⚡ Sylvain Giuliani

Learn how to fine-tune your product to meet market demands with strategic customer conversations and data-driven feedback mechanisms 👇 ➡ 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗲: Brian Long, CEO & Co-Founder at Attentive 🔌 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿: Nick Moran, General Partner at New Stack Ventures and Nate Pierotti, Principal at New Stack Ventures ✏ “The Playbook to Finding Product-Market Fit, When Founders Should Begin to Scale, and Lessons from Building Attentive” ⭐ 𝗦𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀: 💬 "I think that what we got right were two things. One, I think that we talked to a tremendous amount of customers, before we started building things. So we learned to hear their problems, hear their issues, and then start building and assaulting those, you know, rather than kind of just jumping right into build-build-build, so that saved us a lot of time." ⭐ 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸, 𝘁𝗼 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗯𝗶𝗮𝘀: 💬 "I think you're also looking at things like NPS, you know… because if that number starts dropping, it's often because you're no longer solving the problem." ⭐ 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴-𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆: 💬 "I think that we've taken an even longer term focus. We know what can be big. And we know it's dangerous to start getting an ego to think you can do things because it's always very hard. You've always got to think towards taking a longer term view, having a thesis around that view, and then understand how the pieces can come together for success." ───── 👉 Follow me, Alexander Small, for tactics and strategies for building startups from industry-leading Founders, Operators and Investors

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This is easier said than done. It's great to be VC isn't it? But the advice is sound. To charge 5x though, you have to be able to create 5x worth of perceived value. That requires some very hard product management decisions and hard work around identifying a segment of customers and a set of features that will resonate with them to justify the price.

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Going from Zero to Product Market Fit is like getting out of a Bermuda Triangle For every direction that works out, an equal and opposite direction works too It is shocking how few get to product market fit Only 15 out of 100 SaaS companies get to a million dollars in revenue When you have PMF, it is an awesome feeling Everything is going smoothly for you It also feels scary and out of control You push one unit, and ten units of progress happen But when you don’t have it…. You push ten units of effort, and not even a unit of progress happens It feels like a Sisyphean punishment Moving a boulder up the mountain In the GenAI age, I hear arguments that go “The focus should be on the core functionality. Like how musicians concentrate on the music itself” This is clearly a faulty analogy Businesses providing playback formats (cassette tapes, CDs) are obsolete today Gen AI brings AI below the API No more does one need to stand up a team in ML Spend a few million dollars to “translate languages” or “transcribe accurately” GenAI now assures that Getting to PMF boils down to the basics - Do you understand the problem deeply - Can you build a 10x better solution - Can you execute & iterate faster - Don’t die in the process (cash) What has worked for you to get out of the Bermuda triangle?

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Solve for information asymmetries! Architecture & Civil Engineering - Layout interpretation ~other industries: Healthcare - <Prescription> interpretation Financial Products - <Subject to market risks documentation> interpretation Loans - <Fine print> interpretation There’s going to be a slew of startups commercialising this year with a value prop of simplification using AI

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Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

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Trying to get from $0 to $1M ARR? Find your PMF. Obsess over identifying a problem that a big enough market urgently needs solving. Talk to your customers about their most painful problems and validate your assumptions. Not all feedback will be valuable. Focus on insights from your early adopters—they become your ICP and shape your product. Stay true to your core customer profile. Chasing revenue or artificially widening the PMF dilutes your product's effectiveness. Your product can only meet so many needs. Tailor every feature to your ICP. Your first version is your Minimum Sellable Product (MSP). Make the MSP easy to use and beneficial. With customers using your product, continually collect feedback to improve: 1 - Offering 2 - Marketing messages 3 - Sales calls 4 - Pricing structure 5 - Demo flow If you reach $1M ARR, congratulations! Your product has real demand. Next, it’s time to think about scaling to $10M ARR. More on that soon.

