Successful SaaS companies require systematic approaches across multiple dimensions: (1) Team building demands clear values with explicit trade-offs and alignment on 'tempo' expectations rather than accommodating everyone; (2) Bootstrapping suits lifestyle businesses while venture capital is appropriate only for companies targeting billion-dollar revenue scales; (3) Pricing should be addressed quarterly through a dedicated committee focusing on revenue per customer metrics; (4) Retention requires addressing both strategic (product-market fit) and tactical (cancellation flows, payment failures) components separately; (5) Customer research is critically underutilized despite driving significantly better business outcomes; (6) Competitive intelligence is essential given the 16-fold increase in SaaS competitors over the past decade; (7) Local strategies and in-person engagement drive 10-30% higher willingness to pay and 20% lower churn; (8) The middle of the funnel represents the biggest growth opportunity, with freemium models proving most effective for building engaged user pools before conversion.
10 Lessons on Building and Scaling a $200M Bootstrapped SaaS
Added:the bratty thing here is that real professional ship like at the end of the day like real profession I don't care what if you're a marketer product person engineer like it doesn't like Ops person people Ops real professional ship and they ship it a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing in my opinion your Tempo framework is more important than your org design and so if you've ever had like a team that seems really really smart but they're always planning or they don't really like ship a lot or you've had trouble where everyone kind of gets it at the leadership level but then the team below them and Below them seems to be kind of going in a different direction you probably don't have enough alignment and you don't have enough alignment on like what good looks like in terms of like tempo welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Patrick Campbell Patrick is the founder and CEO of profitwell which he bootstrapped and sold without any funding for over 200 million dollars I've been a big fan of profitwell and Patrick for many years he's one of the most insightful and smartest people that I know constantly sharing wisdom on Twitter and in his newsletter primarily on pricing and retention and team building and all the elements of building a successful SAS business I've been excited to get Patrick on the podcast since I launched it and I think this may be the most action-packed signal to Noise episode yet we covered 10 Topics in an hour including hot takes on team building bootstrapping shipping competitive analysis user research and of course pricing and retention do not miss this episode it is one of my new favorites with that I bring you Patrick Campbell after a short word from our wonderful sponsors this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked or you're going to be asked about your sock 2 compliance sock 2 is a way to prove your company is taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners especially those with serious security requirements also if you want to sell to the Enterprise proving security is essential stock 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals or it can put your business on hold if you don't have a sock 2 there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table beginning a society report can be a huge burden especially for startups it's time consuming tedious and expensive enter vanta over 3 000 fast growing companies use vanta to automate up to 90 of the work involved with sock 2. Banta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months less than a third of the time that it usually takes for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off Banta just go to vanta.com Lenny that's v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today this episode is brought to you by amplitude if you're setting up your analytics stack but not using amplitude what are you doing anyone can sell you analytics while amplitude unlocks the power of your product and guides you every step of the way get the right data ask the right questions get the right answers and make growth happen to get started with amplitude for free visit amplitude.com amplitude power to your products Patrick welcome to the podcast thanks for having me man good to good to finally we've been texting chatting for years now and I just realized we've never we've never had an actual conversation so this is this is where the relationship and the friendship ends because we realize how awkward we are together I guess I highly doubt it I hope that doesn't happen I wanted to get you on this podcast ever since I started this podcast it's always been on my list uh you're just generally one of the smartest humans and most amazing humans I know and so thank you for joining me on this podcast we gotta we gotta introduce you to more people but I I appreciate that I appreciate that you're humble humble man so usually what I do with these podcasts is I have kind of just like one main topic that I focus on but I feel like you're such a renaissance man of a brain that I thought it'd be more fun to go through 10 different topics and kind of like power through them and see your perspective I feel like you have all these contrary intakes on things and these like interesting insights and so what I want to do is just go through 10 topics and kind of just get a sense of what's like a big mistake Founders companies make in this area what's maybe a big opportunity they missed or just like what's a hot take on this topic how does that sound yeah 100 let's do it I I'm gonna change my Twitter bio to that Renaissance of a brain oh that's that's right explicit for me yeah I appreciate that just yeah just lennyson's yeah tribute that quote that'd be Hillary people you're like what the hell is he anyway Let's Just Jump Right In first topic is building your team as a founder or just a leader of any kind so here's the question just what what are the biggest mistakes people make building their team what are the biggest opportunities people miss when they're building their team and then just or just generally what's like your take on how to best approach building your team as a as a founder or just a leader of people you always have to start answers with cliches and I think the the biggest cliche with building a team is is team is everything right like if you're listening you've you've heard that you've probably said that to somebody or you know gotten mentored on that and I was told that in the early days of building and I I actually thought it was terrible advice I thought it was going to be like the product or marketing or something that was going to hold us back but I think that although team is everything and I truly believe that if you look at most data or most behaviors that most companies make this isn't actually how we think or what we do let me give you two fundamental issues I think the first one is we confuse team by being everything to all people to accommodating to every single person and especially in Tech the last couple of years maybe that's going to change a little bit now but it was always like oh everyone needs to be like happy and I think that's a really really big misconception because uh you're not there to make everyone happy you're there for some sort of mission and some sort of goal and you want to set up the culture and the team in a way that gets to that particular goal and I think the little bit more actionable way to look at this is I don't think we actually focus on our team the average tenure of a manager in Tech right now is about 15.7 months I actually went and looked into this mainly because we we got into hyperdrive about team a couple of years ago the average time a report has the same manager in corporate Tech is only about 10.8 months so just under 11 months and there's no way that team is everything or at least we actually believe that when the purveyors of your team your management only last that long it's just impossible and I think for the most part people Ops is an afterthought and if even if you get into the history of HR which we should not do because that's an entire podcast it's all about reacting it came out of the labor movement in you know the mid-1900s and it was all about you know hey how do we like cya rather than like how do we push our team forward and I think in Tech we had the opportunity to do that but we we haven't really focused on our team as much so I don't know if I answered your question but that's kind of the scope of that problem I think is is we don't actually focus on our team we don't actually focus on our team in the context of the we kind of just hire people hope they're really happy and and obviously I'm generalizing but if you look at you know the stats and you look at kind of what's Happening that's that's that's that's how it shakes out is there something you've done in building your company that has kind of been countered to that something you've learned about because I I totally agree people always talk about team team and then that's often really sucky to work at a lot of companies and clearly they don't care that much about your experience so super actionable things that we've done I think one it kind of comes back to the Baseline feedback or advice you've probably received or if you're listening this before which is you can't be everything to all people so like who are you for like who are you for and who are you not for I think really defining that in your values and values aren't values unless there's an actual trade-off right and so we had things like optimized for the long term there's a clear trade-off when we optimize for the long term you probably give up short-term Revenue right you also you have different types of people that do better at the particular company than not one of the the more controversial things we did is we talked a lot about behaviors the one thing that we had is this thing this concept known as the most charitable interpretation it's not something we made up but there was this idea that basically when there's conflict or when there's some sort of Confrontation the way that you handle that confrontation was really really important to us and the way that we wanted our teams or the people that we wanted to hire for basically would take the most charitable