Eusden Shing

As a product builder, one of my favorite concepts is Balaji Srinivasan's Idea maze (attached below). End users of a product only see the final decisions made. They don’t see every tradeoff the builders agonize over and the alternative universes that could’ve been. Great product are designed by builders that put an incredible amount of thought behind each decision. Steve jobs talks about a similar feeling in building the Mac. IMO this is the essence of finding product <> market fit, and makes a world of a difference in outcomes. For example, “video on the Internet” in the early 2000’s was an obvious emergent trend. But Youtube and Vimeo are very different products, and company outcomes. I think about this concept often for the market of “GTM signals” and "AI for Sales." It’s hot right now, many GTM teams are talking about using signals and AI, and there’s a wide diversity of products to choose from. Some tenured GTM operators gripe about how this is nothing new and it’s a renaming of age-old concepts like ABM, intent, B2B marketing, etc. There’s some truth to that and as a builder I’m always curious about the history of our space, but I also believe that AI (specifically LLMs) are unlocking new use cases that were previously not possible. So next time you see a new product in a confusing market, keep an open mind and see if it helps you accomplish something radically new. You could be looking at the next Youtube.

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How does David beat Goliath aka early-stage startups close candidates also interviewing at FAANG / larger companies? Generally, they don’t, but here’s what @SingleSprout's data (80% offer close rate in last 6 months) says: 1) $30k: If the offer from a big company exceeds yours by over $30k, you're very likely not going to get that candidate. 2) # of Competitors: A candidate considering one large company might still be within reach. However, the more large companies they entertain, the less likely you'll get them. 3) Motivation: Understanding why a candidate genuinely prefers your company is crucial. Look for and test for interest in impact, equity, and the entrepreneurial journey. Unfortunately, most startups hiring on their own can't get this level of information from a candidate, and sadly waste a lot of precious time :(

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Andrew Chen puts into words what many product people have realized in the trenches. There is more to product decision making than data. Having taste, sometimes rebranded as "product sense", is something I've been leaning into. There's usually not any meaningful data at the earliest stages anyways, it's about a developing a vision informed by your depth of experience, your conversations with customers, and your differentiated view of the world. https://t.co/ZR3HFdfDX9

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Started to read The SaaS playbook. Will report findings. "... this is the playbook for launching and growing a SaaS startup to millions in revenue without raising buckets of venture capital." https://lnkd.in/gSVTCQAY

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Can hyper-growth actually hinder a startup's ability to build a great product? In this latest episode of the Product Thinking, I'm joined by Alex Wattrelos, former Chief Product Officer at sunday, who witnessed firsthand the double-edged sword of explosive scaling. Sunday went from an idea to 450 employees with $203 million in seed funding in a mere 4 years. While living the startup dream of rapid growth, Alex and his team also had to navigate how to stay laser-focused on solving real customer problems amidst the chaos. When the 2022 tech crisis struck, they faced the harsh reality of de-scaling the entire operation and ruthlessly prioritizing initiatives that drove market fit and profitability. Throughout our discussion, Alex shares firsthand insights into the key challenges he faced as Sunday's CPO, including the delicate balance of maintaining a clear product vision while continually pivoting priorities. He also shares insights on leveraging an MVP to unlock early success, solving the "busy restaurant bill payment" problem plaguing Europe. And we examine the critical differences between product management in the US vs. Europe markets. Don't miss Alex's hard-earned wisdom on: ►Scaling products AND teams at breakneck speed ►Abruptly de-scaling and reprioritizing the entire roadmap ►Keeping the team focused on driving real value vs. vanity metrics ►Navigating cultural nuances across European product teams For startups wanting to avoid growth at all costs, this is a must-listen on building the right product before chasing unicorn status. Have you ever had to rapidly de-scale your product roadmap? How did you approach it? Share your experiences in the comments! #ProductManagement #TechStartups #ProductLeadership #ScalingProducts

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Chief Product Officers have the shortest tenure of any C-Suite member: 2.5 years. In my recent interviews with Product Leaders, a common theme emerged - navigating a role under a non-technical Founder/CEO can be extremely challenging…but not impossible: CPOs that focused on educating their org about how product works, shared their vision and strategy constantly, and showcased how product metrics tied to clear ROI and customer value had longer tenures and better, more collaborative relationships with the rest of the organization > those who didn’t.

