the best in B2B SaaS
Earlier this week one of our colleagues posed the question: “who are the smartest people in B2B SaaS?”. A few obvious names came to mind, but we struggled to find any thorough lists that were up to date, so we decided to start our own of the top minds in B2B SaaS.
We invite you to give it a follow, and would love your feedback if you think that we’re missing anyone! Cheers.
🔥💰🔥 2019 was the year startups began to really question the scalability of paid acquisition channels. Last year’s record levels of VC investment resulted in new money companies throwing heaps of cash at paid ads, saturating those channels and driving ad costs up. It doesn’t help that buyers have become more and more wary of ads over time, which has increased the price even more. We think we’ve found the cure to this ad cancer, and it’s focusing on your customer network. Adding value to your customer network will prompt them to spread the word about your business, which is both more scalable and cheaper than paid ads. There are 3 main ingredients you’ll need to serve this tasty customer network marketing dish.
Great Product - This is obviously easier said than done, but a fantastic product will always lead to more positive word of mouth.
Early Adopter Focus - Your first users are usually the ones who will shout the loudest about it, so go above and beyond to make them fall in love even if the cost doesn’t seem justified at the time.
New Kind of Nurturing - Thinking of your customers as a network means you’ll need a new type of CRM to manage them—one that measures a customer’s place in your community and tracks their relationship at a more personal level. We have yet to find the perfect solution, and hack this manually for the time being.
❓ Startups have significantly fewer resources than well-established companies, and must quickly move towards profitability or hyper-growth to survive. Depending on your level of cash burn, you really only have 1-2 years to do this after seed money is raised. This means decisions need to be made quickly, which is why you hear someone in your office talk about the 80/20 principle at least once a week. It’s our turn to bring it up, and we loved these 4 questions that will force you to generate 80% of your results from 20% of your output.
How can we achieve this faster? - Great for development sprints because it will uncover resource-intensive parts of the feature and highlight what is really meaningful.
What’s the expected impact of us doing this? - Connecting an action to an end impact to your users ensures you’re always adding value to your customers.
Can you unpack that? - Ask customers this to better understand their workflows and get to the bottom of their needs.
What initially made you excited about our product? - Another for your customers, that will remind them why they came in the first place, and show you what is drawing people in.
📋 Your first customer success hires will shape your company’s customer experience, so you want to make sure you get the right people, and that starts with a great job description. A seemingly unimportant factor is the job title, but there is a bit of ambiguity on the difference between common support titles (see GrooveHQs definitions below). You’ll also want to make sure to convey the type of business you are through the tone of your description— the right candidates will mesh with your tone immediately, and smart ones will mirror it in their cover letters. To really see who stands out, add subtle action items in the description like formatting requests for their resume. This will separate the careless from those with attention to detail.
💪 We are far more capable than we give ourselves credit, and pushing our mental boundaries is often what it takes to realize our full potential professionally, and in life in general. David Goggins’s Can’t Hurt Me is a testament to this idea—he overcame tremendous adversity by mastering his own mental toughness, and now holds a number of incredible records like the most pull-ups in 24 hours (4,030 to be exact). There are a lot of tactics to take away from the book, but our favorite is Goggins’s “40% rule.” He believes that our brains have an artificial governor that dictates our limitations, and in reality, when we feel we are hitting our limits, we have another 60% in the tank. As you can guess, the numbers are not backed by any real science, but it’s absolutely true that our self-governed boundaries can be altered.