interpretation of that confrontation so Lenny if you were like hey Patrick I like your shirt and I just didn't like when people commented on my shirt instead of getting pissed off going to HR or like getting mad at you what we would do is we'd say hey like the right way at profitwell to handle that would be like uh he didn't know so I'm not going to bring it up or hey Lenny you probably didn't know but I don't really like when people comment on my shirt it seems super trivial but when you have over 20 people all of a sudden these things start to come up and I think most of the time we infantilize our teams where we let them run to kind of HR we have different policies or all of these different things but at the end of the day you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for very smart human beings to basically do stuff and you want them basically working together not having to go in this run around with policies and people to kind of push things for them I love that it reminds me of something at Airbnb where our header product which was always encouraging us to assume good intent from the other person yeah just like what is the good version yeah of like what they're trying to achieve it's unlikely they're trying to cause harm but the important part is and this is where like you really care about your team is if you believe that and it's okay to have a culture that doesn't believe that it's not a culture for me and that's okay that's the entire point but if you believe that then people who have trouble assuming positive intent or have trouble taking the most charitable interpretation they they can't be at your company and they have to go and you have to find and we would have people and we didn't always defend this when we started defending it everything got better but all of a sudden we would say like hey like it seems like this is really tough this is how we think about things this is how we handle this type of behavior here if that's hard for you let's find you another job and thankfully we're we're not taking ditches here we're all working in Tech and so it's easy quote unquote enough to find another gig even in you know economies like now that reminds me of there's this guy Douglas Atkin who I worked with for a while who helped us craft the core values at Airbnb and he made this point that your values need to be needs to be clear exactly like you said who doesn't fit who doesn't belong because if yeah it's everybody it doesn't it's wordless like Integrity trust like everyone wants that and and you know fits into that but it's only valuable if it's clear who's like not a fit exactly how you're saying it well we get this fear that accommodation culture again where it starts even in the interview process we're like oh my God we need these hires we need these sales people we need these Engineers so we don't we don't end up being upfront with these values and these trade-offs in the air review process and then all of a sudden you spend a lot of time and a lot of money hiring someone who just doesn't fit and I think that's really really bad for them it's really bad for you and so that was the other thing is we would pull all of this forward into the interview process and talk about it and basically say like hey if this is not how you think that's okay we're not better than you you're not better than us it's just this is how we do things here and I think a lot of times we're scared to do that because we have that founder or that exact fear of you know hey we have to get this thing done and the only way to do that is to you know do X Y or Z when in reality that's actually gonna you know make your deadline go out further than actually focusing on you know alignment as much as humanly possible next topic bootstrap it I feel like you're probably in the bootstrap Hall of Fame you built a company there we go that's all I've ever wanted I think you're in there so you told me if I'm gonna say anything but basically you bootstrapped the company sold it to for 200 million dollars I don't know if I've heard of anything like that so what's your hot take what are mistakes people make around bootstrapping the basic idea is bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses that want to cash flow funding is for companies trying to create a billion dollars in annual revenue and that's that is something that that answer offends everybody like that answer offends like the Indie friends I have they're gonna be like oh what about base camp wistia profitwell and I'll tell you like profitwell this was a big mistake like yes it was a great exit we sold for over 200 million dollars Etc but we probably if we had taken money we we could have had a billion dollar exit or we could have kept going and we should have taken money earlier in our life cycle this was actually a big mistake because we got hooked on the efficiency and that was that was great but we could have moved even quicker than we were and you know in hindsight it's 2020 and you know I'm I'm obviously not crying over this but it's one of those things that I think that you have to know who you are and you have to know what your goals are for a company and our biggest thing was we wanted to build a big company and we were going after that but we weren't doing the things in order to actually make that happen which is I.E getting funded so yeah that's that's that's kind of my hot take and hopefully I offend everyone but it's also just kind of the end of the Twitter argument where it's like yeah it depends but that's that's kind of the thing to think about it's interesting because usually you hear from the other end someone that raised VC money is like I shouldn't have raised money I should have bootstrapped this thing longer it's cool to hear from the other side someone that did that like no we maybe should have raised some VC money along the way well I think there's a lot of ideas that should not raise money like there's a lot of ideas that should just be great cash flowing and they can be large businesses you know there's large businesses cash flowing tens of millions of dollars you know without funding right and I think it's just one of those things that you need your goals your model and ultimately your your funding situation all to kind of match and I think a lot of folks they go in the opposite direction where they're just like oh everything on TechCrunch everything on Twitter is like hey I need to raise money raise money raise money and they don't take a step back and go like well that idea it's just not a very good business to get money and money is so plentiful even now still that you know it is easy quote unquote relatively easy to to raise money on just not a great idea and so that's that's you know obviously problematic I've been thinking about writing a post on that exact topic something like your startup probably is not Venture scale because a lot of people think they should they could raise money and build a huge business it was like a heuristic that maybe tells a Founder that they shouldn't raise money it's never going to be a billion dollar company I used to look at it you know 10 years ago you'd say is this a company that can get to 100 million in annual revenue and now those numbers are all changed because IPOs are happening closer to 200 250 million and you know the markets are all over the place depending on the day I look at this as if you are going to be that large company you need to get to a billion in Revenue per year it doesn't have to be overnight it can be over 20 years it can be you know it's not something that has to happen quickly but that's how I think about it and if I don't feel like there's a clear path to that it doesn't mean I don't raise money it just means that I take a step back and really think about that particular idea because when you get on that treadmill there's plenty of ideas that will sell for 400 million 500 million but then if you're on the funding treadmill and you look at how much money that that founder that exact team ends up getting at the end of it it's like you might have been better just building a 50 million cash flowing business that you know you're getting more money you know from that and you still have the choice to kind of sell it so that's how I think about it it's it's a spectrum it's on the margins there it's not like a fixed rule but the other thing I also think about like when I think about building my next company we're gonna be bootstrapped for I don't know what it's not a timeline but I had imagined probably the first 18 to 24 months because I don't want to give up that equity for that funding on figuring out the idea obviously I had an exit so I'm able to I'm able to like afford that and you know I'm in a position where I don't have to worry about you know my own livelihood but I think it's one of those things if you can bootstrap for the even if you're going after a funded idea if you can bootstrap for the initial ideation and maybe even through product Market fit which is not an easy thing to do but that's the ideal time then to raise because then you're just going and you're going for the fences at that point I really like that very concrete stat you shared and that's exactly how I think about it that if you don't think you can get to a billion dollars in Revenue a year eventually that it probably is not a venture skill business and I think that just boils down to how large is the market if there's not enough people that are going to pay enough money to make this a billion dollar a year in Revenue business you probably shouldn't go down to VC treadmill and I think when you think about that it opens up this world of options for you as someone listening to this and and so like think of it this way you don't have to have the pressure to create a billion dollars in Revenue if you can take a step back and be like okay I can create a 10 million dollar business like you listen to this probably you're like I don't know but like if you were a director level somewhere at a corporate company or you're leading product somewhere you can go create a 10 million dollar business might not happen overnight it might take 10 years all these other things but that's amazing that's insane like think of you know 20 30 40 50 years ago you'd have to have a corner store and you'd have to work 18 hours a day to build that type of you know ability or that wealth to then hopefully retire when you're 65 and sell the business for like 1X now