True Ventures’ Post

It is now commonplace for founders and investors to believe that achieving Product-Market Fit is the most crucial factor for a startup's success. Having found PMF with a few businesses in my career, I’ve learned one thing: → Achieving product-market fit is a milestone, not the finish line. In the most painful way possible, I learned that:  1) PMF is often temporary  2) It’s limited to the size of the audience you have PMF with  Think about social apps that scaled to millions of downloads per day and then stalled (i.e. Clubhouse, Periscope, etc.). These are extreme examples. But, most businesses I know experienced a plateau in their growth at some point. There is a whole playbook of things you can/should do when this happens:  - Explore new growth channels  - Experiment with new customer segments   - Find adjacent problems to solve for your existing customers  - Bundle up and upsell your clients into other products  - Go upmarket or downmarket  Etc. But one thing you can’t do is take PMF for granted and expect it to last forever. Remember, evolution is non-negotiable in the business world. 🔁 Share if this is how you think about PMF too.

I just launched on Product Hunt. 🎉 I did this for one reason: Product distribution is hard.  In the last year, I’ve been part of 2 startups. I saw how challenging it is to fill the information asymmetry gap. When launching a product, you want: - An audience to try it. - Coherent feedback to get data. - Iterate on that data to improve the product. For that, you need trust from the right audience. Your Personal Brand is your trust magnet: - You become a Guiding figure. - You build your product in public. - You write about your persona’s pains. - You jump into calls with your audience. - You share how you intend to change that. Personal Branding is not a fancy word.  It’s the solution to product distribution. PS: If you have a producthunt account, it would mean the world if you could support me there :) https://lnkd.in/ePnJ8qdr

Ever wondered why many startup founders struggle to connect with their audience, customers, or investors? 🤔 One big reason is that they often focus too much on listing the product's features and perks, instead of its real value. 🚀 In this carousel post, let's dig into the difference between features and values, and learn how to tackle this challenge! 💡🌟 #pitchdeck #investordeck #storytelling #value #marketing

One of my best tips for turning impressions into income is to have a brand buffer. Content is a great way to encourage conversation, conversation is a great way to build an audience of fans and buyers. People buy from people. Too often startups aren't utilizing this aspect of sales psychology due to lack of time, resources and knowledge. Having the right person on your team to do this is a game changer!

Perfection is overrated. In our journey with Kendal, we've learned the value of iteration over perfection. Our BD team took a simple challenge: to craft a no-code prototype of what they thought customers wanted. What they came back with wasn't just a model—it was a revenue-generator. And that meant that it was time to turn our learnings into code & a game-changing social media assistant that generates posts, generative art, content calendars & much more. For us, launching Kendal wasn’t just about building another tool, it was about about joining our customers on their entrepreneurial journey from the very beginning. Starting with marketing. Today, we present Kendal on Product Hunt. It's a new chapter in our collective story of innovation and co-creation. Check out Kendal, and join us on our journey. Every upvote, every piece of feedback, adds yet another line to our story: https://lnkd.in/eXZsSrjb Here's a simple little teaser of what Kendal can do:

Does anyone else cringe when they see someone has themselves listed as in a "stealth startup"? Or when they post sh** like "exciting things coming to the x space, follow me for more". It's like terrible hype marketing 101. It doesn't make me curious it just makes me think you're an as*hole. Either tell us what you're building or don't. Don't make it weird. When you finally launch #genericproduct10304 most people will have lost interest. Instead If you share what you're building and why you're likely to find people who resonate with your journey and your product and give you early feedback to make a better product for your target audience.

Is Steven Bartlett "Wasting Money" Testing 53 Thumbnails? I recently spotted a post about Steven Bartlett running 100+ Facebook ad variations to optimize a single YouTube thumbnail. I decided to check the Facebook Ad Library myself - he currently has 53 live tests optimizing the next Diary of a CEO episode! 👀 Talk about an outside-the-box tactic for squeezing higher clickthrough rates! Though with a name like Bartlett, you could argue no budget is too high for optimization. Let's make this clear - he's absolutely NOT wasting money. Bartlett leaves no stone unturned, finding marginal gains through meticulous testing. Major respect! 🙌 But his approach does raise questions for cash-strapped startups lacking his scale. Is this testing model attainable for smaller ecom brands? Particularly when developing video creative? The reality is most early-stage companies can't even afford a single high quality video, much less 50+ variants. Relentless experimentation seems restricted to players like Bartlett. Closing this agility gap is exactly why we built our AI-powered video content engine, Mor. We empower brands to rapidly iterate on existing footage and response data to optimize FAST. This exact strategy helped Lane44 slash CPAs 66% over Black Friday using this tech. Still think relentless testing is wasted dollars? Let's connect if you want to step up your video strategy! #content #facebookads #ecommerce #startup

Early Stage Startups be like: "PRODUCT-MARKET FIT IS KING! 👑" Yet, many get sidetracked with: - Feature overload - Neglecting customer insights - Tech-centric, not market-centric approaches And they act surprised when: - User engagement drops - Brand loyalty doesn't materialize - Their message gets lost in the noise Stop wasting your time releasing more flashy features that don't resonate. The key isn't in the quantity of features, it's in the alignment with what your market needs. Focus on what your target market actually seeks and create digital content that educates, engages, and adds value. This way, you're not just building a product; you're nurturing a community eager to engage and purchase - some right away, others in due time. Invest wisely in product-market fit. Stay ahead, or risk watching your competitors wear the crown. 👑 ♻️ Spread the word to founders who need to see this.

For startups, it's pointless to optimize on metrics before you even have a story that resonates with your customers. But if you nail the story, everything takes off. Here are five brilliant consumer marketing strategies that prove the point: Dollar Shave Club, Liquid Death, Weee!, Wyze, and Ume Tea. Via iFly.vc and Han Shen https://lnkd.in/gDudzBFn

Reminder for early stage founders… 👉 Your positioning is a moving target. ❌ Not a one time decision. You’ll have to experiment with a lot of different positioning strategies — and test them in market with different messaging to see what will actually work. The tricky part in this experimentation is being able to handle the turbulence of jumping between different positions (moving between broad and specific). And making sure you’re giving a new position enough time in the sun to evaluate whether it works. We’ve iterated through dozens of positioning strategies (even more than shown in the image). And what we’ve found is that every time we make a decision to get more specific… 💪 Our positioning gets more powerful. → More engagement with our content marketing → More leads filling our pipeline → More deals won And even though we believe in our current positioning… We full expect it to continue to shift and evolve over time. -------------------------------------------------------- Me and Anthony Pierri 🎸 have helped over 85 startups by taking them through a structured process to identify their positioning options and get them expressed on your website. If you’re a founder working on your own positioning and website messaging — Shoot us a DM!