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YC is right about so many things, but I think it gives one piece of unhelpful startup advice: "Don’t worry about competitors; listen to your customers." This advice worked when there were few excellent tech companies. Just listening to your customers and building fast in tech was a way to differentiate. But that’s no longer the case. Listening to your customers is still essential but must be paired with a strong strategy. I have wasted a lot of time treating this advice as gospel. I built a product that a small group of people loved but could not break into the market because listening to our users was not guided by a sound strategy. In an increasingly competitive market, you must understand how you will differentiate from your competitors in a way that cannot be quickly copied or competed away. Ultimately, there are three broad approaches to do this: Do something your current or future competitors (A) can’t do or (B) don’t want to do. Approach (A)—traditional “moats” or “powers”—sounds great, but it requires particular circumstances when in a crowded market with similarly funded and sized competitors. (B) is often the right strategic move for most startups competing in a crowded market—doing something your competitors don’t want to do. Three ways to do (B): 1. Adopt a counter-positioned business model If most competitors pursue a particular business model (e.g., freemium, PLG SaaS), switch to closed free trials through salespeople. Or vice-versa. The model still must work with your segment and give you some asymmetric advantage. But if so, it will be hard to copy you. 2. Focus on an undesirable segment Find a sub-segment of your market that is unattractive for some reason (e.g., longer buying cycles, harder needs to satisfy, harder to reach) and focus on them. They still must have a burning problem that your product meets in a differentiated way. And there should be a path to grow deeper with or extend beyond them. 3. Narrow to an uncomfortable level so that it feels like your “TAM” is too small This is a subset of 2: Find a way to further segment your existing ICP into a more targeted/narrow definition. This deeper segmentation needs to be along a meaningful dimension that creates differences in needs, preferences, and behaviors. It's a bonus if this smaller segment is fast-growing (H/T to YC for the excellent advice). Often, people are scared to do this because of a smaller “TAM,” but focus is a source of power. TAKEAWAY Struggling to get traction in a crowded market? Start doing one of three things today: change your business model to something hard for your competitors to copy, focus on an undesirable segment, or narrow your ICP to an uncomfortable place. Doing so will help you run in a less crowded lane where you’ll control your destiny. — I wrote this with Alper Yurder 🤝 at Flowla 🌊 from a discussion about how we're competing in crowded markets. Check out what he’s building; he’s thinking about this right.

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This hit me hard today and feels antithetical to leading from my values. As Shirin Eskandani notes: “Trying to run a business during "times like these" sometimes feels like the weirdest thing ever. There is nothing like the cognitive dissonance between trying to launch an offering while literal m@ssiles are being launched. It feels disingenuous to carry on with business as usual. Because nothing is usual. Nothing is okay. Your mind and heart are elsewhere. As they should be because you're human. And while you strive to build a business that reflects your deepest values and beliefs, you fear the backlash and repercussions of sharing your deepest values and beliefs. But you push through the fear because "times like these" are exactly why you started your business. You started your business to serve and to show up for the communities you hold most dear in ALL of the ways. You started your business to facilitate real change for the collective. You started your business because you never wanted to do business as usual in the first place. Which means you make it very clear what you believe in. Which means you do not stay silent. Which means you do what you can to truly be of service. The truth is business is personal. There is no way around it. And in "times like these" that becomes so incredibly clear. So if they unfollow you, they shouldn't have been following you in the first place. If they decide to not work with you, they shouldn't have been working with you in the first place. If they decide to not collaborate with you, they shouldn't have been collaborating with you in the first place.” I became a founder in part to change the capitalistic systems we exist within. To lead with empathy, humanity, and intentionality. To model what can be. To be told, "Make no comment on politics; you have zero upside, only downside," is, to me, a directive to lead without integrity or empathy. He's absolutely right that there may, and likely will be, a downside. However, I choose to take that risk, knowing that building community is more important.

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Here's a verbatim review from last month's cohort: "Tom's class is the only one on Maven thus far that I wholeheartedly rate a full 10 out of 10. Through fun assignments, we got hands-on practice on dealing with ambiguous, high-stake reviews. Beyond product reviews, Tom's extensive insights have been enormously helpful for a mid-career PM like me." I've got a new cohort starting in a few days for my 5-star rated, interactive, live, small-group workshops. Learn more and enroll here https://lnkd.in/gFFuUYpu #productmanagement