like you can build a software company that's doing a million a year have an amazing life reduce the number of hours if you want or go all in and make it into a 10 100 million dollar company over time and I think that's that's amazing we should celebrate that rather than like if it's not a billion you're failing but we should just know our limits I think that's that's the thing a lot of people fail out with funding next topic pricing you are probably the most uh okay you're in the top top one percent smartest most experienced people on pricing we could have done a whole podcast on pricing maybe we will in the future but as maybe one of ten topics what comes to mind is like maybe the biggest mistake people make in pricing biggest uh opportunity they miss biggest hot take it's super boring but the biggest hot take is you just have to do something once a quarter that's it like I've I've been trying to teach about pricing for a decade now I've done a lot of different approaches on this and I think the easiest thing is listen you have three growth levers you have acquiring customers monetizing them and retaining them you're spending a lot of time and money on acquisition you're spending some time and money on retention you're probably doing nothing on pricing and monetization and it's because you think it's this nebulous thing and there are some nebulous aspects to it but to make it super concrete it is the revenue per customer look at that number that one kpi and you want that number going up and to the right it's obviously going to go to the right over time but you want it to going up over time you know every single quarter not as high as your sales volume or your volume or your Revenue maybe but you want that number gradually going up and just do one thing per quarter the least sexy thing when it comes to pricing is have a pricing committee if it's two-person company to you and your co-founder if it's a you know 100 000 person company it might be 30 people but really it's only eight people kind of central to that particular product and then just realize there's a lot of things that influence that Revenue per customer there's the actual price you're packaging your add-on strategy your discount strategy your price localization freemium there's a whole host of different things there but just find one thing you're gonna do every three months put a calendar invite let it renew every three months you're going to snooze it a couple of times I get it I've seen this many many times before but just do something even if it's super small like I I guarantee you it's just like any other thing you measure as soon as you start measuring and caring about it you're going to start to do some stuff some of it's going to go poorly some of it's going to go great then you're going to do more stuff and then just over time all of a sudden that number is going to go up and to the right but just do something that's that's the basic idea I love the Simplicity of that if I think about the the pie chart of the things you will do and may change there's you mentioned if you want to raise prices one may be lower prices ones probably change your pricing model there's a couple more I guess in your experience where have you found the biggest opportunities end up being maybe early in the early phase of a startup in that pie chart the number one thing to figure out when you're thinking about the different pricing pieces pound for pound it's the pricing metric or the value metric that's how you charge per user per thousand visits per thousand what's its whatever it is consumer companies it's a little bit harder physical good products it's really hard obviously because you have that physical good the physics you know you can't get over but the reason this is so powerful is because if you get everything else kind of in your pricing wrong or not great but you get that right you tend to be okay when it comes to monetization and the reason is is because first from an acquisition standpoint like acquiring customers you end up making sure that you get Disney coming into your product they're paying Disney prices and then you get Johnny Eugene startup coming in and they're paying Johnny and Jane prices you don't want them paying the same thing because obviously the value is different even if they're consuming almost the same amount so this allows you to kind of figure that line out and then what's really beautiful about it is sure tends to be about 20 to 25 percent lower because people will downgrade but they're using you don't get this like I'm paying for so much and end up not doing you know not using a lot of it it's like oh I'm using eight seats this month I'm gonna downgrade and it's just automatic and then your expansion revenue is typically double when you're using a particular value metric because instead of me having to resell you and being like hey Lenny there's this really cool feature in this upper tier do you want this and you're like I already use a product I don't really want this instead I just go hey Lenny congratulations you now have 100 videos in your account that's awesome you guys must be growing I'm just going to bump you up to the 100 video plan let me know if you have any questions right like it's just a very very implicit way to get expansion Revenue so that's the thing pound for pound that's the best and then I would say if you have a lot of politics internally which everyone does with pricing because it sits in the center of so many different teams I would actually start with a price increase you should be increasing your overall price once per year if you're building if you're not building and your support sucks and your NPS is low then you know don't worry about it but if your NPS is over 20 which is not a very high MPS you should raise your prices once per year the reason I suggest that is because it gets all of the like BS and all the politics on on the mat you're gonna have to collect some data you're gonna have to prove it to Sales you're going to have to make sure you have the enablement you're gonna have to make sure your messaging is but it's a tight enough non-nebulous thing that you're doing versus a value metric where you can have a bunch of debates about this metric or that metric and should you give 10 away versus 100 away it's a good way to kind of rip the Band-Aid off and most companies most companies don't change their actual number that they're charging once but every three years so if you haven't done it for three years like you're overdue for it so it's a good one to kind of rip the Band-Aid off this episode already pound for pound I think is is up there this is amazing I'm excited to get to the next topic but first I'll plug you wrote a guest post in my newsletter about pricing and we'll link to that in the show notes and that goes deeper into this value metric and how to think about pricing so check that out next topic retention so when I think Patrick Campbell I think pricing and retention so again this is like could be its own podcast episode but let's just pick one thing to talk about what are the biggest mistakes people make retention opportunities or just hot take the reason I started writing about retention and Publishing data on it is because I didn't want to be the pricing guy I was trying to like basically differentiate myself and then you know I was trying to be the SAS guy but there's that's that's too broad but anyway so retention the hottest of hottest takes and this is the one to offend 90 of the list no it's not going to offend but this is a product podcast that's how I think about it yeah products homies you fail at realizing most of the time that there are two types of retention there is strategic retention and then there's tactical retention strategic retention is all the stuff that you as a great product leader a great product team are doing your icps your time to Value Road mapping the right features figuring out your mission metric agonizing over every little thing right all the paper cuts of being a great product leader but because you're so focused and so biased towards that you miss out typically on this thing we call tactical retention and these are things like payment failures term optimization cancellation flows off-boarding Etc and if your past product Market fit this area this tactical retention it's typically about 25 to 40 percent of your churn problem which is a significant amount but you don't really look at it because again you're like I gotta go focus on features I gotta do this and I'm gonna go you know be be this great product leader and so because product is so entrenched in that thinking that that problem can be solved with like two months of work like it's not that much work putting in basically a marketing funnel When people's credit cards fail not that hard not rocket science right doing off-boarding like being really smart with off-boarding and one little tidbit I looked at like two million cancellation flows we built some products for this that's why I have this data just to be clear but looked at like 2 million cancellation flows and we found you have about 18 to 30 seconds when someone hits that cancel button we found you should ask two questions one why are you leaving multiple choice don't do the free response you get like one out of a hundred great responses and 99 are not great and then the other question we found works really really well is what did you like about the product and the reason that works so effectively is because that person's on a freight train to basically cancel they're like I'm already done oh yeah this is why I'm leaving the minute you ask them what they'd like you're basically tapping into this Nostalgia effect and you're stopping that freight train and then when I have that information it's great for a product team it's great to figure out like what's working what's not what should we do more of was this a good customer but then based on their engagement data their plan whatever all their like firmware Graphics about them plus their answers then I could offer up a salvage offer or a pause plan or a maintenance plan or these types of things but all this type of stuff this is really really powerful and I always suggest like Finance teams should just take this on because product teams are always going to be thinking so much more in the future rather than like fixing this right now but that's that's the hottest take I got for for retention that's a great awesome take and