Dan Martell - October 09, 2017


The Scaling Credo for Bootstrapped Startup Founders

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Clay Collins Taki Moore
Question Logic： 3 Frameworks To Use For Product Development How To Build a Software Company With No Money

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

193.51

Word count

1,294

Sentence count

73


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the 5 traits of growth and why you need to have one target market, one product, one core customer, one channel, and one channel for growth. Too many founders are chasing too many options. Maybe you're frustrated because your team keeps doing things but you have no progress, or you don't feel like you have a clear strategy for growing your business? I wanna show you a different way of doing it that brings you crystal clarity in your business, creates predictable revenue, and even more importantly, happy customers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.