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What do VCs actually look for in pre seed deals, particularly given the recent wave of AI startups? As a B2B SaaS focused investor, I have the opportunity to evaluate thousands of software businesses, and invest in 100+ each year. One of my favorite parts of my job is meeting exceptional founders and learning about problem spaces that are completely new to me, but the investment team at Forum Ventures spends a lot of time discussing focus areas and opportunities where we see the most promise and are actively looking to invest. In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing a series of market opportunities where I am looking to back exceptional founders solving challenging problems.  * Automation of complex, legacy workflows within enterprise, particularly across regulatory and compliance use cases. * Application of AI across the defense and broader government sectors, specifically related to operational efficiencies, the infrastructure stack required to leverage cutting edge AI advancements, and the development and adoption of autonomous systems. * Manufacturing/hardware design and production, spotlighting modern manufacturing - robotics, aerospace, alternative energy, medical devices, etc. * Complex manufacturing supply chains- from extraction to processing and refining, and ultimately through manufacturing and distribution.  If any of the above sounds like something you are building, let’s connect. #GenerativeAI #VentureCapital #EarlyStageStartups #Innovation #TechTrends #AI

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Build vs Buy, the great internal debate every developer product has to overcome when selling to companies of all sizes. I had a great chat with Han Wang at Mintlify on how he sees Build vs Buy. Whether its docs, sdks or any part of the developer stack you will always meet great product teams that believe they should build and maintain exactly what your product does in house. Here are some takeaways 👀 ⏹ Its all about control. You're product needs to increase your users ability to ship high quality product. Think deeply about where you should blackbox vs expose controls to the user. ⏹ Quality. Do you think your product reflects the quality at which they could build AND maintain this themselves ? ⏹ Our job as vendors is to grow with companies over time. As your product matures the gap between what you can do vs what can be built in house will quickly diminish. If you're buyer of docs or sdks how do you think about build vs buy ? 👇 Speakeasy #sdks #docs #buildvsbuy

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Starting today, teams can now fully white label IntegrationOS’ AuthKit. I’ve always been a big fan of Plaid and the growth loop that in-component branding provides. Building a trusted brand that’s also visible to 2nd-party users is what I believe to be a big part of Plaid’s success. That said, our north star is to be the most open, flexible and developer-first integration middleware for high-velocity product and engineering teams. Our preference is to let developers embed IntegrationOS anywhere and everywhere - in any way they want. Almost all CPOs and CTOs want to offload the headache behind integrations to a vendor. They just also want access to the same flexibility they’re used to when building in-house. These two demands shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. White labeling is just another push to make sure they're not.

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Thanks for the insightful pitch strategies. When can I get a slot to pitch to you?

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If you had a great startup idea, should you keep it a secret? Are musicians natural entrepreneurs? In this episode, Seed Zeng and I chat with Yotam Rosenbaum, musician, YC founder, and investor. 👉 Listen on your podcast app: https://tr.ee/ZmRr5NjEtk

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Arrived at that point, when LLM is a choice of cost and speed.

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We iterate on how our engineering/product/design team runs sprints at Unify to improve product velocity. Here's how they've evolved since day 1 of the company: We started building product in February of 2023 after Solomon and Sam started as founding engineers. Given our backgrounds, we knew how Ramp, Scale AI and Airbnb ran sprints, but a 4 person startup is a very different story. We started with zero process: no Linear or project management, just daily stand-ups. We'd write lightweight specs and then get to work. We thought flexibility would make us faster as a small team, but in reality, we needed structure to keep us organized. We missed on the first product deadline we set for ourselves. In April 2023, we started using Linear to track tickets—this increased velocity as we were now better coordinated as a team. In the fall of 2023, we added Notion and Google Sheets to our sprint planning toolkit - I'll link to a previous post I did about how we use each of these in the comments. Here are the meetings we use today to run 2-week sprints: ➝ Monday: Team kickoff to share priorities for the next two weeks. We screen share Notion. ➝ Thursday: Sprint check-in to discuss project statuses and chat through any blockers. Working out of Linear. ➝ Following Monday: Mid-sprint check-in to review priorities and track progress. We screen share Notion. ➝ Thursday: Final check-in to push projects over the finish line. Working out of Linear again. We're constantly zooming in with Linear, and zooming out with Notion. During the second week, Connor, Hyewon, and I sync on priorities for the next sprint. We'll prioritize the next sprint based on our roadmap in Google Sheets, bugs that have come up, and customer feature requests. Key takeaways for EPD teams: 1. Your sprint planning process is going to evolve as you find what works for your team 2. Be deliberate about how you run sprints if you want to improve your product velocity How do you run your sprints? 

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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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