I want to plug profit while right here actually I know you guys offer a product that does this and I've used it so I don't know if it's still chewing after the position things change so I use profitable for my newsletter I just plugged it into my stripe account and it's like the most amazing free product because it just tells me everything I want to know and then it's got this cool feature we just turn it on and it does these things for you like it tells people your credit card is about to expire hey this card hold you should try yeah putting in a new card so that's a cool uh reason to check out profitable thanks man I appreciate that and it it's actually kind of cool because I think for us because the fact that product teams don't really think about this stuff we stumbled into this like whole thesis that you know could be a whole episode which is like all the product features are done for you so what I mean by that is like you'd notice this but when you log in and set this up you're not writing emails you're not setting up the flows and the reason is because we have all this data from you know 30 billion dollars in ARR flowing through our metrics product that we can like study and like understand what works and what doesn't and that kind of stumbling that is useful for folks is what we kind of discovered is this anti-active usage type product like it retains itself at a really really high rate because people are just getting the value and they don't have to use it and so what we kind of found this is like a little bonus thing on retention when we look at churn rates across different types of products those products that are workflow products you use every single day or mostly every single day or those products you don't have to log into but you still get the value that's where the lowest churn rates are the highest retention anything in the middle it's like death and this is why profile metrics ended up being free because we were just like it's it's terrible to build a metrics for an analytics product it's so hard because people just don't appreciate how much work goes into it therefore they don't retain at a high rate they don't want they're not willing to pay that much Etc I think that alone is a really interesting story and I don't know if we should get too deep but just to like highlight what you just said so many startups build an analytics product that is just like a better way to measure and track all the stuff that's going on and what you found is you won't make money doing that people don't want to pay for like a SAS Analytics tool you have two options you go up market and you pretty much become like a data product with a UI or you go super Niche and even super Niche like it's super hard and it's just because I don't know like everyone's trying to kill a spreadsheet and it's like you're not going to kill a spreadsheet all real analysts will do everything in a spreadsheet so for us it was we want to give you a clean UI and then we want to help you get this data into spreadsheets or email or you know whatever you're accusing for your databases things like that yeah like I don't want to make this an F for profit well but it's like uh Founders come to me with pictures of like hey build this Suite analytics so I'm like just look up for profit while I was giving away for free that's going to be a high bar too exceed yeah yeah we were gonna try to sell it like we were trying to sell it in the beginning but what ended up happening is we ran into all this that's why we didn't all right back on track topic number five shipping but have you learned about shipping whatever mistakes people make when trying to ship faster proficiently yeah this the bratty thing here is that real professional ship like at the end of the day like real profession I don't care what if you're a marketer or product person engineer like it doesn't like Ops person people Ops real professional ship and they ship it a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing and so the thing that we thought a lot about is is like in my opinion your Tempo framework and I'll explain a little bit more of what that that means in a second is more important than your org design and so if you've ever had like a team that seems really really smart but they're always planning or they don't really like ship a lot or you've had trouble where everyone kind of gets it at the leadership level but then the team below them and Below them seems to be kind of going in a different direction you probably don't have enough alignment and you don't have enough alignment on like what good looks like in terms of like tempo and so the way we looked at this was we have to establish like mission mission metric and guiding principles at the top so what do we do how are we measuring it and how we're going to get there so for us it was we automate subscription growth our mission metric was the amount of Revenue that was on profitwell because that was good from acquisition but it also meant we were doing our jobs then how we're going to get there we want to be the most helpful Brandon SAS and then we also we're gonna do it for you this whole thing that I just kind of talked about then what we did is we established that at the leadership level every org leader so Marketing sales Etc they need a framework that fits into that overall so marketing at profitwell was this whole inbound media so lots of podcast video series Etc and the most important part of that was they needed to determine what good looked like in terms of shipping so if we're like Hey we're doing sales blah blah blah or Marketing in this case this many episodes per month it's this many product launches per month this many big product launches per quarter whatever it is and then your leadership is basically a conversation of like great that's what good looks like we agree how do we close that Gap and then all of those conversations are like okay you only shipped one thing per quarter we want to do one per month why well I don't have enough resources we solve that problem where we you know figure out how to get the more resources then they're not doing it again okay why well there's this problem and then all of a sudden you start to create this like you know very high output team kind of across the board and you also have this alignment so you don't like wake up nine months into someone being at your company and being like well I think Tim sucks and it's like well why did you just all of a sudden wake up and think Tim Tim sucks well he's not shipping blah blah well it's probably an org problem rather than like a Tim problem because again you vetted Tim Tim was at this other company and apparently it was a really great rock star so what what's the difference here like you screw up the hiring well maybe because that you know is really really hard but most of the time you just haven't set an expectation of like what good looks like in terms of tempo and then you haven't had that constant conversation to make sure that Tim has what he needs in order to ship what was like a big learning I guess in doing that is that just something you built over time of we need to create this Tempo yeah profit well and complete misalignment if you don't call it out on what good looks like just complete misalignment like so and so is going and building they think one product launch per quarter or I'm sitting there and I'm like well we should have a medium one per month and we should have a big one per quarter right complete misalignment and if you don't have a way to talk about that like some sort of Nexus to have that conversation you end up not having it and then you end up creating this like friction and resentment on both sides because everyone thinks again like Tim isn't doing well and it's like that's that's not what's happening it's just the expectations aren't set and then what was really cool is that you start to find out that the why they aren't hitting what good looks like is is all solvable and most of the time it's this team isn't talking to this team oh great well marketing wants to do these launches product isn't providing them stuff all right let's get these two people together have this conversation because we didn't have product marketing or official product marketing they have this conversation and all of a sudden it's like all right Neil you need to provide one thing a month there's so much stuff we've built a lot of it we haven't announced you just need to provide one thing a month marketing will worry about how to like position it in a way that you know isn't too far isn't like overselling it but also like gets us something per month and you can approve like that positioning and then all of a sudden it's like you start getting this like Tempo going which you know obviously is the goal reminds me David sack says this awesome post called the Cadence around how marketing and off and product and sales should operate and create this kind of cadence so being aligned but also like offset schedule which uh we'll link to that in the show notes if you haven't seen it yeah that's correct next topic first principles thinking as a renaissance man of a brain I feel like you spent a lot of time thinking about from first principles and in our conversations you always have really interesting approaches to things what have you learned about actually implementing first principle thinking which you know people are always talking about how do I want to be first principal yeah people people always talk about it and I have there are no good courses that I have found on first principles thinking there are good blog posts but the good blog post kind of explain what it is and then that's kind of it like it's like this is what it is and here's an example and most of them quote Elon Musk about rockets and breaking down you know the the different parts so what I kind of found is there's the five y's which I I think someone's talked before or at least I've read it in the newsletter before which is just you keep asking why right you know you kind of well this is this way well why is that well this is this way why is that I found the model that people who aren't great at first principle thinking or aren't great at talking about it that kind of helps them unlock is this thing called Problem cause solution so I learned this in debate in college in high school and it basically is you have a problem that you're trying to solve well you can't actually solve a problem so if we