests and private events.
00:06:37.020 And also if you're ready to get going, I've got two videos queued
00:06:39.220 for you right now. I'll see you next Monday.