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We PLG folks love making fun of how bad some enterprise SaaS is — whether it's the extremely vague messaging or clunky UX. But it actually makes sense for that part of the market. Who they're selling to wants: - Jargons to check off their buying criteria - Vendors on their IT approved list (updated 5 years ago) - Vendors that appear on Forbes/Fortune/CNBC (paid) - Bespoke features, implementation, and contract - Most importantly, partners that can make them look good internally So any sign that shows you understand how their worlds work is highly valued. However, keep in mind that many major enterprise SaaS players get where they are by being there early...like 20 years early. Your startup doesn't have that luxury. So if you don't target the same market, don't follow the same playbook. If you do, think about how to keep elements that resonate with enterprise prospects while leveraging product-led principles to make things better for everyone — buyers, users, your own GTM team. That's how you differentiate. #saas #plg #b2b #salesled #enterprise

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Some of the things I've learned over three startups: - Lead by doing. People are inspired by actions more than words every time. - Focus on the fewest things. Time is limited. Resources are constrained. Life is short. - Don't take money from just anyone, or the biggest check. Who your investors are, and what they value matters. - Always hire people much smarter than you. Aim to become the dumbest person in the room. - Startups have the highest highs and lowest lows. Learn to embrace them both because neither lasts very long. - Culture will make or break the company equally as much as product market fit. Be intentional about creating it. - Focus intensely on your customer's needs. Understand market trends. Be aware of the competition. - The most important thing to get from your prospects is money in exchange for the product. Feedback doesn't pay salaries. - Leave the whale hunting to Ihab, it's rarely worth it. Get 20 customers paying $5, not one customer paying $100. - Hire people who have the same values as the business. This is what cultural fit means. - Be persistent on vision and flexible on the details. The why matters more than the how. - Discipline matters the most. The small things you do every day add more value than the big one time changes. - Never be too small for the big things, or too big for the small things. Sweep the floors and make the decisions above your pay grade. (Credit for this one is Mark Calkins, and it sticks with me always.)

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Shopify IPO'd at $1B. Today it's worth $115B. 🧵 5 Leadership lessons from CEO Tobi Lutke: 1️⃣ Treat feedback as a gift. Not an attack. → You grow faster with radical candor → Create a culture of REAL feedback "Feedback is a gift. It clearly is. It's not meant to hurt. It's meant to move things forward, to demystify something for you." - Tobi Tobi's approach: He explicitly tells his team to give raw feedback without sugar-coating. You are only as good as your operating candor. "Yes" people can be dangerous to your business. Create psychology safety for real feedback. 2️⃣ Take accountability for your emotions → Take 100% responsibility for your mental state → Understand WHY you react the way you do "If I'm insulted it's because my brain made a decision... I did that under my own volition. It was my own choice." - Tobi Tobi's practice: He consciously chooses his reactions to situations. Next time you feel offended, pause and ask yourself: "Am I choosing to feel this way? Why" You own your emotions. 3️⃣ Think big for yourself. Not just "best practices" → Question everything, even industry standards → Aim for the global max, not small upgrades Tobi always asks himself: "Are we optimizing the machine itself or just a cog?" Challenge yourself: Identify one industry standard in your field and ask, "What if we completely reimagined this?" "Global Maximum > Local Maximum" 4️⃣ Stay humble. Learn from anywhere. → Assume you're wrong. Not right. → You can learn from anywhere "I think the best company (that exists right now) is a 6/10 on the scale to what is a perfect company" - Tobi Tobi's habit: He encourages learning from unexpected sources. Every Shopify employee can expense Factorio. (That's Tobi's favorite video game btw) Great ideas can come from anywhere. 5️⃣ Study how you make decisions → Keep a log of your decision-making process → Review it regularly to find patterns "If your job is to make decisions, it's worth treating it like any other subject to get better at." - Tobi Tobi's system: He keeps a small log file with one paragraph explaining each major decision. Every 6 months, he reviews it. Start your own decision log today. Decision making is a skill. Sharpen yours regularly. 6️⃣ Reward outputs. Not hours. → Focus on productivity, not hours logged → Success doesn't require 80 hr weeks Tobi: "I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so." Tobi gets home by 5:30pm and doesn't work weekends. He channels 4/5 daily creative hours into work. Reward what your team produces. Not the hours they log. -- 👋 P.S. Follow Arthur Root for more Shopify content. Liked this? ♻️ Repost to share!