talk about world hunger you can't just solve world hunger because it's kind of the symptom it's this problem that exists well then I want to break down what are all the causes of World Hunger right and it's a little more brainstorming when you have these conversations with folks especially again when they struggle with this and all of a sudden I could list out all the causes irrigation crisis Aid not getting to where it needs to be you know famines drought Etc and then what I can do is I can rank those causes in terms of like magnitude right so if we're trying to solve world hunger and for some reason we discovered irrigation was the biggest problem like if we solved irrigation you know everything would be great well then I'm going to align my solutions to all of those different causes and you get this like nice alignment between I can solve a cause and if I solve the cause that's big enough and proper enough I'm going to eventually solve the actual problem or mitigate the problem I should say so that's the framework that I found really really useful and it also it also it's great for using for presentations it's great for Mission it's great for all of these different things because it's a little bit more actionable than just the five y's which is more of a way to have a conversation so the way you operationalize this so the problem cause solution you're saying like on strategy templates you kind of write out here's the problem we're trying to solve here's the source of the issue and then here's how we're approaching it can you talk a bit more about how you implement this at your company and the people you work with yeah totally so I'll say big medium and small things and I'll try to be really quick so big things it's it's like what are we facing ah we you know we're we're gonna try to charge for this metrics product now there's a bunch of competitors the customers don't really care about it so we have this problem and the problem is growth right like how do we grow a product like this how do we grow our company right and what's really interesting about like a big problem or a nebulous problem like that is you end up having a lot of conversations about the problem which I think is more useful sometimes about like well what are we actually trying to do like let's get alignment as much as possible and then it's like okay well what are the causes of our growth problem well people aren't willing to pay for uh metrics getting accuracy is really really hard actually the Market's dense all these other things well what are some of the solutions well we could do this could do this could do this and normally what ends up happening is the solution ends up being kind of an approach so our approach that kind of mitigated some of or solved for some of these causes and mitigate the problem was freemium and then these paid products that were all paid for performance because with paper performance you could charge a significant amount more in a market that only has like a hundred thousand logos right which is a really small market and so that that's kind of an example there medium and small like let's talk about a support ticket right like this person's pissed off they're coming in they're pissed off what are the causes well there's a lot of different cause houses that were probably like oh we didn't get back to them in time and then we gave a crappy solution we gave this it just kind of allows us to kind of like look at the problem and so it's it's more of a way of thinking on that level and it's not happening you know we're not going to have an hour-long conversation about a support ticket but the support folks that I talked to about this they go okay cool why is he upset well we didn't get the answer in time okay my first line is going to be I understand we didn't get you an answer quick enough like apologies for that you know it just allows them to have a little bit of like an extra second to kind of think through things and kind of move forward with that I love that I love that uh big example in the small example this episode is brought to you by dovetail the customer insights platform for teams that gets you from data to insights fast no matter the method there's so much customer data to get through from user interviews to NPS sales calls usability tests support Tickets App reviews it's a lot and you know that if you're building something hidden in that data are the insights that will lead you to building better products and that's where dovetail can help dovetail allows you to quickly analyze customer data from any source and transform it into evidence-based insights that your whole team can access if you're a product manager who needs insights to motivate your team a designer validating your next big feature or a researcher who needs to analyze fast dovetail is the collaborative insights platform your whole team can use go to dovetailapp.com learning to get started today for free that's dovetailapp.com Lenny all right next topic customer research I feel like you have a pretty interesting perspective on custom research so let's go into it I I think I have like the 85 year old curmudgeonly man perspective on customer research so I here's the thing everything in your business it does not matter what type of business you have everything is used to drive someone to a point of conversion or Justify the products or the price that you're offering up that customer is a human being you're driving to that point of conversion and it's your job to understand how they perceive you how they perceive their problem how they perceive the world like around them around your products like we all know this on a philosophical level but here here are some fun facts so one only one in five companies have buyer personas or icps only one in five so we talk about this all the time we retweet the Articles you know we give the advice so many of us give the advice but then we look at our own companies only one in five have some sort of segmentation icps right and then only one out of ten companies actually do customer research or development on a quarterly basis this should be a continuous thing it should be a monthly weekly type thing not saying you're like setting up surveys or having all these conversations on a weekly basis but like only one out of ten are doing quarterly so that means the number that are doing monthly is even smaller than that and I just think that's insane and when we look at all data and we have a lot of data on this and this is something where I've been talking about customer development for a long time like everything is better like everything is better NPS is higher for organizations that have you know customer development functions or even just icps um or buyer personas depending on what framework you're using willingness to pay is typically higher the funnel is more efficient Tac is typical LTV to CAC is normally much much higher all those growth numbers you're typically growing at a much much higher rate like a fifteen twenty percent like not not a small like Delta 15 15 20 higher rate retention is better all these things are better um and the thing that I think 28 years ago or 10 years ago you didn't have to do customer development because you know and this is where the you know Keith replies just like customer research is dumb or whatever his famous quote is but you didn't have to do it because there just wasn't a lot of stuff out there we all were riding the wave of the internet but now the Market's harder and harder so like what are you going to do are you just going to keep throwing stuff up against the wall or are you going to actually do the stuff that all of us talk about doing and actually do the research and the research is hard it's never going to be 100 accurate because you're gonna have to use your judgment but like that's your job and so that's more of a rant I guess than a hot take but I think it's I also think this is one of those things that AI kind of starts solving especially all this you know generative AI because now you can just throw all that stuff into a workload and then all of a sudden you'll get back a lot of the sentiment and all that kind of stuff so you don't even have to do your do do the hard part anymore yeah that's that's my rant love the rant maybe one follow-up question why do you think it is that companies don't do this like I love the point you made of they're like retweeting yeah research is great writing blow style research is useful we got to do research why do you think they don't companies don't do it and then what's one thing that maybe they could do tomorrow that'll bring them closer down that path the one thing you can do put a number on a whiteboard 10 you're gonna have 10 customer conversations a month just 10 non-sales conversations you're just going to talk to 10 people or you're going to send one survey and people are terrible at sending surveys like surveys are actually great you just have to be good at sending them and good is it's not a high bar it just means that like you have 30 to 45 seconds of someone's time unless you're compensating them don't send 45 questions surveys by email where the first question is what's your email like you know don't do that but just do just put a number on the board I think the reason we don't do it is because it was quote unquote easy to get away with not doing it like if you really think about a funded environment and some some products are so Paradigm shifting that like the biggest misconception about customer research is like I have to listen to that you don't have to listen to them at all you just have to understand where they are and then you're filtering all of that with all this other data and then you're making a decision you're earning your paycheck as a product person typically it's the product person but also in marketing so I think it's just it's just one of those things where you could get away with not doing it now though the way the Market's going like you're just starting to see this more and more you're starting to see more tooling the reason you're seeing more tooling is because they're starting to connect it to like actually being useful rather than you having to set up your own kind of customer development program I think the other the other reason typically people haven't had to do this is because there's a lot of brute forcing that's done in startup land and it only lasts so long so all of these companies that raise a bunch of money get the 100 million dollar exit everyone's clapping because it's a big number but like cap table screwed everything's bad you know like it's a win because it's a win but like all of those companies are ones who are able to Brute Force to a certain level and they never learned how to like actually understand their Market or their customer and and I think that that kind of story will continue to happen as long as we have a lot of capital flowing in the market but I would rather not be that company I would rather be the company that you know gets the 100 million dollar 200 million dollar exit with bootstrapping or you know builds the billion dollar annual revenue company because I know my market I know my customers so well talking to customers good you should do it great reminder people are going to listen to this like yes we should do this and then we'll just move on oh I my joke when I give talks is only 20 of you are going to do this uh you know what I give a talk on it and so like I'm not even gonna talk deeply on it like you 20 come talk to me I got a whole framework for you that type of a thing because I think people just nod their heads and they tweeted and they just don't end up doing it that is close it's hard to overcome sometimes we're on to our eighth topic we got three to go and it's on competitive intelligence and the touch is on a really interesting part of your background that I don't know a lot of people know yeah so my my background I started uh my career I worked in US intelligence I worked for NSA and I I was just a entry level until analyst basically I was only there for just over a year and what what was kind of interesting is you get taught first principles thinking in so many different ways because you're solving essentially puzzles every day now those puzzles are like like finding a bad guy or a gal or finding this piece of information like those are all the puzzles but you have to kind of think through like how to how to figure this out and a lot of those puzzles involve you have these number of entities how are they going to react and you're trying to predict how they're going to react and you're also trying to help figure out how you're going to kind of react or act in the context of them right so like node analysis basically and what's interesting from a startup or a business perspective is I think that don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice it's amazing advice for product teams when you have a competitive intelligence program or you have competitive Intel I I try never to share that with product ever because products should just focus on the customer they should not give two craps what's going on with you know competitory or competitor beat right but as an overall missive don't focus on your competitors as terrible advice and if I'm being charitable it's just outdated because some fun facts and I alluded to some of them before over the past decade if you're building in Tech particularly in like SAS or subscriptions you now have 16 times the number of competitors if you started a business today than if you did 10 years ago and this is because everyone and their mother can spin up a website a server they can drive traffic to that site so there's a bunch of stuff in the market right and then because of all that stuff all these marketing channels are getting denser and denser right KHAK and B2B is up about 110 over the past 10 years consumer it's up 145 percent if you're selling sales and marketing software it's up 220 percent because there's just so much sales and marketing software doing sales and marketing things in the market and so the other reason for this is we haven't had a brand new marketing channel since 2015. and that was Snapchat we have Tick Tock you know TBD depending on how you think about it but we're going from like brand new marketing and advertising Innovation every quarter to basically every five years my point is if you are not in a blue ocean you're not in the Peter Thiel go to a market of one you're not those types of things which is most of us and even some of us who think we're in those things we're actually not you do have to focus on your competitors on some level and the levels I particularly think are a bare minimum just knowing who they are having a strategy so for profit well we never had comparison Pages because we very quickly went from a Challenger in this very competitor Market to the leader in the market so all of a sudden we were going to be above The Fray that was the idea that was the strategy that we had which is we're gonna have a lot of intel on what's going on with them why people care about this product we had white label NPS surveys and customer development surveys going to our competitors customers like that's the level and it was just automated it wasn't like it was taking a lot of time but we just wanted that Intel when you say white light label that means you're emailing your competitors customers to see what they think of your competitors right exactly so we're basically and we're we did it as like a third party basically which was you know I think one of them was analytics software.com like stuff like that so it wasn't like we were spoofing as you know our competitors I think that crosses a little bit of a line but basically we would have this Intel I would have there's a whole program here like I would have basically I'd have sources like basically these you know these customers I knew were always going to stay because they liked the founder or something like that I would get on the phone with them every quarter or two just to be like hey like what are you liking why haven't you switched yet these types of things I see them at conferences so there's a whole program there and again it's not it's not like it's distracting anything it's just I want the Intel so I can predict what's going on I can predict who to care about who not to care Oh but even then like if you're a challenger competitor marketing pages are really powerful and the thing is is like your customers especially in a denser Market they know your competitors exist or they're looking at them don't infantilize your customers help them hey this is how we compare to XYZ you know competitor and be honest as much as possible we should always be honest but be be as upfront as possible I should say with where you're bad at and where you're where they're great at those types of things but long story short having something awareness and then choosing a particular strategy and then depending on your strategy you might ramp up how much you actually do with the actual intelligence program this is amazing two questions should every startup have a former spy on their team to help them operationalize these ideas and then see is there anything else that you found super valuable that you did based on your training there we didn't have a formal program but I love hiring veterans either Veterans of intelligence so they're they're citizens so they're not they're not veterans from a military perspective but like people who had worked in Intel or people who were actual Veterans of different military branches there's a lot of reasons for this but I think that the intelligence folks it's a way of thinking now you got to be careful and this is just purely my opinion because depending on how long they were in the reason I left is because it's the government it's super bureaucratic was one of the most fulfilling jobs like I will ever have and I was only there for for a short amount of time but it's just one of those things where like it's just so bureaucratic so the 15-year person there is not driving they're not trying to like change the world necessarily they have a job right so you got to kind of be careful with that but yeah I think there's there's these really smart people that just think in a different way and it's a broader point is I think it's just really really good to like go to different Industries like all this customer development stuff you go to any like major retailer or any major e-commerce company they have entire teams just dedicated to this stuff like Hallmark was one of our first pricing customers back in the day before we went subscription focused they had 119 people in customer insights and research and this was part of the reason we were like well you guys don't need our help you guys enough people but like those are great people to hire even though they don't necessarily have the domain or the the actual industry knowledge they have a lot of domain expertise in terms of things I learned I'll put it this way not to get political if I was in charge of budget I would give so much more money to the Intel Community I saw conflicts or heard about conflicts being stopped just because of intelligence they didn't go hot you know in terms of like we're fighting I think it's one of those things where I would put so much more money there than the actual you know other side of kind of the defense budget and also like everyone asks me about Snowden so again not to get political it's a lot more complicated I think than a lot of people think it's one of those things that the issues that were brought up obviously they got really sensationalized but they're they're really important conversations to have but it's not as simple as like you know oh like stop doing this start doing that you know you don't have to worry about the NSA the NSA is all outward looking you should worry about the FBI the FBI are the ones who get a little a little testy with with certain things and you know you're seeing that in the court cases and stuff like that but just know there's a lot of really hard working very well-intentioned people who you might disagree in terms of trade-offs in terms of safety and things like that they're also some of the most privacy orientated people on the planet so you know that's that's worth the whole conversation so hopefully I didn't throw too many grenades in this in this part no we need more grenades uh that's the first time uh snow it was brought up on this podcast so that's cool there you go and this actually a good segue to the next topic which is around local strategies like FBI versus NSA I think you have a strong perspective that local strategies are much more likely to drive so we'll just get into that oh yeah just to give you a tease I'll tell you what I think of Snowden after the podcast so the world doesn't get to know except that I'll tell you what my opinion is afterwards local