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How should startups & scale-ups approach customer discovery? Here's a framework I put together to help. I'm a strong believer that this is one of the most important things for early stage ventures to get right. They have to balance the need to deeply understand customers with the urgency of rapid execution to maximise their runway. Pragmatism is key. 👉 Over-investing in discovery can result in prolonged product-development cycles causing startups to potentially miss first-mover advantages, fall behind competitors or run out of cash. 👉 Conversely, insufficient discovery might lead to launching products that lack market fit, causing brand damage, commercial setbacks, and potential churn of any early customers. Striking a balance is one of the key ingredients for startups to bring great products to market efficiently, maximising their chances for success. Are you a founder or leader at a startup? If so, this framework poses three simple questions to guide how you might find the right balance... #startups #discovery #research #researchOps #design #designleadership

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Today was a big win for consumer health, with Flo Health Inc.'s valuation at $1 billion. We're hearing talk about the market becoming frothy again, but I’d argue—without seeing the detailed financials—that this valuation could be entirely warranted. Flo has built an impressive business, with 5 million paid subscribers and 70 million monthly active users. At $60 per year for users to access the product, this business has hundreds of millions in revenue and plenty of room to grow. It's increasingly clear to me that innovators focused on healthcare have been wildly underestimating consumer business models for years, believing that patients would only opt for solutions covered by their health plans and prescribed or recommended by their doctors. That thesis needs updating, particularly given high deductible plans and soaring co-pays. Innovators building solutions that users genuinely love will win - even in healthcare. These businesses also have the potential to move into B2B channels, which is far easier to do when you have an engaged, loyal user base. I expect we’ll see many more consumer health businesses “pop” in the years to come, further proving that consumers are ready and willing to pay for such solutions. We're watching closely at Cherish Kudos to the team at Flo for this impressive milestone. Lainie Muller Charlotte Yeh Aashima Gupta Avanlee Christine Esther Dyson Alexandra Drane Jessica Kamada Vin Gupta, MD MPA Asheesh Saksena Paul Crnkovich Josh Kampel Steve Chazin Lee Wagner #agingwithattitude #independentliving #consumerdrivencare

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1. how do I get customers, 2. how do I raise capital, were the most common things the current athena.vc cohort is asking about This all goes back to: 1. Do you have a 10x better product 2. and you're solving a very painful problem for which existing solutions are not very good. If you have a generic product that is solving a problem which isn't that painful. You'll have to be very good at marketing and sales. that's fine, refer to : https://lnkd.in/gVsEdWir and https://lnkd.in/grnSqpns for what we did at ContactOut BUT what is easier is to just make a 10x better product for a very painful problem. e.g if you cure cancer, or solve nuclear fusion, or figure out how to make humans live forever. You clearly do not need to worry about sales or fund raising. even if you are very early and just have a few unique ideas in this space, people will flock to invest in you. for example take a look at the types of companie sam altman is funding: fusion: https://lnkd.in/gdJnN9rr longevity: https://lnkd.in/gUUbkvXd list of all investments: https://lnkd.in/gFeutEcM they are all world changing companies. suprisingly solving a very hard problem is actually easier because you don't need to worry about sales and marketing. You can just focus on solving the technical challenges there is no market risk. worrying about sales and marketing is hard. so how do you get ideas about fusion, or longevity, or making a better search engine than google, or building a better GPU chip than nvidia: 1. talk to users 2. study competitors 3. talk to mentors / industry experts 4. read: science journals, text books, articles, podcasts etc, everything you can. As Sam Atlman says: you will be surprised at how quickly you can become an expert. Sam became expert in 1 year. There are 12 year old kids building nuclear fusion system in their bedrooms. Steve wozniak single handedly built the apple II - all software and hardware from reading textbooks and copies of MIT research papers. All self study.

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B2B SaaS companies would be able to manage pricing, packaging, and monetization with 10X the agility, if they used feature flags to manage entitlements. So why don't more companies do this? I asked Brian Rinaldi for his take during our conversation a couple weeks ago. 1️⃣ Habit: Many companies are accustomed to viewing feature flags solely as binary (true/false) tools, which limits their use to basic on/off switches. 2️⃣ Perception of Impermanence: Feature flags are often seen as temporary solutions during development, not permanent parts of the application infrastructure. 3️⃣ Targeting Maturity: There's a significant gap in using feature flags for detailed targeting within production environments. Companies struggle to move beyond basic environment targeting. 4️⃣ Feature Management Adoption: Many organizations haven't progressed beyond initial stages of feature flag adoption, primarily using them for simple release management rather than exploring advanced functionalities like creating beta groups or managing user entitlements. 5️⃣ Engineering vs. Business Problem: Feature flags are often seen strictly as developer tools, leading to a disconnect when addressing broader business issues like entitlements, which involve pricing and packaging complexities.