strategies local strategies very basic people like to buy from people but we as operators get so excited about the scale of the internet that we forget the basics of humanity I hear some fun data points we did a bunch of studies on this so prospects who meet you in person and this is not just for profit like all the data I've shared it's all Global level data or segmented depending on how we did it it's not like just our findings it's like we looked at probably a minimum of like 2 000 companies per you know kind of factoid most of the time much more but prospects who meet you in person have 10 to 30 percent higher willingness to pay than those who didn't churn for those folks who you meet in person is typically 20 percent lower than those folks who have never met you expansion revenue is typically fifteen to twenty percent higher and this is this is not only in like hand-to-hand kind of sales like you know coffee meetings lunches lunch and learns this type of thing but it's also in scaled products so products that cost 20 50 bucks per month and so my suggestions to you especially in like a post you know post covid I don't know if that's the right term but like in a world that hopefully does not see another pandemic in our lifetimes you know knock on wood do meetups do lunches go to conferences unless you're Lenny who is not a big fan of conferences but like get out of the office make sure you get out of the office and the budget doesn't have to be as big as you think breakfasts and lunches are super cheap we would push all of our P2 and p3s to like a Meetup and all of our p1s we would have one-on-one coffee dates like it's super cheap what are the peas mean is that like priority like Priority One you know we want these people to convert they're very good fits all this other stuff p2s are like they're probably good fits but they're just not as big and then p3s are with a Content play they're they just love our content and stuff but they're not necessarily um good fits for us and so people make the mistake they push everyone to dinners and it's like I don't want to spend all of my money on ptus and p3s and so like breakfast and lunches are cheaper than dinners meetups can be extremely inexpensive get creative we like to do like barbecue type stuff or like you know not dive bars but like the unique dive bar I guess is the best way to put it so it's not fancy people just want to meet people they want to talk to you especially if you're doing content and things like that the Lenny newsletter money Empire meetups I see the pictures of those all the time like there's just an urge to learn from one another and hang out so yeah that's the biggest thing get out of the office or get out of your desk at home yeah that's right you're a zoom and you're saying it's not just like the founders it could be anyone on the team sales people that all works anyway I led marketing as part of part of my role as CEO and so like I did a lot of this and I'm also the one doing a lot of content and stuff like that or like the face of a lot of our content so I did a lot of it but your head of sales and you just have to position this a little differently if if they're going to meet with a salesperson it's the same same thing as if they get a email from a bdr like they're like I'm not going to figure it out I don't want to like deal with this but if it's like hey we're hosting like we're doing these lunch and learns right now I was in Paris New York and London last week it's probably why I'm so sick this week and all of a sudden you know we did these lunch and learns people just want to hang out so we had 10 people we had 20 people at one 10 people all Priority One leads and then we did these meetups with you know 100 plus people at each like just think of that like brand equity and you just hang out you know it wasn't just me at all of these things I ran the content but then all of our sales folks were hanging out and you know doing their thing but it doesn't have to be super complicated it's just those touch points that people want and it's so so high leverage because there are a lot of people who will not answer your email but will come to an event to meet you or meet someone from your team because it's something to do especially if you're buying them breakfast or coffee or something like that it doesn't have to be something that's extravagant I love this advice basically it's like if your sales aren't where you want it to be find a way to meet your potential leads or someone in your community early like that's a very actionable thing you could do like we're not hitting our numbers let's just go meet some people find Opportunities to hang out and realize well in the early days pre-product Market fit this is all we would do too like I would I would stay at the worst hotels I would say at hostels but just to just to get to like okay I want to sell to these people like the best information I'm gonna get isn't in a zoom or I'm asking them questions it's going to be like hey I you know gave a talk on pricing because I was like a high leverage thing I could do because no one knows anything about pricing but they know it's important so a lot of people want to listen but then afterwards it's like oh yeah how do you think about this like what are you doing for this what are you doing for like all of those like fun producty questions in really really high leverage and and I think it's one of those things that you know that depends on your role it depends on your stage but everyone can use something there great segue to our final topic a lot of people spend time on top of funnel driving visitors driving traffic getting the word up a lot of people spend time at the end of The Funnel closing customers increasing within an organization you have this perspective that the middle of the funnel is maybe the biggest opportunity these days can you talk about that pound for pound biggest opportunity so take a quick setback demand generation exists for more than just supporting the sales team we we forget that so sales and marketing you know the past decade right it's all been the funnel the top of the funnel middle of funnel bottom of the funnel hubspot's trying to make it a flywheel but marketers are still talking about funnels right and when you look at the data it depends a little bit on the price point and a little bit on the vertical but 80 percent of sales and marketing budgets tend to go to the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel so sales folks and like add type spend um you know field events whatever it is that's where it goes and the whole point is you're trying to move someone from a lack of awareness at the top of the funnel to being aware about you and then to like a sales combo or or a conversion point if you're if you're not doing kind of sales the problem is bottom of the funnel efficiency and top of the funnel efficiency has plummeted the past decade like just plummeted and it's not only because of the factoids I was saying before about CAC and all these other things and so many competitors being in the market it's just it's just one of those things that like the days of like just hiring a bunch of bdrs not training them not having them in account based marketing not doing all these other things those days are are not here anymore like those days are gone maybe in some specific verticals in in specific parts of the market but here's here's the other problem sales today is so much more about timing than it once was because there's so much stuff out there it's it's one of those things where people are are waiting until it's the right time they're aware of you but they're waiting so the question we have to ask ourselves to not bury the lead any further is do we we need to make this like River of demand generation like basically what the man generation works but that's table space if we want to be even increasingly more successful that middle of the funnel needs to get bigger that pool of users who is aware of you interacting with you on a regular basis like what if you had leads basically hanging out there in the middle of the funnel interacting with you on a regular basis before all of a sudden their timing was right and then all of a sudden they go to the bottom of the funnel and even better they opt into them you don't have to like keep you know going after them and doing you know sales processes that are very kind of churn and burn so that pool of leads and so the best way to create pools of leads freemium I'm a huge fan of freemium I used to write articles about how freemium's terrible so I'm a big convert I wrote a book on premium as well the thing with freemium is CAC is still up over the past decade but it's up a lot less than overall CAC customers who convert from freemium and become paid customers their retention is typically about 10 to 20 percent higher than those who converted from a free trial or converted from kind of like a traditional sales process and then on top of that NPS or csat we measured it through NPS is typically about double because they're converting on their own kind of timeline not on some artificial timeline of a free trial or artificial timeline of sales you should still have those things but I want this pool of people who are aware of me and are using something of my product because at the end of the day what better content do you have than your actual product right even if you're a big Enterprise solution give them something to interact with and then the other way to kind of fill that middle of the funnel is is I think inbound marketing is just becoming SEO and ebooks Kieran from HubSpot gets offended when I say that but I love you buddy it's okay I'm still a huge fan and this is just because like CAC and inbound marketing has gone up and it's all about you know a lot of SEO and we'll see what AI does to that but this whole thing of inbound media we got on this train about five years ago and our media is just podcast video series when we sold the company we had eight different podcasts and video series all very like Niche like pricing page tear down which was a show about we collected data and tore down pricing Pages the good and the bad we had boxed out which was a retention Focus show for the e-commerce industry the subscription e-commerce industry so all of that was to build this pool so that people were aware of us and then over time all of a sudden they're like oh we have a pricing problem we should go talk to these