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What sets product-led companies like Calendly, Dropbox, and Slack apart from the crowd? Let me break it down for you! After signing up for more than 50 product-led growth companies, our incredible team at ProductLed has identified some key characteristics that these top-tier companies all share. Here's a quick overview: 1) No more email verification walls These companies prioritize user convenience by eliminating the hassle of email verification. They understand that time is precious and want users to dive right into their product without unnecessary barriers. 2) Transparent pricing Product-led companies believe in being upfront about their pricing structures. By providing clear information, they build trust and demonstrate their commitment to creating a fair and open relationship with their users. 3) Complementary free product These companies know the power of a great first impression. They offer a complimentary free product that showcases their core value proposition. It's a fantastic way to engage users and prove the worth of their offerings. 4) Tight feedback loop Listening to customers is a priority for product-led companies. They establish a tight feedback loop to gather valuable insights, allowing them to continuously improve their product based on real user experiences and needs. 5) Frictionless signup experience Simplifying the signup process is crucial for these companies. They prioritize a seamless user journey, making it effortless for individuals to create an account and get started. Curious to see these characteristics in action and learn how to implement them in your own company? Check out the link in the comments to see the full guide. I dive deep into each characteristic, providing practical examples of how these companies excel.

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Small teams and an intense bootstrapping mindset can be a superpower. Lean bootstrapped companies are competing with VC-backed goliaths because they can be: - Hyperfocused on what's important to them (and their customers) - Profitable and sustainable - Quick to shift DHH did it with Basecamp. Jason Bosco is doing it with Typesense. Bootstrapping is tough and venture capital offers a stack of competitive advantage because it can grow a company fast. But it also puts you on a treadmill focused on revenue and fast growth targets. We bootstrap Flagsmith and I'm so glad. It makes money. It’s sustainable. And it's fun to build it our way. There's something great about focusing on slow, consistent, profitable growth. And knowing that we can choose where the next 5 years will go. There's no treadmill. Everyone builds differently, but in the spirit of building transparently, I'm going to do a few posts on the reasons the bootstrapping track works for us.

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Sam Altman on idea generation: “YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. It turns out that good founders have lots of ideas about everything, so if you want to be a founder and can't get an idea for a company, you should probably work on getting good at idea generation first. It's important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. You want to be around people who have a good feel for the future, will entertain improbable plans, are optimistic, are smart in a creative way, and have a very high idea flux. These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don't make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves. You want to be able to project yourself 20 years into the future, and then think backwards from there. Trust yourself-20 years is a long time; it's ok if your ideas about it seem pretty radical. Another way to do this is to think about the most important tectonic shifts happening right now. How is the world changing in fundamental ways? Can you identify a leading edge of change and an opportunity that it unlocks? Get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people. Any time you can think of something that is possible this year and wasn't possible last year, you should pay attention. When you can say "I am sure this is going to happen, I'm just not sure if we'll be the ones to do it", that's a good sign. A good question to ask yourself early in the process of thinking about an idea is "could this be huge if it worked?" There are many good ideas in the world, but few of them have the inherent advantages that can make a startup massively successful.” - @sama

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As a founder, speed of shipping product is incredibly important. But so is quality. So how do you quickly ship a great product? The summary is basically: 1/ Hire the best product builders, there's no way getting around this. 2/ Give them full context. Let them talk to customers. Explain the business deeply to them. 3/ Get out of their way. Any friction points will slow them down, and one of the highest impact thing you can do as a founder is to remove obstacles. Full post: https://lnkd.in/edHDm5yu ✌️

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🎙️ Exciting insights from SaaS Academy's CEO Johnny Page on the Expertise Economy podcast! Johnny breaks down their two-step approach to helping SaaS founders: 1️⃣ The Discovery Call: Uncovering the founder's "why" and long-term vision 2️⃣ The Strategic Game Plan Session: Creating a 90-day action plan to achieve 12-month goals 🔑 Key focus: Identifying and solving business constraints Want to dive deeper on the secrets of building a successful SaaS business? Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u #SaaS #BusinessStrategy #SaasAcademy #ExpertiseEconomy #Podcast

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