guys oh we have this content or this retention thing we should go talk to these guys but I think the pool is is kind of the future a lot of people are still treating it as just this just this Gateway between the top and the bottom of the foil middle of the funnels the new top of funnel we need a bumper sticker there you go that's I don't know if that's going to sell well but I will buy one so the most nerdiest of all bumper stickers hello Patrick we've gone through 10 topics is there anything else you want to touch on before we get to a very exciting lightning round I think what I will say is this is all still hard right so I'm giving I'm giving some heuristics I'm giving some benchmarks but like your mileage is gonna vary but that's again that's your job whether you're a Founder a product person an exact whatever you are like your job is to you know take in information your job is to kind of analyze the problem and then ultimately you know come up with the best solution and so I think it's one of those things that there's some hard truths I think we talked about but then there's a lot of this that you kind of have to evaluate it for yourself so just a general I may come off like a know-it-all but I understand that you know mileage varies I guess is well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready I'm ready okay I feel like I need a buzzer I'm gonna get I'm gonna add a buzzer someday anyway here we go what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people I have read high output management probably 20 times in the past 10 years I read it at least once a year now I commissioned a bust a bronze bust of Andy Grove so that's being done I'm a big Andy Grove fan oh it's in progress so yeah yeah it's in progress I'll send you a mock-up after this but yeah high output management thinking in bets going to the first principles thinking I find that a good book to share with people so that they can you know kind of think about things uh and kind of get on board with that and then powerful by Patty McCord anything around HR like to kind of break your brain a little bit about what you think about HR and people Ops that's the gateway drug that was the one where I was like oh we can choose how to design our people Ops teams okay next question favorite recent movie or TV show I don't have one that's recent but I watch The West Wing at least once per week so I've done that for a long time I just I I love Sorkin you know I I think the writing's just so good so I'll just throw that out right when someone was telling me there's a podcast where they analyze each episode which uh it is a great podcast and I've listened to most of them so yeah okay great you're all over it favorite interview question that you like to ask because you're interviewing I have a controversial one I'm not going to be able to go through the entire question in a lighting ground but what I do is I do a mini I do all the FI or I did all the final interviews at Prof while and we did a very hard culture check in that final interview there's a mini case study it only lasts about like a couple minutes I'm not gonna go through it but I asked them if someone in slack responded to someone sharing something benign like some report they found on the internet for McKinsey they shared it in slack and then someone responded to that with something indirectly offensive uh so it's changed over the years sometimes I say like oh they they called it the r word they said it was stupid like something indirectly offensive and then whatever and then I say like what would you do and what do you think the company should do and no matter what they say I challenge them and I always tell them like I've never seen that at profitwell which is always good just to like make sure they don't have a bunch of fear and you know this this position but it gave me a really really good opportunity to talk through our culture particularly that most charitable interpretation piece and I would say there were about 10 of people who kind of had like a zero tolerance policy for whatever you know the situation was and I would tell them I would say Hey listen like we have zero tolerance for the obvious things right we probably all agree on those but for this type of situation we would we would ask some questions we'd want to figure it out we want to see there's probably some judgment around what happened like how long if they've been doing this for a while that type of thing and then we would make kind of a decision on what would happen and a lot of times nothing would happen except hey like you know don't be an idiot you're smarter than that use better words or something like that and so that that was a good good culture check to kind of opt the mineral that is very cool it goes back to the value of culture and values and Beyond aligned within your company on on culture and values and it's interesting that that's the question you ask and not something technical or skill based yeah well I do all the final interviews so they've already gone through like a skill based and they've done culture screen already and stuff like that so this is more of the here's why you should not work here that type of conversation basically I love that next question what are five SAS products that you or your company uses that you love and bonus points are ones maybe people haven't heard that that's hard to answer too because at the end of the day we'd all say Zoom Google workspace or whatever they're calling it these days like you know because those are the things that are so Central right um I gotta give a shout out to notion we use notion for all of our kind of documentation I use notion for my personal all these things I know code is a sponsor so apologize but they're both sponsors and so we're friends with everyone over here both are great amazing Lenny's podcast friends of friends of all products um descript I used a scripts quite a bit I used a script not only for it's a it's like a video recording and editing tool or you can kind of bring in video to edit but it's got some cool features that I use it more than Loom a lot of times because it just works in my workflow not only for creating but also for like those quick conversations K tool here's a fun one this is an indie product K tool there's probably other products that exist like this but I actually really like the interface of it it's super simple basically if I'm online or someone sends me a PDF or something like that I can basically choose to send that to my Kindle so if someone sends me something I could just choose sent and then that can batch all of those things into like a Weekly Newsletter that I can curate so my Sundays and my Monday morning are just spent reading so I have this Weekly Newsletter of like someone wants me to review this thing or someone wants me to like read this article or something like that so I batch that into a little newsletter and it's just a Chrome extension that works really well tweet Hunter I'm trying to be more on Twitter I went through lulls and now I'm like trying to be consistent so tweet Hunter is pretty good it's got some like AI fun stuff into it to make Discovery better and then it's not a SAS application but the last one is this Apple watch Ultra so I don't carry my phone anymore I just don't like I found myself being on a computer walking away with my phone going doing stuff and then just never being off screen so I have this for when I'm not in front of my computer and I'm I'm this close to also doing it when I travel so when I've been traveling my phone will stay in my suitcase but it connects if I need to make a phone call it connects via Bluetooth all that kind of stuff but just trying to take my attention away from from my phone basically so that's that's been the unlock damn what a list that was incredible I'm gonna ask just one more question what's your favorite lesson from your NSA experience that helps you in life day to days I shouldn't say everything but most things are more complicated than it seems and that's not like a Sinister thing it just means when that person's coming at you and super angry about something whether it's your fault or not something's there they're having a bad day on top of it you really messed up you tapped into a particular emotion that you didn't realize you did or like hey there's you know even the story in the news about this politician's bad or something like that it's like everything's a lot more complicated and not in a like it's too hard to understand way it's just a the first reaction you should always caution yourself on believing the first reaction that you have and I developed that there because there's so many things where and I was I was also my first job so a lot of this stuff happens because it's your first job many people may have this experience at a different place but it was like oh this thing geopolitical thing this happened oh here's my first instinct that means this is bad they're like well actually there's this other thing going on over here and this other thing going over there and those are actually connected that's why this was caused so that's helped me like one not get so pissed off at the news it's also helped me you know I think just as a human along with most charitable interpretation just be like okay let me not overreact here let me like seek to understand and then and then react or respond versus react what a beautiful way to end it Patrick Campbell renaissance man of a brain this may be the most action-packed episode we've had and I'm not surprised two final questions working folks finding online if they want to ask any questions Reach Out learn more about what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you yeah so I'm on Twitter at paticus childhood nickname p-a-t-t-i-c-u-s LinkedIn Patrick Campbell I don't check my LinkedIn messages I'm going to get around to it it's just there's so much spam in there but yeah you can find me there or just pcpaticus.com that's my personal email so yeah if I can be helpful or you want to see more of the data or you have this question or that question we've probably written or recorded something on some of the things we talked about today so I'm happy to send it over and just obviously want to be helpful so yeah feel free to hit me up amazing Patrick thank you again for being here thanks for having me man bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode
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